*~* “Teach with TSP” Contest Winner, 2018 *~*

One of the ways that The Society Pages can be really useful for teaching is for finding ways to connect recent events in the news to larger sociological conversations in the classroom. Today’s suggestion shows one way to use “There’s Research on That!” to do just that: without necessarily assigning any of the readings to the students, the instructor can find a topic of relevance and use the academic resources included in the TROTs post to quickly catch themselves up to speed on the recent sociological literature in order to facilitate a stronger class discussion. This is a great way to keep classes relevant and to keep ourselves current in the field.

Recently a Texas court ruled the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) unconstitutional. This topic would be of interest in a variety of sociology courses: Family, Law and Society, Race and Ethnicity, Social Problems, and Intro to Sociology units on institutions.

Materials:

You bring:

• Projector/internet/resources to show a streaming film in class
• Link to the documentary
• Read the TROTs resources ahead of time
• Prepare and print copies of a worksheet with some questions (suggestions below) connecting the ICWA with contemporary and historical experiences on Native people in the United States
• Paper copies of a news article about the Texas court decision striking down the ICWA (unless you want to assign it in advance or have students read together in class)

Students bring:

• Any reading you want to assign in advance

Instructions:

1. Ask students to read a news article about the Texas court ruling that the ICWA is unconstitutional. You can either have everyone do this together at the start of class or assign this to be read in advance, but in all cases ask students to take written notes on anything they don’t understand or have further questions about.
2. Ask students if they have any immediate comprehension questions about the news article. For example: if they didn’t understand a word or basic concept, then those questions should be answered. Otherwise, tell students to keep their questions in mind during the documentary. The questions should help the students connect the contemporary to the historical.
3. Show the first 40 minutes of the PBS Documentary “Unspoken: America’s Native American Boarding Schools.” The documentary streams for free online. Its full length is 56 minutes but I don’t recommend the last 16 minutes for this activity as it is not focused on boarding schools and will probably distract class discussion. Ask the students to complete the worksheet while they watch the documentary, which will again help make broader sociological connections between the historical experience of boarding schools and contemporary foster care systems and schooling. Actively using the worksheet also teaches students to be more active watchers of content.
4. Use the answers on the worksheet AND the questions students wrote on the news article to launch a discussion. A good prompt for starting a discussion after an emotional video like this one can sometimes be to first let students just react to the content (ex: “how did it make you feel?” or “what did you think?”) before trying to get them to think too analytically.

Worksheet Question Suggestions

• Did the documentary answer any of the questions you wrote beforehand?
• What is the Dawes Act?
• List 3 dates you heard and what happened on those dates. (You as the instructor can use these to have students construct a timeline later for a more extensive activity if you want. These can be a really useful for active learning and to really have students visualize how long certain periods lasted in relation to how little time has passed since then.)
• How long did American Indian boarding schools run? When were they closed?
• Give one example of resilience from the documentary.
• What surprised you?
• What does assimilation mean? How does it relate to American Indian boarding schools? To the Indian Child Welfare Act?
• There are more ideas for discussion on the PBS website of the documentary.

Additional Resources

• The Standing Rock Syllabus is an invaluable teaching resource
• Additional TSP TROT post on Settler Colonialism and Minnesota’s “Wall of Forgotten Natives”

 A special thank you to Bret Evered for her invaluable pedagogical knowledge and assistance with this activity.

Dr. Meghan Krausch studies race, gender, disability, and other forms of marginalization throughout the Americas and in particular how grassroots communities have developed ways to resist their own marginalization. Read more of Meg’s writing at The Rebel Professor or get in touch directly at meghan.krausch@gmail.com.

*~* “Teach with TSP” Contest Honorable Mention, 2018 *~*

I am committed to teaching students how to translate and disseminate sociological knowledge beyond the classroom. This semester, I taught a new course titled “Femininities and Masculinities.” At Skidmore College, this is a gateway course to the major. One of the challenges of teaching this course is getting students to understand complex theories about gender and sex at an introductory level. Most of my students have not taken a sociology course, or are concurrently taking Introduction to Sociology. On top of that, the course is designated writing intensive, so I face the daunting task of teaching students how to become better writers.

To tackle these intersecting issues, I assign The Society Pages’ book, Assigned: Life With Gender, and require students to write a blog post about a topic of their choice. The text serves as a benchmark for sociological blogging and helps students digest complex sociological theories about gender and sex through accessible prose. The three objectives of this assignment are to illustrate comprehension of theories and concepts through application, advance analytical writing using sociological prose, and to use an accessible platform (blogging) to enrich their college writing experience.

In this class, we read classic texts such as West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender,” and Judith Lorber’s “Seeing is Believing.” To unpack these works, I concurrently assign articles from Assigned: Life with Gender. For example, Tristen Bridges’, “Doing Gender with Wallets and Purses,” complemented West and Zimmerman’s classic text, while Markus Gerke’s piece on gay male athletes helped students grasp Connell’s complex typology of masculinities.

Teaching students how to write well is challenging, and many obstacles stand in the way. Procrastination, confusion or partial understanding of fundamental theories and concepts, and lack of practice writing sociologically are a few among many. Over the years, I have noted that one of the biggest challenges students face in sociology writing courses is interpreting and analyzing theories and translating this knowledge into accessible prose. A short blog post allows students to focus on understanding a concept or theory well while improving their writing.

Over the years I have learned to incorporate a scaffolding approach in assignments. Students focus on one assignment — in this case, the blog post — and submit tasks throughout the semester (see assignment guide below). The benefits of this are numerous, and teach students essential skills such as time management. For writing assignments, a scaffolding approach teaches students that starting early and re-writing are essential skills for solid academic writing.

Student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. During a recent meeting with a student who is writing a blog post on transgender men’s experiences of ballet dancing he told me, “I appreciate this assignment because we can work on something that we are passionate about.” His blog post, which is inspired by his observations (he is a ballet dancer), reveals how transgender men are ostracized when they challenge classical ballet dress code. Other topics include; the gendering of beer pong, sexual racism perpetuated in gay dating apps such as Grindr, expressions of masculinity and femininity among female aircraft pilots, how haircare regiments among African American women reinforce emphasized femininity, and how the DSM-5’s lack of criteria for diagnosing EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified) reinforces dangerous body image ideals.

Blog Post Assignment (pdf)

Ruth M. Hernández is a sociologist whose research and teaching interests lie in the intersection of gender, international migration, and Latinx communities. Currently, she is a Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Skidmore College where she teaches courses on gender and Latinx communities. In addition to her scholarship, Ruth is an activist involved in various community projects that address issues affecting temporary and permanent Latinx migrants in the Northeast. You can reach Ruth by email at rhernand@skidmore.edu 

*~* “Teach with TSP” Contest Honorable Mention, 2018 *~*

I’ve always loved Tristan Bridges’ Sociological Images piece about how we can readily see the ways that we “do gender” by analyzing what we carry around with us every day. Bridges focuses on wallets and purses, telling the story of a transgender women who struggled to learn the norms of purse-carrying during the process of socially transitioning to being recognized as a woman – remembering to bring it, knowing what to put in it, how to carry it, etc.  Aside from the fact that wallets and purses themselves are gendered, Bridges shows how what we put in those wallets and purses is also gendered. I’ve found the four-by-four schema presented in the piece to be a great model for getting students to analyze the contents of their own wallets and purses and to reflect on the ways that gender norms influence their choices.

In this activity, I build directly from Bridges’ piece to get students thinking about whether and how gender norms influence the kinds of things they carry around with them. While Bridges focuses on wallets and purses, I’ve found that students are most likely to be carrying backpacks. So I complicated Bridges’ piece a bit to get students thinking about not only how wallets and purses are gendered, but also how what might seem like a gender-neutral bag – backpacks – may or may not conform to some of the same gendered norms found among wallet and purse carriers.

I’ve used this activity in an Introduction to Gender Studies class and an Introduction to Sociology class. It’s worked great in both contexts. I usually run this activity during a week/day that’s devoted to understanding concepts like socialization and the social construction of gender. I have students read the Bridges piece, either as part of the week’s readings or as part of the activity itself, and then hand them the attached handout with a four-by-four schema and some discussion questions. Then we talk as a class about their analysis. Students enjoy the interactive and tactile aspect of the activity (I ask them to dig through their bags), and it gets them talking about sociological concepts like gender norms, socialization, and “doing gender.”

Activity Materials

Doing Gender with Backpacks – Handout Lab 8

Jacqui Frost is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include non-religion and religion, culture, and civic engagement, and her dissertation project is an ethnographic study of a non-religious community.

*~* “Teach with TSP” Contest Honorable Mention, 2018 *~*

I use this in-class activity in the “Health, Medicine, & Illness” week in my Introduction to Sociology class to engage my students in critical thinking about small changes that can be made to address people’s micro experiences with health issues and inequalities.

I give each of my students a copy of “The Rise of Health-Tracking Technology,” an article from The Society Pages blog, “There’s Research on That!” 

Students are asked to read the article and then are put into groups of three to discuss the following questions:

• How can we understand health-tracking technologies as part of medicalization?
• What are some of the benefits of health tracking technologies?
• What are some of the social problems associated with these technologies?
  • What are some problems these technologies are intended to help?
  • What potential problems might evolve from these technologies?

Then, students are asked to work in their groups to brainstorm ideas for how they would design their own health-tracking or health/wellness oriented app to address some of the social problems of health and illness we have learned about that week.

Student groups are then asked to present their app designs to the rest of the class, emphasizing how use of that app would address social inequalities associated with health, illness, and wellbeing.

An example of one proposed app from my student groups was the following:

An app that would address some of the health inequalities in food deserts through a GPS based system that would let users know where places to buy food are in their near vicinity. The app would be connected with store employees so that users would know when fresh produce and other fresh food items were available in the stores.

The take away discussion after this activity involves talking with the students about how small changes can make a difference in the way that people experience health inequalities in their daily lives, but that we must also be working in an ongoing way to address these inequalities at the macro level too.

Lydia Hou is an advanced graduate student in the Sociology Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago studying international students and Higher Ed diversity projects. Her work broadly focuses on race, gender, qualitative methods, critical higher education, and pedagogy.

With so many concerns about voter suppression in the 2018 midterm elections, now is an excellent time to highlight the important role that social science can play in public debate and in our classrooms. Today’s suggestion for Teaching with TSP is a group exercise using King and Roscigno’s special feature on the 50^th anniversary of the voting rights act that can be done during class followed by a discussion with the whole class. I used this exercise in my lower division Race & Ethnicity class, but it could easily be used in other lower division classes like Introduction to Sociology or Social Problems, or in an upper division Political Sociology class with some additions and modifications (which I’ll explain below). This exercise is ideal for a course in a general education curriculum that meets a social sciences requirement where instructors are often tasked with teaching students how to assess different kinds of information, evaluate evidence, and understand biases. I like this exercise because it leaves room for students with differing levels of ability, and because it directly and constructively engages students who hold the belief that everything taught in Race & Ethnicity or other sociology classes is “biased” or based on “differing opinions” without attacking them.

Materials:

You bring:

• Printed copies of the article (1-4 copies per group)
• Whiteboard and a bunch of markers

Students bring:

• A copy of the book or other text you have recently read in your class
• Pen and paper

Instructions

1. Place the students in groups of 4-5 and give each group at least one copy of the article. Make a section on your white board for each of the different terms: 1) an opinion, 2) an empirical fact, and 3) a social scientific claim. Ask students to read through the entire article and, as they go, to identify two of each: an opinion, a fact, and a claim. They will need to write each of these on the board as they find them. You may want to make the rule that no repeats are allowed since that sometimes helps people work a little more quickly in groups (but this may not work if you have a larger class and a lot of groups).
2. As students fill the board and work through the exercise you can choose to either let incorrect answers stand or you can go talk to the groups and ask them to fix those answers in the moment, depending on the dynamic and size of your class.
3. Students are likely to come up with good questions about the difference between these three terms for you and each other while they work through the exercise, keeping in mind that part of what may be new here for college students is the addition of the “social scientific claim.” While K-12 does teach a related skill, it tends to focus on fact vs. opinion, which leaves evidence-based arguments in a confusing gray area for many new college students. Furthermore, many of us know that observable empirical facts in sociology are often nonetheless controversial. This exercise opens up that fact for conversation directly from an unexpected angle.
4. Groups that finish early complete the same exercise using the most recent course reading, until all groups have at least finished the main exercise.
5. Gently correct or clarify anything from the answers on the board. Transition from small group activity to large group discussion by asking “What do you notice when you look at the answers on the board? Does anything jump out at you? Anything surprise you? Confuse you?” This gives students a moment to reflect on what all the groups did. By asking students to choose the direction, you allow them to take ownership over the activity and lead the discussion in a direction that’s interesting to them, and the result is a more engaged, productive discussion that will allow students to tell you what they know and don’t know about the topic and what they want to know more about. More ideas for discussion are below, along with possible modifications to the exercise.

Discussion Guide

• Is voter fraud a problem? (Establish that given this article and exercise the students understand that it is not a problem.) Why do you think so many people think it IS a problem? Did you think it was (more of) a problem before today?
• Explore students’ reactions to why voter ID and other voting access laws are being changed, especially since voter fraud isn’t a problem. Do they agree with the authors? Are they unsure of the reasons? Can they develop their own sociological hypotheses?
• Discuss the history of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Movement. What did students learn that was new? Do they have questions or reactions? Is there a reason these changes are happening now?
• What is the role of social science and sociology in politics?

Possible Modifications

• Students could be asked to update this piece or to make it local by researching the requirements to register and to vote in their own state.
• If you are in a state with voter ID legislation, students could research who introduced and supported this legislation, what challenges have occurred to it, and the judicial opinions that have been issued.
• Either of these could be done as part of a class activity or as a homework assignment.

Additional TSP Reading on Voter Suppression

How Voter Suppression Shapes Election Outcomes

Strict Voter Identification Laws Advantage Whites—And Skew American Democracy to the Right

—

Dr. Meghan Krausch studies race, gender, disability, and other forms of marginalization throughout the Americas and in particular how grassroots communities have developed ways to resist their own marginalization. Read more of Meg’s writing at The Rebel Professor or get in touch directly at meghan.krausch@gmail.com.

Over the past year, I’ve had a number of conversations about teaching writing with faculty members teaching courses ranging from Intro to Methods to Senior Projects. These courses require different kinds of writing and different modes of thinking. Intro instructors are most concerned with description, that is, teaching students how to describe sociological patterns they observe in the world, or to describe the sociological significance of some concept from the course. In Methods, instructors add a focus on synthesis, that is, bringing themes or strains from existing literature together to point toward a research question that the student can write a proposal to investigate. Methods courses also often require critical writing, especially when assignments ask students to identify strengths or weaknesses in the methods of studies they read. Senior Projects instructors combine synthetic and critical summaries of existing literature with descriptive analysis of data students have collected by themselves.

It might be surprising that with the different kinds of writing being taught in these courses, and the different kinds of assignments they use, there is one instructional tool has proved useful in all of them. But there is. It’s called a reverse outline.

Many of us teach our students to write outlines before they try to write papers, but this is not always effective. Outlines only work well when students already have some idea of what they want to say. They presume that before sitting down to write, students know what needs to be described, synthesized, or critiqued, and that the problem separating them from a good finished paper is one of organization, not content.

Experience across the Minnesota sociology curriculum shows that this is not usually the case. For better or for worse, students often sit down to write having no idea what they’re going to say. In this situation, writing an outline is no easier than writing a paper, and it can actually be counterproductive, because it gives students the idea that they have to have full command of their argument before they begin writing. This is not helpful, and for many, it’s intimidating. It prevents students from engaging in the descriptive, synthetic, and critical analysis of course materials, and makes them think instead about things like paragraphs and sections.

This is why I recommend something else: a REVERSE outline. The reverse outline is conceptually the same as an outline – it highlights the main points of an argument and charts how they are structured in a paper. The difference is that the reverse outline isn’t written until after the student has begun to draft their work. Whereas an outline asks students to organize their thoughts before they put a single thing down on the page, a reverse outline invites them to take risks with their writing, knowing they’ll be able to come back later to structure their arguments. It asks them to be adventurous early in the writing process, and only later to apply rigid requirements for style and organization to thoughts that they have now been able to develop fully. This is extremely effective for teaching the basic skills of descriptive, synthetic, and critical writing, because it allows students to think about content and organization at the same time. Unlike an outline, which presumes that content has been mastered before writing begins, it acknowledges that the content will be revised and improved through the process of organizing it.

The reverse outline is a good way for students to transfer their unstructured thoughts on course concepts and materials into organized writing that follows a logical flow. It’s also a great intermediate assignment between first and second drafts of a paper. But most importantly, it’s an extremely useful way for students to develop their own writing skills through evaluation of others’ work. Particularly in upper level courses, students often have a hard time writing literature reviews that synthesize thematic areas and broad ideas from existing work. Asking them to read a simple journal article and write a reverse outline of it is a great way to help them see how an effective literature review points toward a research question. Likewise, students in introductory courses can learn a great deal from reverse outlining short think pieces from sources like Contexts or Sociological Images, or from popular press sources.

As with the five-minute workshops I discussed in an earlier post, the idea with reverse outlining is to integrate writing instruction with course content that an instructor is already using. If you have a multi-draft assignment coming up, give it a try. If you don’t, ask your students to write a reverse outline of an upcoming reading. Either approach should help with teaching the integration between content and organization that students so often struggle with.

Most sociology teachers want to teach writing. The problem is they don’t have time. With dozens or hundreds of students, meeting one-on-one with even a small fraction of those who need help is impossible, and since students’ writing skills vary significantly, it’s difficult to draw up in-class lessons that will help students at all levels. Given these structural impediments, it’s hard to blame instructors for de-emphasizing writing skills in the classroom.

To address this problem, I’ve recently incorporated a tool called the five-minute workshop, developed by Pamela Flash, Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Minnesota, into my teaching. Using five-minute writing workshops enables instructors and TAs to quickly and efficiently teach writing skills that benefit all students, regardless of their current writing abilities.

The basic concept is simple enough. Give students five minutes to either write something or revise something that connects to work they are already doing, or to content you are already teaching. Then move on. Do it again next week. And the next. And so on.

This works because writing is more than putting words on a page. Minnesota sociology faculty report that what holds our students back the most is not crafting prose, but struggling to identify and communicate sociologically important concepts and arguments, or to effectively juxtapose competing arguments from readings and lecture. Five-minute writing workshops focus on these kinds of skills: the conceptual and analytic part of the writing process, more than the art of phrasing. Give students five minutes to either write something or revise something that connects to work they are already doing, or to the subject matter you are already teaching, and then move on with the rest of your content for the day.

To design a five-minute workshop for use in your course, start by identifying a core writing skill that you think your students should work on. For instance, I often find that my students need practice describing the role of media in transmitting cultural scripts. During discussion of gender, culture, or media, I display the image below and ask students to take three minutes to write one sentence about the role of perceived physical attractiveness in the cartoon. We then discuss their ideas for a couple more minutes, and move on. This develops students’ abilities to recognize cultural frames and narratives as depicted through visual media and to distill broad ideas into sharp, debatable statements.

The possibilities are vast. To practice thesis development, put a characteristically problematic thesis statement on a slide and ask students to write a version that improves it. To work on style, project a sloppy, overwritten paragraph, and have students write a version that conveys the same meaning in half the number of words. If students are struggling to identify theoretical tension, display a concept map of a recent reading and have them describe the relationship between two of the central elements. And so on.

These workshops are designed to be brief, fun, and stress-free. If you’d like some help designing a few to get you started integrating writing instruction into your course, drop me a note. I’d be happy to help.

This semester I taught the second course in my department’s quantitative methods sequence that is required for all of our graduate students: Advanced Data Analysis for the Social Science. Sociology departments around the country all have a pretty similar required sequence. In teaching the course this time, I tried to modernize it so that it would train students for the future (not just the present or the past).

One big aspect of this modernization was requiring students to complete a project where they replicate and extend an already published paper. Overall, this change was a big success, and I’d recommend that other classes also try it. In this post, I’ll share some of what worked about the project and how I will do it better next time. I’ve also made all of the materials that we’ve used available on the class website.

Why do a replication and extension project?

There are two main reasons that I decided to add a replication and extension project to my class: 1) it is great for the students and 2) it is great for the field. As students transition from consumers of quantitative research to creators of quantitative research, there are a variety of challenges that they encounter related to analyzing real, messy data. These challenges are hard to describe to students but are painfully familiar to anyone who has created a serious piece of quantitative research. I’ve come to believe that courses where students work exclusively with toy data—such as courses that I’ve taught previously—do not fully prepare students to become creators of researchers. In fact, this realization, that I was not preparing students for “real” research, was one of the most important pieces of feedback that I’ve received about my old courses.

In addition to helping my students, I hope that the replication and extension projects will help my field move to a system of open and reproducible research.

What exactly did the students do?

Just deciding the scope of the project was difficult. To me the most important things were that they should reproduce (or try to reproduce) a paper exactly; they should try to do something new; and they should not try to write a whole new paper. After my course, students take a yearlong course where write an entire empirical paper. I did not want to replicate that class. Rather, I wanted to give them focused practice on just one part of writing a paper: the data analysis.

I ended up with a six part structure.

Pick a paper
Get your plan approved
Reproduce the results exactly
Get feedback including from peers
Do something new
Get feedback including from peers

More information about each step is available on the class webpage.

How did it work?

As I said earlier, I think it was a big success. I was impressed by how much students seem to care more about their projects than they cared about their homework. I don’t yet have a way of getting detailed, real-time measures of student learning, but I would guess that they learned more per hour working on their projects than on their homework. Further, I would guess that the things that they learned on their projects were higher-order skills that are harder to acquire from a book or a video.

Also, the projects really enriched our class discussions. For example, when we were learning about multi-level modeling, the students who were working on a paper with multi-level modeling could explain that paper to their peers.

Ultimately the best measure of the success of the project will be the students experience doing their own research. Fortunately, they will do that next year, and I’ll do an evaluation at the end of that to see how it turned out.

What would you do differently next time?

Although it might all sound smooth here, there were a lot of rocky parts to this project. Here’s what I would do differently next time. I hope that these tips can save you and your students some pain.

More support choosing papers

By far the biggest problem was that some students picked papers that were too difficult given their background. The schedule calls for students to reproduce the results of a paper in six weeks, which is quite fast. Because of this, I required students to use projects where data is already public. But, still several students ran into problems. To address this, I’ve developed an improved format for the project proposals. This highly structure format might seem strict, but it would have alerted us to all of the papers that turned out to be too hard. I guess this is something that I’ll just get better at understanding over time.

More work pairing students

Students completed the project in pairs (similar to Gary King does it Gov 2001). This turned out to work well as many of the pairs were made up of students with complimentary skills. However, next time I would work a bit more to ensure that students with strong backgrounds in data analysis and coding were more evenly distributed across the groups. Pairs with two novice students really struggled at points.

More chances for the students to present their progress

Each team made a 5 minute presentation at the end of the semester about their project. Next time, I would offer students more opportunities to share their work. I think that this would motivate progress and promote collaboration across teams. I think that a better presentation schedule would be: halfway point (replication complete or nearly complete); three-quarters point (extension in progress); and end of the semester (everything complete).

Really push hard on replication by spring break

The schedule called for students to complete their replication by spring break, the midpoint of our semester. Honestly, very few of the groups really made this deadline, and many were far from it. This created problems later in the semester because it meant that many groups had little to no time for their extensions. Perhaps by choosing more reasonable papers and pushing hard, the students could have more time for an extension.

In designing this project, I benefited from the experience of a number of teachers who have assigned similar projects in their classes: Kosuke Imai, Nicole Janz, Gary King, Brandon Stewart, and Cristobal Young. I want to thank them for sharing their advice either in person or in writing. Finally, I especially want to thank our class TA Angela Dixon who helped our students with their projects and help me make this project more focused and more useful.

First published at Wheels on the Bus.

May Day Part III: #Social and #Political #Movements, There’s Research on That! #TROT http://t.co/R8WXHOR2jK by @Ekojo pic.twitter.com/C80iAXzYks

— The Society Pages (@TheSocietyPages) May 1, 2015

“There’s Research On That!” (#TROT) is a blogging project at The Society Pages that presents short summaries of classic and contemporary research relevant to current events as a resource for journalists and the public. While our archives are a great resource for students looking to kick-start a sociological research paper or for readers who want a fresh take on the news for their next cocktail party, the format of these posts also works great for class assignments! For this activity, students write their own TROT posts as an exercise in collecting, evaluating, and summarizing research.

Guidelines:

1. Browse the “There’s Research On That!” blog to get a sense of how TROT posts are written. They usually start with a summary of a current event, then provide sociological ideas relevant to the matter at the hand. The author highlights one to four key ideas from the research and includes citations for each source with hyperlinks to the authors’ website and the publication information.
2. Choose a recent news event or pop culture trend to analyze. Ask yourself, “What would sociologists have to say about this that the rest of the media may be missing?” Make a list of a few possible themes to investigate about the topic, such as the impact of social construction, institutions, or networks.
3. Search for literature on your themes using an online database such as JSTOR, Sociological Abstracts, or Google Scholar. Select three to five pieces that speak to the themes or provide broader information about the topic.

***Start with major journals in the field—American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, or Social Problems—but the search doesn’t end there! Books and publications focusing more narrowly on subfields, such as Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Gender & Society, or Deviant Behavior are always helpful. Also, remember to think broadly; sometimes a general article about the topic can be more helpful than one that fits the news story perfectly.

4. Evaluate the research. Read the methodology sections of any journal articles, or find reviews of the books published in academic journals. Do you find the conclusion(s) convincing, based on the evidence provided? Is the methodology high quality? Which pieces provide the best takeaways for a general reader? Once you’ve considered the possible sources separately, consider how they will fit together in your post. From your list, pick the best two or three pieces to include in your article.
5. Write a TROT post in the style of the website. Remember the main components: a short summary of the news, including links to media coverage so the reader can see what’s already been written; key takeaways you identified in the sociological literature; and citations of the research. Be prepared to discuss in class why you picked the sources you did.

TROT is an evolving project quickly becoming an integral part of TSP. Instructors are encouraged to contact the TSP staff (email tsp@thesocietypages.org) with the best TROT posts from this assignment for possible publication on TSP!

Note: At the time this post was written, The Society Pages’ Discoveries were called The Reading List.

Findings about lifetime earnings, fertility, graduation rates, and gentrification are interesting all on their own, but how do sociologists go about studying these topics? To address this question for my Intro to Sociology class, I began with a 10-min. mini-lecture on “Methods” based on the info in Ch. 2 of Dalton Conley’s You May Ask Yourself textbook. (The students had SQ3Red this chapter for homework.) To kick it off, I reviewed how sociology was different from the other disciplines—our topic from the previous class, and then got into the new material about variables, samples, qualitative and quantitative, methods, etc.

So that the students could develop a fuller sense of the new concepts they learned, I created this methods sheet for the class to practice applying them. First, as an example, we answered the questions from the sheet about the first article in the Reading List Packet together as a class. Students were able to ask questions about the procedure and I could clarify the directions before they tried one on their own.

Then, students were instructed to get into small groups of 2 or 3. Each group was directed to work on answering the questions about a different Reading List article. When all groups had finished, each reported back to the class what the question, findings and methods were.

Why I like this activity:

• it’s easy to differentiate if you have a heterogeneous class. The Reading List articles vary in difficulty, so you could assign easier articles to groups that struggle and more difficult ones to groups that need a challenge. Alternatively, you could differentiate by interest by letting each group claim which article to begin with.
• if one group gets done way ahead of the others, they can move on to a different article, so nobody’s stuck waiting around for groups that need more time. If the whole class picks up the skills quickly, you could set a time limit and reward the group that finishes the most articles before time is up.
• it’s social—at the beginning of the semester, students can get to know one another, and get comfortable working together and sharing answers with the class
• having groups report back to the whole class provides a low-stakes way for the teacher to correct students’ misunderstandings in a way that benefits the whole class
• students learn about the breadth of sociological inquiry while practicing their skills of identifying parts of a research article (and—perhaps more importantly—the parts of a research study)