Having seen how many students are unaware of how to register to vote, the mechanics of voting, and why voting matters, coupled with my own naturalization as a U.S. citizen, has compelled me to make voter engagement and registration an integral part in my classes and spearhead a college-wide effort in the same realm.

There is so much potential in incorporating voter education in college classes. In addition to demonstrating to students that what they are learning in class is related to real world issues, it gives students the opportunity to practice skills they acquire in their classes. This is what employers (and grad schools) are looking for (see for example, National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Career Readiness). 

Here, I will discuss one in-class lecture and activity that bridges the study of intersectionality and voting education that I conceptualized for a Sociology of Gender class. This, along with additional assignments and activities, was developed while I was an inaugural fellow of the Civic Engagement & Voting Rights Teacher Scholars Program funded by the Mellon Foundation. 

There are many ways to introduce and explain the concept of intersectionality to students. To do so, I assign a variety of readings including, but not limited to, an article by Jan Ellen Lewis that discusses that certain women had the right to vote in New Jersey for a short time period after the American Revolution. This and other academic references are used as a launching pad for students to comprehend why universal statements such as “when women got the right to vote” (referring to the ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920) are not only inaccurate but fail to consider that different women have had different experiences. I provide various examples to students: Single and propertied women in New Jersey during a particular time period could vote, but lost the right to do so. The majority of Black people, regardless of gender, were prevented from voting until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Similarly, until U.S. citizenship was imposed on Native Americans through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, they were also disenfranchised, often until 1957, since voting rights were governed by state laws. I use these examples of exclusion to explain to students what intersectionality is and why intersectionality must be part of social science and humanities research as well as policy analysis. At times, at the end of the lecture, I have asked students to create social media posts directed to a fictitious high school class in which they explain in their own words what intersectionality is and problematize why it is not helpful to speak of the “experiences of women” without applying an intersectional lens.   

In addition, I assist students to register to vote, check their voter registration status, and/or request a mail-in ballot (Centers for Civic Engagement, the League of Women Voters, or other local organizations  are usually able to assist with this.) Importantly, I also have resources available for students who are citizens of other countries. For example, Stony Brook University’s Center for Civic Justice has a country-by-country guide.

There are a number of resources and grants that aim to assist faculty interested in incorporating voter education into their classes. Among them are the aforementioned peer-reviewed Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholars assignments and syllabi, Periclean Voting Modules, Faculty Network for Student Voting Rights, The Center for Artistic Activism, AASCU’s Resources on Voting Education and Engagement, and Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice.

Bernadette Ludwig is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of Civic Engagement at Wagner College. Professor Ludwig’s research focuses on how racism affects African refugees in their ability to find refuge and in the resettlement process. Her other work investigates how community engagement can nurture students’ sense of social justice and belonging.

See Odum and Kordsmeier’s discussion about the impact teaching sociology in “unprecedented times” can have on students. While various difficulties may arise while teaching during crises, this article gives teachers ideas to craft their pedagogy for an engaged future.

For tenure track faculty with research intensive roles, balancing research and teaching can be difficult. Meanwhile, students are eager to obtain transferable skills to enhance their career prospects at the same time as community and government organizations benefit from research projects that provide useful data for their work. With these realities in mind, I set out to incorporate a community-engaged research project into my undergraduate Environmental Sociology course at Utah State University. 

I knew I wanted the project to focus on water conservation (a salient topic in Utah), particularly on the state’s rollout of the Landscape Conversion Incentive Program (LCIP)—a program that incentivizes the replacement of residential lawns with more water-efficient landscaping. To prepare for the course, I coordinated with two community partners to refine the project’s research objectives and develop interview instruments that would generate useful data for each agency: the Utah Division of Water Resources (the agency that rolled out LCIP) and the City of North Logan (the municipality closest to our campus that is eligible for the program). In addition to building this collaboration, I applied to have the course designated as community-engaged learning (CEL)  and submitted an IRB protocol with each student listed as a research assistant. 

Once the course began, students obtained their CITI certification as required by IRB. Early in the course, they read empirical and theoretical works highlighting water conservation, landscape conversion, and the cultural significance of lawns in the United States. They also learned about interview-based data collection to prepare them for the task at hand. In the meantime, I was hard at work with participant recruitment, a task I didn’t want to burden the students with. I distributed flyers at key public locations across North Logan, and set up a participant recruitment booth at North Logan City Library. Participants were offered $20 gift cards for participating in our study.  It took a couple of weeks to get participants enrolled in the project, but once we had willing participants trickling in, I paired each student with an interviewee. Students reached out to participants to schedule their interviews, carried out and audio-recorded the semi-structured interview, and then transcribed and proofed the transcriptions in Otter.ai (a transcription software). 

All proofread and de-identified transcripts were then brought into Dedoose, a cloud-based software for qualitative coding. We then held a three-day “Coding Jamboree,” in which students worked together to code all of the interviews for emerging themes, patterns and outliers. Students then individually used the coded dataset to write up individual papers connecting their findings to the literature read earlier in the term. Finally, the whole class collaborated to produce a presentation of preliminary research findings that they presented over Zoom to our collaborating agencies. 

By the end of the semester, students were CITI certified and had experience with 1) carrying out a semi-structured interview, 2) transcribing and editing, 3) coding qualitative data, 4) writing a qualitative research paper, and 5) presenting findings to state and local agencies. Meanwhile, with the assistance of my students, I collected data that I will use in subsequent reports and publications. Finally, our partnering agencies received data that will help them refine their water conservation and LCIP rollout efforts. This is why I like to think of community-engaged learning as a triple win: a win for students, for faculty, and for the community.

Kirsten Vinyeta is an assistant professor and environmental sociologist at Utah State University. Her research employs qualitative methods to study the socio-political dimensions of land and fire management, federal-tribal relations, climate vulnerability and resilience, and multispecies dimensions of human social systems. She teaches courses on environmental sociology, the sociology of climate change, multispecies justice, and social science methods. 

Looking to summarize to students recent discussions on eviction and gentrification? Hepburn, Louis & Desmond (2024) look at six million court cases filed in 72 cities in the US and find that eviction is a durable component of neighborhood disadvantage.

When I first started teaching, in the Fall of 2022, I was surprised by how often things that seemed obvious to me eluded the grasp of my students. This wasn’t about course material: that, I expected to have to teach them. But I was surprised by how often students didn’t seem to know things that are basic to higher education: How should you read a research article? What counts as plagiarism? When should you ask for help? 

Once I learned about the hidden curriculum, or “the set of tacit norms, policies, and expectations in an educational context that insiders expect all students to follow but are often not taught explicitly”, this lack of knowledge made sense. Students dealing with the hidden curriculum at the college level are often dealing with it alone: they may not have family to ask about norms, or may feel embarrassed about not knowing what to do. This hidden curriculum is important because we often use its standards to judge students, and it is unfair to judge students based on expectations they were not aware of.

In order to help students become aware of the expectations and standards on which they may be judged, I’ve started using the first week of class to introduce students to the idea of the hidden curriculum, explicitly addressing its specific norms, policies, and assumptions. I start by telling students the story of how I learned to read,  not  as a child, but how I learned to read again when I first entered college. I tell them how I was first taught to read linearly when I was young: to start with the first sentence of the picture book and end with the last one, reading every single word in a row. But when I entered college, I realized that this way of reading was not always so helpful. In college we’re often reading something for a particular purpose and, depending on that purpose, we should change our reading strategies. I explain to students that learning to read differently was difficult for me and that it was made even more difficult by never being explicitly told that my linear reading strategy wouldn’t always work. With that story, I explain to students that we’re going to spend some time discussing some parts of the hidden curriculum. I let students know that, while some of this information might not be new to them, it will be new to others, and I want all my students to start off on equal footing in my classroom.

Then, I get into the aspects of the hidden curriculum that I think are especially important to success in sociology classrooms. I discuss what a journal article is and how to read them, how to communicate effectively with professors through email, the difference between “doctors” and “professors”, what plagiarism is, and the plagiarism review process, to name just a few. This past semester, I also explicitly talked about ChatGPT and AI. In addition to these topics, I also introduce students to various offices and resources around campus that could be useful for students going through a difficult time. While perhaps not technically under the umbrella of the hidden curriculum, I think that ensuring that students are aware of where to seek help strengthens my main goal, which is to ensure that all of my students have the knowledge they need to thrive in college. 

Students appreciate going over the hidden curriculum. Even though I go over this the first week of school, students often come up to me after class enthusiastic about this new knowledge. One example from this past semester is that a student who was going through a bit of a financial dilemma told me that they were not aware of the offices on campus that might help them, and told me they were going to get in contact to hopefully help with their problem.

Discussing the hidden curriculum does not, of course, mitigate the effects of the social inequalities that make its discussion important in the first place. Students come into the classroom with different levels of cultural capital, and this exercise does not and could not make everything equal between all students. However, I think that it is an important first step in helping students who don’t already have this particular knowledge by giving them new tools to succeed in my class and throughout the rest of their time in college. It is an easy way to demonstrate to students that you care about creating a more equitable classroom and sets you up for continuing that atmosphere for the rest of the semester.

Kylie M. Smith is a sixth-year doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia. She has taught several courses for the sociology department including Introductory Sociology, Sociology of Gender, and Social Psychology. Her research interests include gender, social psychology, and inequality.

Sociology courses frequently focus on helping students understand the severity of our social problems. We can do even better by also helping students take practical steps to address these problems. Helping students practice civic engagement is important because it addresses a too-frequent blind spot in our pedagogy: we assume that students who learn about problems will be inspired to act and know how to act on them. But it isn’t necessarily true that students who learn about poverty, racism, environmental destruction, and the like will be moved to act and know how to do so; they might instead become fatalistic or depressed. Teaching them how to productively express their views in a real-world civic context may reduce the risk of defeatism and encourage positive action.

One approach I’ve used is teaching students how to call their elected officials to share their views on a course-related topic. This activity can take on added significance during or just after elections, but can be used in nearly any class regardless of election cycles. I typically mention calling elected officials briefly on the first day of class and then return to it after a month or two once students have built up content knowledge. I begin real preparation about two class periods before asking students to make a call. I ask students to find a current local, state, or national policy issue connected to a course topic on which they would want elected officials to hear their view. Since class members vary widely in how closely they follow politics, I give time to research policy connections, encouraging them to look for legislation currently under consideration.

I ask students to generate ideas and to talk with others, and to write up a paragraph explaining who they might call and why. I remind them of differences between levels of government and decision-making (in particular, many students need an explanation of state vs. federal legislators). I share resources on how to find relevant lawmakers; example issue guides; information on what happens when you call and why calls may sometimes have an impact; and tips for reducing anxiety. In particular, mentioning that most calls go to an intern whose job is to note constituents’ opinions, or to voicemail where students can leave a message, relieves a frequent worry. 

Using speakerphone, I make a call while in front of the class. Students then have 10-15 minutes to fan out and make a call themselves. Though in practice I have limited control over whether they call, most report (in follow-up anonymous surveys) that they do. The most commonly shared reaction during debriefing is that calling was easier and less anxiety-provoking than expected. Most class members also report that the exercise has made them more likely to call an elected official in the future. I share more facilitation suggestions and learning outcomes evidence in a Teaching Sociology article describing the exercise in detail.

In a mostly-democratic system such as the modern U.S., citizen input shapes some political outcomes. That students learn how to engage the political system around social problems—and crucially, that they actually engage it—helps them develop citizenship skills they can use throughout their lives. Further, moving from solely learning about problems to taking action generates satisfaction that can fuel continued learning. For these reasons, civically-minded instructors should incorporate this activity in their classes.

Raj Ghoshal is an associate professor of sociology at Elon University in North Carolina. He has published over a dozen journal articles, mostly on race and ethnicity. He teaches courses on race and racism, political sociology, quantitative methods, and criminology. His most recent work appears in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.

One of the main tasks we have as instructors and teaching assistants is reading students’ writing and assisting them in communicating their ideas. Even when we have engaging class discussions, how do we get students to do good thinking and move their ideas from their heads to the written page? One way to help students is by providing effective feedback. Feedback serves as a conversation between a reader and the writer. The goal of feedback is to offer a different view of the writing, from which the writer is obscured. Feedback also helps the writer see what others take away from their writing and if their ideas have been effectively communicated.  

After serving as the department’s writing intensive teaching assistant this past year, I have a few manageable pieces of advice to offer. These ideas and techniques are adapted from the University of Georgia’s graduate Writing Intensive Program course, discussions with other writing-intensive teaching assistants, and Gottschalk and Hjortshoj (2004)’s The Elements of Teaching Writing: A Resource for Instructors in All Disciplines. The advice below should help instructors provide effective feedback on all forms of writing, from short pieces to longer, scaffolded essays:  

1. Focus on the forest and not the trees. Our main goal is to help students grow as writers. Students enter the classroom with different writing skills, experiences, and backgrounds.. You cannot fix everything in one semester, but you can help them identify what they are struggling with. Focus on these issues when giving feedback instead of honing in on individual sentences or singular minor points. 

2. Focus on giving each student a manageable number of tasks. When commenting on a first draft, I usually concentrate on only 2 to 3 big points related to major content or overarching arguments. Sometimes, for longer pieces, I might include 1 or 2 small points as well. 

3.  Do not write directly on students’ work. Instead, I write a note on a separate page (or a separate attached comment on our online system). This indicates to them that not only did I thoroughly read their essays but that I value their contribution and do not see them as just a number in the class. Having a note format for feedback also indicates that this is their work and gives them ownership over the page.

4. Think critically about the verbiage of your constructive criticism. One of the changes I have made to get students to really think about big picture issues is always including a sentence about what I thought their main point/key takeaways were. Rearticulating their argument in my words serves as a point to see if there is miscommunication between their thoughts and what the reader is taking away from the page. It creates an opportunity for them to clarify their intentions in revision. I have also changed the verbiage of how I articulate this to “As a reader, this is what I took away.” Furthermore, no matter how creative I have to be, I always try to start with a sentence of positive reinforcement on what they are doing well. 

5. Do not copy edit a draft. Copy editing students’ work can make the writing feel finalized and subvert the revision process, preventing students from producing a new, better draft as a finished product. Emphasize that grammar errors and minor style issues are part of the polishing stage writers enter once they have worked through content. To help students polish their work, suggest (the free version of) Grammarly or your campus’ writing center. You can also provide specific guidance on polishing once they have submitted a “final” draft.

As public sociologists, part of our job is to encourage critical thinking and clear writing. The tips for providing feedback I offer here promote students’ agency in the writing process and encourage deep thinking throughout the revision process. Students can often feel resistant to receiving feedback on assignments often preferring to turn in one draft, this feedback encourages them to lean into the revision process. The goal is to emphasize writing as communication and part of a collaborative process. 

Emily Tingle is a second-year doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Georgia where she currently serves as the department’s writing intensive teaching assistant. She holds a Master of Science degree in Sociology from Mississippi State University. Her areas of study include political sociology, social movements and collective action, and rural sociology.

I love sociology majors. They have a unique perspective as they try to apply recently learned concepts and methods while grappling to understand the sometimes-broken systems in our society so they can change them from within and address the disparities they’ve noticed in their daily lives. Some of the sociology majors taking my courses are focused on specific instances of injustice, often related to a structural inequality that has impacted them personally. I had a transgender student in my class who was interested in educating others about the violence related to a trans identity. I have had female students involved with organizing a “Take Back the Night” event to raise awareness and reduce stigma around sexual assault. I had a student who was president of the Black Student Union (BSU) focused on hosting cultural events with the goals of providing a social support network for Black college students. In each of these examples, the students had lived experience in a minoritized role – and the language to talk about it. And importantly, they wanted to use their training in sociology to raise awareness and provide support and services to those impacted by structural inequalities.

But because I work at the only public institution in Georgia to have a medical school and because I teach undergraduate medical sociology courses, most of the students in my sociology classes are not sociology majors. In fact, many of the people who take my class will only take this one class in the social sciences. This is their only formal exposure to sociology. And they see my course as just another box to check off their list towards their degree so that they can get to their actual career…in medicine.

Students in my classroom on the pre-med track are focused on getting into medical school and jumping through all the many hoops so they can eventually help people in their future role as medical doctors. As part of that long road with many expectations and requirements (including a high GPA in all classes), these students are often focused on what they need to do to get the grade in my class. I try to help them see how sociology applies to the medical field – whether it be related to gender-affirming healthcare, reducing barriers to accessing medical services following sexual assault, or racial differences in health outcomes. But these smart, motivated, capable students who are singularly focused on medical school are rarely interested in synthesizing sociological concepts in the same manner as majors. Instead, they want to know the answer to one driving question: “what’s gonna be on the test?” They want to do well on both the tests in my courses and the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

My situation is not unique. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recognizes the value of social science for a medical education. The AAMC recently restructured the MCAT so that understanding the principles of social science now comprises a quarter of the entrance exam to medical school. This has resulted in an increase in medically minded students in sociology courses all across the country. This shift has given instructors of sociology an important opportunity to provide the next generation of medical students with a sociological perspective. Sociology will help them not only on the entrance exam, and then in medical school, but in their intended careers interacting with hundreds of patients and dozens of colleagues.

Along with my co-authors, Dr. Melissa Powell-Williams and Dr. Kim Davies, I published a study in Teaching Sociology of how students who had recently completed the MCAT perceived sociology prepared them. Respondents in our study reported that their sociology courses helped them 1) develop empathy and 2) gain a sociological imagination. It should not be surprising that we think those are actually way more important skills to carry into a career in medicine than just scoring well on the MCAT. Of course, you do need to score well on the MCAT to get into medical school, and we as instructors want to help our students do well on their tests. But we shouldn’t be creating a “pre-MCAT” course to address the influx of premedical students seeking social sciences. We should keep teaching sociology as a discipline. All of our students will benefit from learning to identify the sources of a news story or read a primary source and analyze it from a sociological perspective. Developing empathy and understanding how social structure affects individual decisions are extremely important skills for people in any field – very much including medicine.

It is our mission as sociology instructors to give all our students – majors or otherwise – the skills to navigate a multicultural world. A primary portion of those skills is developing empathy and a sociological imagination. The quote that motivates the URL for this website comes from an American Sociological Association Presidential Address where Dr. Michael Burawoy said, “our students are our first and captive public,” and indeed the restructuring of the MCAT is bringing many more students into our classrooms. Even as they come to us in order to score well on a standardized test, this gives us an opportunity to teach them sociology. The AAMC’s emphasis on the importance of social science in providing more effective medical services is laudable. We need to validate their intention to cultivate cultural competence by helping students understand and appreciate how useful a sociological imagination can be for their intended career in medicine and as members of our society.   

The students I teach want to be doctors, nurses, physical therapists, or work in healthcare administration. And, in those roles, they will interact with a wide cross-section of people who vary from them on many social demographic indicators. They will interact with patients and colleagues who are different from them in terms of gender, race, sexuality, social class, age, religion, and ability, among others. They will be participants in the systems and institutions that sociologists study. They will deal with people in their most vulnerable moments when empathy and productive communication can be life-changing, or even life-saving. It’s critical that we distill to them the relevance of our hard-won insights. What I try to do in my class is to teach sociology as a way to think about taking the role of the other – imagining how someone makes decisions based on their position in the broader social structure and seeking to understand where inequalities stem from as we examine the structures in which people are embedded. I try to get students to think about how people make choices in context, how people are constrained by their socioeconomic status, their race/gender/sexuality and the political environment into which they were born. By first understanding these inequalities in our society, we can then work to address them and facilitate change. These sociological teachings are valuable for future medical providers to reach their patients and serve them effectively.

Elizabeth Culatta is an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Social Sciences at Augusta University. Dr. Culatta studies social determinants of health especially focused on identity tied to mental health and substance abuse for young adults. She has published in journals including Society and Mental Health, Social Currents, and Journal of Health Psychology. Dr. Culatta teaches medical sociology courses as well as Introduction to Sociology, often including pre-medical students.

Dear Junior Faculty Colleagues,

Teaching community-based learning (CBL) courses is one of the most rewarding pedagogies for students and professors, so we commend your interest in taking on this challenge. At the same time, this pedagogical approach requires a lot of preparation and dedication to ensure its success. With this in mind, we write this letter to you. We are faculty who each have been teaching CBL courses for more than a decade. Although we are sociologists, the information we discuss here is not limited to Sociology faculty; as we have taught classes in other disciplines too. We share some insights and advice, so that you may become a career practitioner rather than a one-and-done. While there are many things to consider when thinking about teaching a CBL course, we focus here on only a few areas. 

Understand your motivation: Are you choosing to teach a CBL course out of your own volition or are you pressured by colleagues, administrators, the college/university’s mission, a new general education requirement, or is there a monetary incentive? Having mentored faculty members and conducted research on this topic (Ludwig & Campbell, 2023), we advise that you teach a CBL course if you full-heartedly support the core values and principles associated with CBL courses. We all arrived at teaching CBL courses through different avenues. For example, Bernadette Ludwig’s initial experience with CBL courses was when, prior to her academic career, she worked for an NGO and was approached by local colleges. In this process, she saw first-hand what works and what does not. During her graduate studies, she collaborated with another NGO for her research and subsequently was asked by that NGO if she could teach a CBL course for a university they were trying to partner with. In other words, for her the motivation has always been to be the bridge between these different fields that she has been part of; community organizations and academia. In contrast, it was the institution that made the decision for Kristin Kenneavy when it assigned her to teach “Public Sociologies,” an advanced, applied research methods course. Although she went into the experience without any particular aspirations to teach a CBL course, she quickly came to enjoy working with her students on data collection projects that mattered, like the assessment of an on-campus anti-interpersonal violence campaign. 

Create sustainable and reciprocal community partnerships: Before you begin working with a community partner, familiarize yourself with the community and the people you and your students will be working with. Learn about the community, its strengths, challenges, and cultural, political, economic, and linguistic nuances, including those nuances due to (dis)abilities, sexual orientation, age, and nationality/immigrant background. Be sure you have a thorough understanding of what kind of project is useful for the community and the community partner, and be honest with yourself (and your community partner) regarding whether you and your students have the skills and bandwidth to complete a particular project or engage to the degree a partner may need. For example, Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom has found that most community partners have different needs and goals and that not all are a good fit for students. Some projects like writing an extensive grant application are likely to be out of the skill-set of first year students or even upper level students. The fit of community organizations’ needs, students’ skills and something doable in one semester requires some creative thought. We nevertheless believe that it is usually best to first listen to the community partner’s concerns and priorities before suggesting a project. 

Reciprocity and sustainability ought to be the center in the partnership and built into the plans. For example, if you teach a CBL course only in the fall, what happens to the partner’s tutoring program when your students are not there? Concretely this means that Bernadette Ludwig plans her courses in such a way that students in at least one class in the fall and one in the spring are available to tutor immigrant children and refugee women with two different NGOs. In addition, she serves on the board of directors of one of these organizations, and as such is very familiar with the community members’ needs and perspectives. For Kristin Kenneavy, it was often a struggle to find enough community partners with methodological need for research projects that could be undertaken by students in the “Public Sociologies” course. It takes a lot of work and networking in order to find suitable partners that have reciprocal needs. A sustainable partnership also entails that you remain in regular communication, attend community events at other times, and consider how your efforts align and contribute to the community partner’s plans. For example, Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom still attends meetings with community partners in the housing sector although she no longer teaches CBL courses that engage with these partners. 

Plan for diversity, equity, and accessibility: Planning and carrying out a CBL course needs to be mindful and thus account for students’ diverse backgrounds and statuses (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, immigrant/native-born, socioeconomic status) since these differences often mean having distinct life experiences that can impact their encounters with community members. For example, Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom lost sleep worrying about the safety of her male students entering an all-female, low-income boarding house for their community project, as the students may be seen as a threat and possibly provoke someone to call the police. In response to this concern she organized a meet-and-greet for residents and students and asked students to visibly wear their university ID tags at all times. In addition, a group photo of the students with their names was posted prominently and also shared with individual residents. Similarly, Kristin Kenneavy found herself teaching a class comprised of only male students who were tasked—due to an agreement entered prior to the start of the semester—to interview other college students, most of them women, about bystander intervention to prevent interpersonal violence. Thus, she spent time providing tools to her male students to be as neutral and empathetic as possible when they conducted these interviews. Simultaneously, it is important to be aware of and address students’ prejudice and stereotypes about communities that they are not familiar with while also supporting the existing knowledge that comes from students’ own backgrounds (see for example, Ludwig, 2016). It is also essential to ensure that all students who are qualified and interested in taking a CBL class can do so without restraints due to money and/or physical access. One way to possibly offset the costs is applying for grants like Bernadette Ludwig did. With these funds, she was able to purchase metro cards so students could commute to and from the community partner. Other possible ways to offset the costs related with CBL classes (traveling, getting fingerprinted, etc.) is to approach your university’s Center for Civic Engagements or possibly even the community partner to ask for full or partial financial support. 

We conclude by reiterating that CBL courses are challenging and time-intensive but also very rewarding and transformative, and as such have the potential to impact individual lives and communities. We hope that by outlining some of these principles when teaching a CBL course, you, as a junior faculty, are able to envision a course that grows over time with a community partner because we know those collaborations are more effective. 

Sincerely, 

Bernadette Ludwig, PhD

Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom, PhD

Kristin, Kenneavy, PhD

Bernadette Ludwig is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of Civic Engagement at Wagner College. Professor Ludwig’s research focuses on how racism affects African refugees in their ability to find refuge and in the resettlement process. Her other work investigates how community engagement can nurture students’ sense of social justice and belonging.

Susan Rakosi Rosenbloom, Associate Professor of Sociology and Civic Engagement at Drew University, is an advocate for integrating academic learning and research with real-world problems working with community partners. Her research focuses on adolescent friendship, peer group racial dynamics, and NYC school choice policies.

Kristin Kenneavy is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She previously was a Faculty Fellow for Civic and Community Engagement and currently convenes the Civic and Community Leadership Minor, which she helped create. Her work examines bystander intervention to prevent interpersonal violence among college students.

I have to be honest. When I first got the invitation to write an essay for First Publics, I wasn’t much interested. I didn’t think it was for me. The reason is that I had assumed that First Publics—this wonderful new TSP blog spot for sociology instructors—was going to be all about and for sociology teachers who used all manner of new technologies and online materials, cool interactive graphics and exercises, and fun social media memes, clips, and videos. In contrast, I think of myself as more of an old-school teacher, given over to assigning readings, lecturing on those readings, and then giving exams or writing papers on that content. Nothing cutting-edge or innovative about that.

But then, in talking with the First Public’s team and tracking their content over the fall, I began to think maybe there was a contribution for me to make after all. It had to do with my plans to teach a big “Introduction to Sociology” course for the first time in a while, having taken a break to serve as department chair for a few years.

I told the team about my plans to use Lisa Wade’s wonderful new textbook “Terrible, Magnificent Sociology” and Matt Desmond’s new manifesto “Poverty, by America.” I explained to them that although I myself had never had a textbook in college (never had a sociology course as an undergrad, in fact), I thought a textbook was necessary for a class like this—not only because it was such a large group of students but because it was such a diverse group of students from different backgrounds and different majors, all with varying degrees of background knowledge and different learning styles. It was important because I thought students needed different ways to connect with and engage the material (and that Wade—a longtime blogger on TSP, indeed the inventor of “Sociological Images”—had produced a text that was particularly accessible and covered much of the ground I thought was important for a soc intro course). I also told them I also like to assign at least one book-length text from a sociologist so that they can get a better sense of how we think and talk—and that Desmond was one of the best writers and thinkers our field has to offer.

We also talked about lectures—and how I did power points, as students seem to want these days but kept them pretty basic and minimal most days. Some days I used nothing more than a text and some talking points outlined on the board. On these days, I told them, I think of my job as to model how a sociologist like myself thinks about the world, uses and interprets data and texts, modeling not only how to think but challenging myself to really bring sociology to life, make it vibrant and engaging for as many students as possible. (Or at least trying to keep them awake until the end of the hour). 

We talked about grading and examinations. I favor a mix of writing, both on exams and in stand-alone essays, as well as multiple choice/true-false time items. That is because I think of sociology as both an exercise in interpretation and critical thinking (thus, the writing) but also as something of a science needing some basic facts and core concepts, all of which lend themselves to more traditional examination formats like multiple choice, true/false and short answer/fill-in-the-blank type questions.

We also talked about the discussion sections, staffed by teaching assistants, that go along with the large lectures here in Minnesota. When I first started college, I often found myself annoyed with fellow students who talked a lot without seeming to say anything in such settings. These days, I have come to appreciate such talk. That is where students illustrate their thinking and begin to develop subtle ideas and distinctions, getting to deeper meanings and implications. I have also come to learn that a great deal of learning happens among classmates and peers. We learn from each other’s successes and failings in this endeavor to discuss and debate. And sections (and TAs) really help to facilitate all of this.

I brought all of these thoughts into my classroom this fall—into the chapters I assigned, the lectures I developed, the discussion exercises, and exams we crafted to help guide and ensure learning, reflection, and exposition. The class wasn’t completely traditional. I used online “inquisitive” study reviews for many of the chapters. I prepared PowerPoint slides for most lectures (especially useful, I think, for students with disabilities or illnesses or diverse learning styles). And I showed some videos and even offered an extra-credit sociology meme contest. But I still wrote an outline on the whiteboard each day, told a lot of stories, and tried to encourage students to read the textbook and supplementary articles on their own rather than spoon-feed everything to them. 

(My teaching assistants this first semester were wonderful, by the way. They were open to my ideas and assignments, supportive of my lectures and suggestions for section exercises,  willing and able to talk things through with students, and better than I at meeting them where they were in terms of both ideas and abilities as well as various individual challenges and issues. I couldn’t have done this class of 240 first and second year college students without them–and, in fact, might be writing a much different essay if they hadn’t been so skilled, hard-working, and supportive along the way.)

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I don’t really know if or how successful this approach proved to be. Course evaluations are in, but the response rate was low (as it has been since the pandemic), and I don’t necessarily trust the results anyway: I know all of the biases that come with them (most of which benefit a middle-aged cisgender white man like myself) and because popularity doesn’t necessarily make good pedagogy. 

I also know that when I do the class again next year, I’ll be able to add some additional bells and whistles to the PowerPoint slides, find some additional amusing memes or other social media content, and perhaps also some more innovative in-class activities or polished discussion guides. My aforementioned awesome TAs also offered some really useful suggestions about how to improve course assignments next time, structure discussion sections, and update certain pop culture references and illustrations. 

But however this course evolves, I think the roots of how I approach it  and however successful I may be, will go back, as they do for all good instructors, to some of the basics:

• Engaging, accessible readings and content;
• A mix of big ideas, basic facts, and a critical orientation to the world;
• Some balance between lecturing and active learning;
• Exercises, assignments, and exams that encourage and, in fact, require ongoing engagement and active learning and thinking as well as factual knowledge and rote memorization.

Perhaps the basic lesson for me is that as much as the world around us develops and evolves, and our teaching and pedagogy along with it, there is also a lot about teaching and learning that remains the same. Being old school may be one of the most original, innovative things I’ve got going.

Douglas Hartmann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He works in the areas of race, sports, culture, and public engagement, and is the author of Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy (Chicago 2016). Hartmann is also a former editor of Contexts and co-publisher (with Chris Uggest) of the TheSocietyPages.org. When President of the Midwest Sociological Society, Hartmann made “Sociology and its Publics: The Next Generation” the theme for the Annual Meetings.