Teaching TSP

New Books in Sociology is an untapped resource for the classroom.  In these podcasts, the hosts spend about an hour talking with the author of a new sociological book.  While they are all interesting, a recent podcast caught my (aspiring genocide scholar) eye.  Evil Men, by James Dawes, draws on firsthand accounts of convicted war criminals.  This podcast would make a fantastic assignment in a course covering genocide, human rights, international law, or criminology.  Below are a few questions that could accompany the podcast.

1. Who did Dawes choose to interview, and why?
2. Why were interviews an appropriate research method for this project?
3. Were people willing to talk with Dawes?  Why do you think this was the case?
4. What did Dawes learn about why these “evil men” committed the crimes they did?
5. What do his findings tell us about why people commit war crimes?  Based on what you have heard, do you find anything problematic about drawing scientific conclusions from his book?

This podcast could also be paired with several other activities on Teaching TSP, such as these activities about the Milgram experiment and this activity about power.

Ok, most of your semesters and winding down or over.   But, for those of us teaching this summer, we’ll soon be turning our attention to planning the upcoming course.

Over the past few days, I’ve found myself thinking particularly about the first day of class. Sure, it’s often a day that consists of the syllabus being passed out and students hoping to get out early.  But, in reality, the first day sets the tone for the rest of the course.  Because of this, I try to spend some time thinking about the goals for the first day.

Generally, I settle on the following three key goals:

#1: Communicate the course elements and expectations clearly.

#2: Immediately set the tone for the classroom as an open, safe atmosphere for learning.

#3: Create rapport between the instructor and students, and begin to create rapport among students as well.

To achieve these goals, I rely upon different activities.  Here are some ideas below:

Communicating Course Elements

Going over the syllabus is often a little boring.  But, it’s important to let the students know what they can expect throughout the course and what is expected of them.  I also like having them write down what they except and hope to learn from the course before we go over the syllabus.  Then, they can keep that in mind while we talk about the course, and, if you have them turn in their expectations, you can get a sense for what they are hoping to learn.  Of course you can’t incorporate all suggestions, but it’s good to know where students are coming from.

I’ve also heard about syllabus speed dating.  I haven’t tried it and would love to hear from someone who has, but the basic idea is that you set up in the classroom for “speed dating” and then ask students to discuss a question about the syllabus as well as a question that enables them to get to know each other.  Then, switch partners and ask two new questions.

Setting a Tone and Creating Rapport

These goals take more than one class period to achieve.  But, icebreakers and activities geared to get students talking often help create a positive classroom environment from day 1.  We’d love to hear your first-day activities so we can create a log of them.  Here you’ll find an older TSP post with a link to classroom bingo, which allows students to get to know one other.  A few other popular ones we’ve seen or done ourselves include:

Interviews: Have the students pair up and interview each other.  Then, give them a chance to introduce their interview partner to the rest of the class.

Two Truths and a Lie:  Each person should share three things—two of them are true, and one is a lie—and the class guesses which one is a lie.

Introductions with a Question: Have each student answer a question when they introduce themselves.  I have asked students to talk about the coolest place they have been (global studies courses), but any broad question would work here.

Student survey: Give students a short survey, which includes questions about their preferred name, why they are taking the course, their career goals, and any other things they think you should know.  I prefer giving them this survey and going over it alone, but I’ve seen others add a goofy question to the survey and go over it in class (after giving students a few minutes to fill it out) as a way to take attendance and do introductions.

Ok, that’s just a few.  We’d love to hear your thoughts on activities as well.

Teaching TSP is very happy that Girl w/Pen has joined TSP’s Community!  Of course, we’re happy for many reasons, but one that we must highlight is the fantastic amount of teaching resources that can be found on the blog.  Here’s an example, posted by Girl w/ Pen’s Deborah Siegel last month, which could easily be adapted to the classroom.

Start by giving your students this short, in-class quiz.

1. Children rarely have a firm sense of what “gender” they are until they are how old?
a) 1 year
b) 2 years
c) 3 years

2. This past holiday season, which country produced a toy catalog featuring a boy cradling a doll and a girl riding a race car?
a) the US
b) Sweden
c) France

3. True or false: In a study of 120 pregnant women conducted shortly after women learned the sex of their baby, those who knew they were carrying females described their fetuses’ movements as gentle, quiet, and rolling while those carrying males described kicks, jabs, and a saga of earthquakes.

 

Then, to get the answers and learn much more, watch this TED Talk in class.

Is “Latino” a race or an ethnicity? As sociologists, we are quick to refer to “Latino” as an ethnicity, but will just as easily include “Latino” as a racial category next to “White,” “Black,” and “Asian.” So, which is it? And why does it matter?

Wendy D. Roth tackles this question in her recent special feature on The Society Pages “Creating a ‘Latino’ Race.” This feature would be a great addition to any discussion of race and ethnicity in the United States and how those categories have evolved over time for White, Asian and Latino immigrants and citizens. This topic would be ideal for the first weeks of a course on Race and Ethnicity or to introduce the topic in an Intro to Sociology class. This would also be a good topic for a Research Methods class when discussing how we classify racial categories and why this practice can be controversial.

Use the following activity in class to get a conversation going about race, ethnicity and Latino identity:

First, hand out an example of the Census questions on race and ethnicity. Have students fill them out on their own. Then ask:

1. Did you feel that the available categories on this form lined up with your own racial and ethnic identity? Why or why not?

2. Do you think that having “Hispanic” as an ethnicity and not a race makes sense? Why or why not?

3. What benefits do you see to having “Hispanic” listed as an ethnicity? What drawbacks?

4. What might you change about this form if you could? Do you believe there are better ways to classify people racially?

 

Then, start a conversation about Roth’s finding using these questions:

1. According to Roth’s research, how is the way that Puerto Rican and Dominican migrants understand race and ethnicity quite different from how Americans traditionally think of race and distinguish it from ethnicity?

2. When Latino immigrants come to the United States, how do they fit into the racial classifications already in place (now and in the past)? How do these classifications not line up with how they identify themselves?

3. According to Roth’s finding, how does the experience of Latinos in the United States differ based on skin color? What does this say about race and racism in the United States?

4. Why have many Latino immigrants seen it as advantageous to remain “bicultural” instead of “passing” for (non-Hispanic) white?

5. Why is the Latino race/ethnicity question a controversial topic? Why does it matter if Latino people are understood as an “ethnicity” or as a “race” by the US government? What might this potential change mean for Latino Americans? How would such a change disrupt notions of strict racial categories held by many Americans?

Below is an activity I’ve seen used a few different ways.  The activity helps to illustrate the issue of mate selection for forming a family; it also gets students thinking about gender, sexuality, and the life course. 

First, have students think about their expectations of what their immediate family will be like someday. What are their plans for the future?  Or, if they are already married or in a domestic partnership, what is their family like?

Then, have students draw a future mate randomly from the list below, which has been adapted from several versions of this exercise.  The trick is that the draw is indeed random, so there will be same-sex, interracial, or other couples.

1. A middle-class, white man who travels three weeks each month for his job and has three kids from a previous marriage of whom he has custody. Currently, he has a live-in nanny but would rather have a full-time parent in the home for his kids.
2. A wealthy, African-American woman who owns a publishing business in Chicago.
3. A working class, Latino man from Costa Rica who wishes to live near his family in his home country.
4. An upwardly-mobile white woman who wishes never to have kids or at least not to care for them herself. (If you want kids, you will have to be the sole parent.)
5. A female, Presbyterian minister whose first job assignment is in central Kansas.
6. An African-American male professor who has tenure at Harvard.
7. A English man who wishes to live in the US but cannot get residency for 3-4 years as a result of the immigration waiting list for English citizens into this country.
8. A white, male Florida “cracker” whose family has owned a fishing business in Everglades City for two generations. He plans to adopt the business in five years and needs to continue working for the business until that time.
9. Martha Stewart’s sister, a middle-class, white woman who plans to be a homemaker.
10. An Indian woman (US resident) whose parents are planning to arrange a marriage for her with someone other than you.

Students must suppose they will fall in love with this person within five years and plan to form a family with them.  Then, they should think about the following questions:

How will their future plans be affected by this selection? What will their other family members think?  Where will they live? What about kids?  What is the likelihood that they would actually consider marrying this person?

Check out the myriad posts on Soc Images about marriage and family, and consider coupling one or two with this exercise!

TSP’s Kyle Green recently spoke with Mary Joyce about digital activism.  This short podcast would be great in a class on media, transnational activism, or a variety of other topics.  Most, if not all, students will be able to connect to the material, making it relevant to their everyday lives and a great addition to a lecture.  Here are some questions to accompany the podcast.

1. What is digital activism?
2. Have you participated in anything that could be considered digital activism recently?  Did you consider your participation as “activism” at the time?
3. What are the strengths of digital activism?  Can you think of any pitfalls?
4. As a related post on our sister blog, Cyborgology, points out, the United Nations declared that disconnecting people from the Internet violates their human rights.  Do you think access to the Internet should be a human right?  Why or why not?

Note that the project’s website also has some tools that could be utilized for the lecture, including a visual summary of their preliminary findings.

If you’ve taught a class, you’ve likely struggled with getting all (or maybe even some!) students to complete required readings.  Sociology Source’s Nathan Palmer recently posted a great assignment to help with this issue, and we wanted to re-post it below.  Thanks, Nathan!

 

Question: Would you like it if most your students came to class having completed the assigned reading? Would you like it if they came to class with detailed notes so they could engage with their classmates better in discussions? Finally would you like to have a detailed outline of all of the reading you assign in your classes?

Well than do I have the assignment for you.

I have had amazing success with requiring my students to turn in notes covering the week’s reading (Download Direction Here)[1]. The notes have to be in outline form and, as I tell them, “need to be written as if the reader had never seen the text.” The notes are graded for their clarity and coverage of the topics in the text. Because these are weekly notes and I want to be able to grade them quickly, I created a check mark grading scheme that allows me to use a rubric with ease.

I incentivize the reading notes by allowing them to use them on both the essay midterm and final. “Think of your reading notes as a cheat sheet in a time capsule,” I tell my classes. I sign the front page of the students notes and then only allow notes that have my signature to be used on the test to try and dissuade students from creating other cheat sheets.

“How Long Should My Notes Be”

Reading notes are great because they teach students how to curate information. We live in a society that is awash with information. Consumption is often free or cheap, understanding is less available, but curation is the rarest of all. Our students will work in an information economy that pays people to shift through the haystack for needles. I stress the vocational value of this assignment to my students because they are likely to see reading notes as a “busy work” drudgery.

I tell my students that their challenge is to separate the hay from the needles. If they turn in notes that are so detailed and overfilled with information, I give them a grade similar to if they had turned in barely anything at all[2] Synthesizing information is a skill that students struggle with, this assignment fosters it.

Crowdsourced Class Notes

The by product of this assignment is a crowdsourced outline of your class texts. Last year it occurred to me that I could use my students’ reading notes to fill out my class notes. Each week I took the best reading notes and paired them with my class/lecture notes to create a top notch outline of what we read that week and what I wanted my students to learn. Now that I am teaching Social Change for the second time, I have found my class notes invaluable.

I’m not always able to reread all of the assigned readings for a given week, nor do I always need to (some of these texts I’ve read and taught more than a dozen times). Having a “CliffsNotes” guide on what we are reading and what I want my students to take from it, allows me to spend time thinking up new class activities and experiences. Put another way, my notes help me quickly re-remember WHAT I want my students to learn, so that I can spend most of my time focusing on HOW they will learn it.

(Psst… if you like this activity and want to hear more about it, check out The Sociological Source Podcast Ep 11. Chris & I talk about it in some depth.)

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1. I want to thank Dr. Susan Wortmann at Nebraska Wesleyan University for giving me this idea. She used this assignment, in a different way, in her graduate social theory course that I took from her. She was one of my best teachers, so stealing from her only makes sense.  ↩
2. Side Note: you should see the looks on my overachieving students when they get a low grade on their 16 page reading notes. They never think I’m actually going to down grade them until I do.  ↩

 

 

 

Photo by 401(K) 2013 via flickr.com

We want to take a moment to alert you to a fantastic new teaching tool: Recession Trends.  As the website’s “about us” explains, “The Recession Trends initiative, a collaboration between the Russell Sage Foundation and the Center on Poverty and Inequality, is dedicated to monitoring the social and economic fallout of the ongoing downturn.”

There are many ways you could use this informative website in the classroom.  For example, you could ask students to form a research question about the recession (e.g., Did crime rates rise during the recession?) and use the website to help answer it.  Specifically, the website includes a graphing utility with data on each of the 16 domains covered regarding the recession (housing, poverty, immigration, crime, health, etc.).  The graphing utility is found here, and the domains are listed on the right-hand side.  Note that students likely would need a few minutes to explore the domains before picking a research question that could be answered using the website.

This could also be paired with the Office Hours podcast with David Grusky, one of the creators of the website.  A teaching activity to accompany the podcast, which was posted earlier this year, is below.

In this episode of Office Hours, TSP’s Sarah Shannon speaks with Stanford University Sociology Professor David Grusky about the social and economic effects of the recession.  This entire podcast could be assigned to students, though you could also considering assigning part of it (the first 20 minutes, for example).

Grusky and Shannon cover many topics in this 50-minute conversation, so there are many avenues for discussion.  Here are a few basic questions that cover some of the main points.

1)   How does the most recent recession differ from past recessions?  In other words, what makes it a “great” recession?

2)   How does the recession affect inequality in the United States?

3)   What are some of the responses to the recession, and how do they differ from responses to the Great Depression?

4)   Why does Grusky see a danger in the focus on tax-based solutions to the current economic problems?

5)   Grusky and Shannon speak specifically about college students several times throughout the podcast?  How is the recession impacting students, and what is the bottleneck that they mention?