intro

The winning submission for this year’s ‘Teach with TSP’ Contest features a semester-long project for Introduction to Sociology courses by Clare Forstie. In this project, students develop their own “There’s Research on That!” article. Below, Forstie shares guidelines for the project, a detailed timeline, and a peer review worksheet and rubric. Congrats, Clare!

The Basic Idea (for students)

You’ll be writing a short blog post in the style of a specific sociology blog, “There’s Research On That!” (https://thesocietypages.org/trot/). According to the TROT website, the TROT blog’s goal is “Offering up great research from across the social sciences that speaks to the big events of the day.” The aim of this project is to familiarize yourself with sociological research on a topic or question important to you, then summarize that research in a compelling way for a public audience. Before finalizing your blog post, you’ll review and summarize TROT blog posts most relevant to your interests, formulate your topic and question, find and summarize sociological articles that speak to your question, and draft your blog post for in-class peer review. Each portion of this six-part project will be due throughout the semester, and specific instructions for each part may be found below.

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Teacher
In keeping with the theme Hollie started about what to do on the first day of class, I’ll share two activities that worked well in my first class of Intro to Sociology:

1) I have a small class this summer (23 students), so I had the time this semester to do student introductions. I wanted to use these introductions as a way to get students to start thinking about their social location. After a short lecture on the basics of sociological framework and the importance of examining context, I had students first go around the room and introduce themselves by name. Then, I asked them to add a little “context” to their introductions. Who are they? What experiences have shaped how they see the world? Instructions to the students:

  • ›Introduce yourself!
  • First, tell us your name (what you would like to be called).
  • ›For all subsequent rounds, introduce yourself further by adding context. Tell us something about your context (what has shaped your view of the world):
  • Who you are, your background, your family, your interests, what you like to do, who and what you identify with, your heroes, activities you do or used to do, why you are in college, your goals, places you have worked, etc.

Go as many rounds as you’d like (I did two). If students start to simply name their interests, start asking them how that interest may influence how they see the world to direct their thinking back to their own social location.

 

2) Next, I reviewed the basics what sociologists study. Then, to get students to start working out their own sociological imaginations, I had them spend five minutes jotting down their own sociological questions and then had everyone share at least one of their questions with the class.

Activity: ›Sociologists attempt to answer questions we have about the social world. What are some questions you have about the social world?

In a Word Doc (hooked up to a projector so they could see it), I wrote down all of their questions so  that we could come back to them throughout the semester to see if they had gained the tools to know how to answer them. If they asked questions that weren’t particularly sociological (for example: one student posed a question about renewable energy), I asked them to think about the social dimensions of this problem (e.g., business interests, capitalism, funding for scientific discovery, etc.)