When I first designed an assignment called Seeing with the Machines, I wanted students to move beyond using artificial intelligence as a convenience and begin studying it as a social actor. I teach at a large public university in Appalachian Ohio. Many of my students are first-generation or Pell-eligible. They work, share devices, and juggle care. Technology runs through every student’s story, essential to learning and daily life, yet few pause to ask how these systems know what they know or who they are built to serve. The guiding question that now shapes much of my pedagogy is simple but generative: What does it mean to teach sociology in a moment when AI is both an object of study and a tool shaping pedagogy?

Michael Burawoy reminds us that our students are our “first and captive public.” When I treat the classroom as a public space, I invite students to practice sociology not as an academic exercise, but as a civic act. That idea has taken on new meaning in one of my newest courses, The Sociology of Artificial Intelligence. The class grew out of a broader rethinking of what it means to teach sociology at a time when our publics are increasingly mediated by machines. Rather than treating AI as a technical subject, I approach it as a sociological phenomenon, a set of systems that shape visibility, belonging, and power in everyday life. 

Our conversation often begins with an unexpected realization: our “public” now includes the machine itself. Algorithms track, predict, and respond to us, sometimes more quickly than our institutions do. As these systems become everyday interlocutors, they also become our newest public, as invisible institutions of governance. The classroom has become a field site of algorithmic power. I realized that to teach sociology responsibly, I had to help students see how their education was mediated by technologies that also classified, ranked, and predicted them.

The assignment began as a short ethnographic exercise. Students selected a machine they interacted with daily, such as ChatGPT, Spotify, Google Maps, or even the self-checkout scanner at the local grocery store, and observed how it saw them. They wrote fieldnotes on moments when the system appeared to misrecognize or over-recognize their behavior, when an algorithm insisted on the wrong music genre, or when a predictive text app completed their sentences in ways that revealed cultural bias. One student laughed as she described Spotify’s algorithm as “that clingy friend who thinks it knows me better than I do,” before realizing that its pattern of suggestions mirrored the narrow labels attached to her digital profile.

I pair this with short readings and quick drills. We map the people and tools around a familiar app, name the labels it uses, and ask who benefits, who is misread, and who is missing. We aren’t chasing tidy answers. We aim for better questions that students can carry into their everyday lives. I have learned to slow down, leave room for silence, and invite stories. Students’ reflections land harder when they connect the abstract with the local. One student wrote about the uncanny comfort of an AI mental-health chatbot that seemed to “listen” better than people did, yet offered canned empathy detached from context. Their reflections were analytic yet deeply personal, blurring the boundary between data subject and sociologist.

When generative AI entered the classroom, I felt the same ambivalence many instructors feel. These same technologies could enhance teaching, yet they also threaten to flatten it. Rather than banning the tool, I positioned it as a text to be critiqued. In one activity, a chatbot summarized Durkheim on social facts. We read with pencils, circling what felt too smooth or too certain. The goal was not to catch errors but to model inquiry. Students saw how systems echo dominant stories with confidence. A prompt about successful families returned a narrow script, and we learned that critical thinking comes from our practice, not from the tool.

Equity sits at the center of this work. Some students rely on outdated laptops, unstable internet, or shared family devices. When we discuss algorithmic bias, they recognize themselves not as abstract examples but as those whose data are often missing from training sets. I try to design with that in mind. Using free tools, I invite collaborative note-taking and shared inquiry, so no student is left behind. I keep a parallel reading list with working-class, rural, and non-Western voices. Students see themselves in the materials and feel licensed to question how knowledge infrastructures are built.

Some of my most memorable teaching moments come from students’ refusals, the decision not to use an AI tool, not to accept an algorithmic classification, or not to write in the machine’s preferred style. Their refusals remind me that critical pedagogy is not about producing compliant digital citizens but about cultivating discernment. One student refused to let ChatGPT summarize her fieldnotes, explaining that doing so felt like “outsourcing reflection.” Another chose to hand-draw her network map rather than use software, arguing that the tactile act of drawing revealed relationships she would have missed otherwise. These gestures, small but significant, embody the ethics of “slow sociology” in a fast computational world. Teaching in this way has changed how I assess work. I now value evidence of process as much as the final product. Annotated screenshots, reflective journals, and short audio notes all make the thinking visible. Students now think with and against machines, not just what answers they produce.

Writing this, I see my public is not only my students but also the educators facing the same dilemmas. Each term, we rehearse sociology’s perennial question, how structure shapes life, now refracted through digital interfaces. If public sociology aims beyond the academy, teaching AI makes that aim urgent. To teach while the machine watches back calls for humility, craft, and vigilance, reminding me that pedagogy is a sociotechnical practice that, when reflexive, can cultivate critical publics who imagine more just futures.

Tamanna M. Shah is the Eric A. Wagner Professor of Sociology at Ohio University and a Curriculum Writing Fellow at Harvard University. Her research focuses on comparative political sociology, gender, peacebuilding, and armed conflict. She serves as the Book Reviews Editor for Sociological Research Online and is a member of the Editorial Board of ASA TRAILS. She is the author of Children and Youth as “Sites of Resistance” in Armed Conflict, Volumes I and II, published as part of the ASA Section on Children and Youth series.

In her ASA Footnotes article, “Meeting the Moment: Why We Can’t Afford to Let Sociology Classrooms Become Places Where Hope Comes to Die,” Ashley C. Rondini (Franklin & Marshall College) points to ways teachers can help students of sociology cultivate the hope that they will need for the work that lies ahead. Read the article here.

Check out this soon-to-be-released SOCI textbook, “The Power of Sociology
Grasping Our Unequal World.” by Gudmundur Oddsson, Jenny M. Stuber, and James Michael Thomas. The book introduces students to sociology by examining the causes and consequences of social inequality, and power at its core. Click here to access the book!

Looking for a free Introduction to Sociology textbook and resources for students majoring in sociology and career support for students? Check out The Sociology Coach, created by Stephanie Medley-Rath.

In August 2023, we launched First Publics as an online space for exploring the politics, pedagogy, and practice of teaching as public sociology with a Dialogue with ASA’s then-President Prudence Carter about the educative power of sociology (thanks to a generous introduction from TSP Editors Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen). We followed that conversation up with a roundtable of responses from five prominent scholars and teachers in the field to Dr. Carter’s address at the annual ASA meetings. Our fledgling team of faculty and grad students were excited about our new venture, but unsure whether others would find value in what we envisioned for First Publics .

Since then we have published 23 Reflections, 13 Class Notes, eight Dialogues, and many more Connections. We have worked hard to solicit content that we think will be of interest to our readers, and have recently seen an uptick in unsolicited contributions. In addition to publishing on a wide array of topics related to teaching as public sociology, we’ve curated three Series so far (Intro to Sociology, Teaching Theory, and Engaging Elections). By the end of 2024, we had nearly 10,000 views. While not an astronomical number, we were delighted that people other than our team were reading and engaging with our content. We have been further encouraged in our commitment to reflecting deeply on the classroom as an essential and powerful site for public sociology in receiving the Carla B. Howery Teaching Enhancement Fund Grant this year to support our fourth Series, which will focus on “Teaching Methods as Public Sociology.” 

In short, there’s a lot to celebrate about how far we’ve come in building First Publics as a community of practice around teaching as public sociology. At the same time, we are still working toward several goals that we feel are central to our mission.

Last spring, our team engaged in a self-audit of the content on First Publics to assess how well we have done in publishing a diversity of voices and collaborating across the uneven landscape of higher ed institutions. We determined that 67 percent of our authors so far are people that we perceive as white and less than a handful are from outside the United States. A majority of our contributors work at research intensive universities (64%) and only 21 percent are in non-tenure track positions (including graduate students). In light of these findings, we are recommitting ourselves in striving to be a collaborative and inclusive space that is a welcoming community to diverse readers and contributors.

While we plan to do this in a number of ways, one exciting outgrowth of this commitment is forming the First Publics Advisory Board composed of six stellar and accomplished public sociologists who are also dedicated teachers: Michel Estefan, Kyle Green, Shamus Khan, Johnnie Lotesta, Myron T. Strong, and Lisa Wade. The Board has agreed to meet with our leadership team several times a year to brainstorm with us and help move us closer to our goals. We are excited about the ways that this group represents a broader range of higher ed institutions and positionalities. We met for the first time last week and are already feeling renewed and reinvigorated with fresh ideas to keep First Publics relevant for teachers and students alike.As we ended the call, one of our board members said that it felt good to be in a space where we could speak from a place of hope in spite of all that is happening in this social and political moment. We couldn’t agree more – and we continue to invite you to join the conversation here at First Publics.

Looking for a way to make a good use of AI in teaching and learning? This paper on “Seeing with Machines: A Reflexive Ethnography of AI Systems in Everyday Life” could help you. Resource from ASA Trails!

Teaching about violence has pedagogical value in Intro class but it needs to be done with care! Check out what Hatton, Upadhyay, and Williams suggest about the use of violence contents in 22 popular introductory sociology textbooks.

I was tasked with acting as a guest lecturer for a Sociology of Gender course on the topic of BDSM and kink. I had 90 minutes to lecture. Prior to beginning the lecture, I went out and brought three boxes of pizza. The lecture took place in a classroom that I had taken dozens of other social work courses in. It felt like the natural place for me to examine and explore difficult topics I had taken Sociology of Gender as an undergraduate with this professor. The professor sat in the front and left me full control of this guest lecture. Attendance was optional, which meant every student had already consented to be there. I told them that we would begin the way any ethical scene begins. We would start with consent, set boundaries, and move forward together.

During the first ten minutes of the lecture, I set the ground rules. I explained to the students that this lecture was about the exploration of history and culture. This was not a place to discuss personal stories and individual experiences. I explained that we would avoid sexual detail and focus on power, stigma, and consent. If anyone felt uncomfortable, they could speak up, pause the discussion, or leave without explanation. My goal for this lecture was for students to understand that taboo topics can be navigated with ethical care and examined from an intellectual standpoint. In order for me to responsibly teach about these stigmatized topics, I needed to treat consent as a practice rather than a slogan.

For the first forty-five minutes, I taught about consent. Not in the abstract and not as a compliance form. I framed consent as negotiation, a social process with history and language. I reminded them that this was not a human sexuality course. It was about how people organize power and stigma. Once we had that foundation, we could place kink and BDSM in their proper context.

History came next. I traced the emergence of leather culture in queer communities pushed to the margins of public life during the twentieth century. Bars and back rooms became places where people created rules for power and intimacy. Students were struck by how much of this history was about community governance. I discussed how members of the LGBTQIA+ were often relegated to dark and seedy places. I explained that many of the spaces, including the Stonewall Inn were controlled by organized crime, as police could not be trusted.

People formed organizations and archives while debating questions of ethics and responsibility. I emphasized the lesbian leather scene and the role of groups like Samois, which brought feminism and kink into public conversation. These were both civic projects and contested experiments.

The students engaged with curiosity and caution. Some asked thoughtful questions about history and culture. A few asked questions that crossed into sexual detail, and I said that those were outside our scope. Creating and enforcing this boundary became a lesson in itself. This provided a framework that was always intellectual rather than voyeuristic.

At the time I was finishing my master’s program in social work and working at a gender and sexuality center as a graduate assistant. I had studied leather culture in depth and had spoken about it in an earlier interview for this same class. The professor likely invited me to lecture because I combined that knowledge with training in clinical social work. My diagnostics course (a class on how social workers use structured assessment tools and diagnostic frameworks like the DSM to understand client problems) had shaped how I thought about anxiety and anticipatory fear. If I taught this material in a sensational way, I would shut students down. If I used sterile language and predictable structure, I would lower arousal and invite reflection. So I chose sterile and predictable. That decision was not about sanitizing kink. It was about respecting students’ nervous systems.

One of the richest exchanges came during our discussion of lesbian contributions to kink culture. Students often hear leather history through a narrow male lens. Tracing lesbian debates about feminism, care, and community complicated the narrative. It also showed how the politics of naming and belonging are never neutral. Who counts as a member, what counts as harm, and which risks are acknowledged are all social questions. These questions remain central to sociology, regardless of the subculture in view.

I see this lecture as public sociology in action. Public sociology is not a slogan. It is a practice of engaging people in real problems, using language that is accessible, and building capacity beyond the campus. Teaching BDSM and kink through consent and history treats students as capable civic actors. It invites them to examine how communities make rules, store memory, and confront stigma. It also models how to address taboo topics without sliding into either titillation or moral panic. We learned to ask better questions. We learned to listen for boundaries. We learned to separate sociological study from pathologizing impulse.

My takeaway for other educators is straightforward. Teach consent as a method, not a definition. Use structure and clear language to lower anxiety. By keeping the scope on history and governance I was able to ensure that students could analyze without feeling pressure to disclose. Offer opt out as a standing option. Name the stigma and trace its origins. Invite students to think like sociologists and neighbors rather than jurors or voyeurs. 

At the end, students reflected that they now had tools to examine power, consent, and stigma across domains of social life. That was the goal: to show that taboo topics can be studied with scholarly rigor.

Joey Colby Bernert (any/all) is a clinical social worker, statistician, and MPH student at Michigan State University. They live in Southeast Oakland County and are applying to PhD programs in Sociology, Statistics, Social Work, and Women’s Studies. Their research focuses on rural sociology and the structural determinants of health. When they are not studying, they can be found long boarding or writing poetry.

I’ve taught social theory to undergraduate students at public institutions for over a decade, and among the instructional challenges this entails, one stands out as the most heartbreaking: the student who faced many challenges to get to college, who shoulders heavy personal responsibilities outside the classroom, goes to office hours, attends every lecture, and reads every page assigned–is just not reaching the level of understanding or receiving the grades they hoped for. You notice the bags under their eyes from the all-nighters. You hear the creeping doubt in their voice during office hours as the feeling that maybe they’re just “not a theory person” starts to take root. How do you convince them not to lose heart? How do you reassure them that, even if the results don’t yet match their effort, their learning is real and they’re making progress? 

The literature on the challenges of teaching social theory and strategies to address them is vast. It contains many helpful and creative ideas. However, there’s no quick fix, no clever pedagogical shortcut, that can replace the slow, cumulative labor of reading, writing, thinking, and talking about theory—the only path to that hard-won moment when the text starts to open up for you. 

I’d like to share seven principles for teaching social theory that have proved effective in helping my students stay the course. They’re easy to adopt in any classroom, regardless of size or institutional setting. 

1. Less Is More When It Comes to Theory

With theory, meaningful learning happens when students have the time and space to linger with the text—to reread, annotate, puzzle through difficult sentences, and sit with confusion. Long reading assignments undermine these conditions by pressuring students to power through instead of slowing down. Smaller, more manageable chunks of text invite depth over speed. 

2. Model the Method

It’s not enough to explain the text—you have to show students how to read it. I project a passage, ask someone to read it aloud, slowly, sentence by sentence. We look up unfamiliar words, discuss tricky concepts, rephrase in our own words, underline, highlight, diagram, and annotate. The goal is to model, in real time, the messy, looping process by which understanding gradually takes shape.

3. Start With the Big Picture

When it comes to theory, every sentence can be a heavy lift. Without a clear sense of the big picture, it’s easy for students to get lost in the details–working unproductively to decode line by line. That’s why I start by giving them the main argument and a rough map of how the parts fit together. It can feel like giving too much away, but I’ve found that offering the destination up front provides students with a map that anchors their efforts without doing all the work for them–just enough support to make deep engagement possible, not overwhelming. 

4. Build a Bridge Between the Text and Their World

Theoretical texts often feel distant or abstract to students. To make them legible, I look for something more familiar—a news story, a film scene, a meme, a personal anecdote, even a lyric from a song—that gives students an intuitive understanding of the argument or concept. The goal isn’t to confirm what students already believe—it’s to meet them where they are. Learning requires rethinking, even unlearning. But unless a new idea connects with something they already grasp intuitively, the deeper insight won’t land. You have to reach them before you can move them.

5. Normalize the Struggle 

I make it a point to tell students how lost I felt the first time I read a given author, and that even now—if it’s been a while since I last read their work—I still have to reread, revisit my notes, and puzzle through passages. What they might hear as clarity in my explanations is really just time invested: I’ve read that section dozens of times. The real danger is mistaking fluency for intelligence. As with anything you want to get better at—whether it’s tennis or theory—it takes patience, persistence, and practice.

6. Proactively Invite Questions

Don’t just wait for questions—intentionally and regularly make space for them. I pause often and say things like, “Let’s stop here. This is a tough passage—let’s take a step back and unpack it.” The goal is to send a clear signal: questions aren’t interruptions, they’re part of the process. I expect them, because this work is challenging.

7. Stay Humble, Stay Curious

The more familiar you are with a text, the harder it is to remember what it’s like to read it for the first time—this is called the curse of expertise. You can’t overcome it on your own; you need your students. Ask them what makes sense and what doesn’t. Invite them to share their misunderstandings and confusions, and listen closely when they do. That feedback isn’t just useful for clarifying the text—it’s a reminder that effective teaching begins with humility.

In the end, teaching theory is as hard as learning it–which is why we should approach this work, and each other, with humility, compassion, and respect. 

Michel Estefan is an Associate Professor of Teaching and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Sociology Department at the University of California, San Diego. 

“How can I effectively teach capitalism?” See the answer here via Sage’s Sociology Exchange.