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Over the last few decades, instructors have been increasingly encouraged to integrate technology into their classrooms. Whether through the use of smart board technology, the incorporation of the ever-expanding library of short videos online, and now through the embrace of artificial intelligence, techno-optimism has pervaded educational spaces. It is in this context that I have developed a counter-pedagogy, which I call a pedagogy of the senses. This is a pedagogy that intentionally centers the human experience of the world. Although I do not reject technology in the classroom, I decenter technology in preference for the bodily experience of learning. This pedagogical approach was inspired by my observations of Anna Guevara, an exceptional teacher whose classrooms have engaged with sensory experiences long before I started to explore these methods. 

I have most thoroughly applied this pedagogy of the senses to the course Sociology of Latinos. In this course, we tap into all five senses to explore questions about the structural factors that shape Latine identities and lives. 

We open each class period with an auditory experience which pairs a piece of music from diverse Latin American genres with the content of the class. For example, we explore deportation through the music of La Santa Cecilia and discuss the racialization and identities of Latines through Calle 13’s song Latinoamérica. 

A visual experience of the classroom centers art, which is both analyzed and produced. We think through the use of art in social movements, exploring a range of political artwork and even taking a print-making workshop to participate in the creation of art.  As my university is close to Chicago, we are able to view some of this artwork in person, taking field trips to the National Museum of Mexican Art and completing a walking tour of murals in the famous Puerto Rican neighborhood of Humboldt Park. Art in this space is an intentional tool used to combat gentrification. 

A tactical experience of the classroom centers movement. For example, as we learn about the role of indigeneity in the Latine experience, we take a workshop with a Peruvian dance instructor who links dance movements to ideas about indigeneity, environment, and the cosmos. This particular workshop is powerful in that the movements are collective: the members of the class must work together, which helps to build a sense of community. 

The classroom also features taste and smell. When discussing the history of corn in the Americas and the consequences of the United States’ corn products on Mexico, I bring to class several unique varieties of corn from Latin American cuisine. For many students, these varieties of corn are entirely new. The bodily experience of tasting a new flavor of an otherwise common product helps students to understand the consequences of the U.S.’s hegemony in global corn production. I also encourage students to bring their own foods to share. Students’ participation has opened conversations ranging from the politics of street vending to the history of particular flavors of Mexican candies (a history that often merges indigenous roots and European influences). 

A pedagogy of the senses produces a series of benefits. It brings the content to life in ways that are memorable—unlike content from a screen that is often fleeting. It creates a sense of community, whether through the breaking of bread or the participation in communal movement.  Finally, in a world that is increasingly digital, virtual, and disembodied, a pedagogy of the senses provides a radical space for learning to be returned to the body itself.

Emily Navarro is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Donald W. And Betty J. Buik Endowed Chair at Elmhurst University. She is a scholar of migration, and her work has focused on unaccompanied youth migrants and the use of immigration detention. She is the author of  Unaccompanied: The Plight of Immigrant Youth at the Border with NYU Press. She is currently conducting a series of projects on mass deportations, which include an exploration of Immigration and Customs Enforcement social media posts and a rhetorical analysis of 911 calls made by civilians about ICE operations. As a professor at a teaching institution, she enjoys teaching on a wide range of topics, including gender, globalization, and race.

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We got ghosted.

Not in a dating app kind of way, but in a way that seemed surprisingly similar: messages were sent, plans were made, the momentum was building. We were excited. We had feelings. Then suddenly: SILENCE.

Of course, I initially assumed there was a reasonable explanation. Maybe my counterpart’s schedule was overbooked, or perhaps a technology issue had swallowed my emails. Maybe they were overwhelmed.  But as the days dragged on, the lack of response left me feeling embarrassed and vulnerable. After all, I was the one who had initiated the partnership. Maybe I was too pushy. Maybe I had come on too strong. 

I told myself it wasn’t personal. It was pedagogical. 

I had built a cross-campus assignment around collaboration between my students and a class at another university in a different region of the United States. It is an idea that grew out of a connection I made through a Facebook discussion board with other sociology instructors.  I proposed a collaborative project: students in two different regions of the United States would research the racial and ethnic histories of their local communities, create multi-media projects on their topics, exchange their work, and write responses to one another. The goal was to help them see how race, place, and inequality take shape differently across the United States.

I was so excited about what this assignment could be. I imagined that it would be a model for collaborative teaching. In fact, the assignment had already become the basis for an upcoming conference panel I will be presenting at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in New York. 

For months, everything moved forward as planned. We exchanged syllabi and coordinated timelines. We created a shared Google folder. We checked in regularly in the weeks leading up to the assignment.

“We have a librarian coming in on Thursday to discuss how to find resources.”
“We are ready to start our assignment next week.”
“Students are still choosing topics, but we should have everything finalized soon.”

In both classes, students worked in small groups and selected topics within five shared categories: Indigenous histories; civil rights histories; immigrant communities and ethnic enclaves; segregation, urban planning, and redlining; and environmental injustice. Within this structure, my students chose topics such as Chickasaw and Choctaw histories, the Memphis State Eight, ethnic enclaves in Memphis, food deserts, and the xAI facility in South Memphis.

The resulting multi-media projects were thoughtful and well done. They took the assignment seriously. They produced work they were ready to share.

I uploaded their projects to the shared folder and sent a quick email to check in. “Please let me know if you have any trouble accessing them!” And then… nothing. No projects from the partner class. No responses. No confirmation. Just silence at the exact moment the collaboration was supposed to happen.

At first, I assumed it was a normal delay. I am well aware of how unpredictable a semester can be: weather disruptions, shifting schedules, adjusted deadlines. I followed up again. Still nothing.

Meanwhile, my students were on track. They had done the work.

So the week the response letters were due, I stood in front of the class with my hands clasped and my weight shifting from foot to foot. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and said, “This is awkward…”

And then I told them: “…we got ghosted.”

I felt embarrassed hearing my voice utter the words out loud. I could feel my face flush red hot with a deep sense of social awkwardness and a deeper sense of professional failure. I had been building this assignment up since the beginning of the semester, and now I could not deliver. The core of the assignment was gone.

Collectively, however, the students immediately reassured me. They laughed, noting that they had all experienced being ghosted before too, just not by a university professor. 

I leaned into our shared understanding and proposed a pivot: Instead of writing response letters to students on the other side of the country, we would turn toward each other. I revised the final component of the assignment: Choose one idea, example, or insight from another group’s project. Connect it to your own topic. What does this comparison reveal about how race, ethnicity, power, and inequality operate in Memphis?

In retrospect, it is easy to write about this pivot as a clean, triumphant pedagogical choice. In reality, that week was a blur of academic panic and quiet resentment. In truth, I was deeply anxious. I worried about losing my students’ trust. I feared my students would see the revised assignment as frantic busywork, or worse, view me as (gasp) disorganized. I caught myself staring at my computer screen late at night, wondering what would become of my student evaluations. 

The pivot also forced me to confront a complex sociological layer of teaching: the power of an audience. Initially, the quality of student work had been driven by the high stakes of an external gaze. I had specifically pointed out to them that they were writing for peers thousands of miles away.  “You are representing Memphis,” I cautioned. The implication was that they would want to appear sharp, capable, and smart. When that outside audience vanished, I braced for a drop in momentum. I feared that turning inward would feel too small and low-stakes.

Instead, something else happened. A different kind of seriousness took over. No longer needing to explain Memphis to outsiders, students engaged deeply with the intersecting realities of their own neighborhoods. They compared, questioned, and extended one another’s ideas in ways that felt genuinely dialogic and part of a shared sociological landscape. For example, the group studying food deserts juxtaposed their map showcasing grocery store scarcity against another group’s project detailing Elon Musk’s new xAI “Colossus” supercomputer facility in Southwest Memphis. The students asked:  How can the city’s political and utility infrastructures move at lightning speed to fast-track massive power grids and millions of gallons of water for a billionaire’s data center, while claiming for decades that it is economically unfeasible to incentivize a single corporate grocery store for the historic Black neighborhoods in the same city? Another group researching Chickasaw and Choctaw land cessions made connections to later patterns of segregation and racial inequality, They argued that the 1818 Jackson Purchase laid the groundwork for historical patterns of exclusion and segregation that would eventually necessitate the Civil Rights movement and moments like the Memphis State Eight.  The students noted that there has been a continuous, unfolding struggle over who gets to belong in Memphis and who is forced to absorb the costs of its growth. 

Instead of looking outward for comparison, they looked inward toward Memphis, toward shared histories, toward overlapping systems of inequality that were already present around them. The assignment evolved into a collective sociological mapping of the history of Memphis. Overall, I consider the pivot a success!

And yet, I do keep thinking about what was lost. The assignment was originally designed to disrupt the assumption that my students’ local context is universal. As a Sociology instructor teaching a course on Race & Ethnic Minorities, I have struggled with the notion of my students assuming that the specific socio-political realities of the American South are a baseline for how the whole country operates. I wanted them to swap projects with a class in a completely different region (specifically the Southwest, Pacific Northwest or New England) so they could understand how race and displacement manifest differently in different places. I especially wanted them to see what race and place look like when stripped of Southern iconography. Additionally, they lost the chance to see how a student thousands of miles away might interpret Memphis’s history, and conversely, they lost the chance to realize that their own local struggles are part of a fractured national history. 

Until now, I have never heard back from the instructor. I hold no anger nor ill will; in fact, I genuinely hope they are okay.

As a sociologist, I ultimately have to look past personal explanations for the silence and look toward structural ones. I chalk this loss up as a direct symptom of the modern academy. Informal cross-institutional collaborations are exciting in theory, but they are incredibly fragile because they rely entirely on the invisible, uncompensated emotional and intellectual labor of overworked faculty. When a semester gets overwhelming, when grading piles up, or when institutional pressures shift, these under-the-table partnerships are the first things to get dropped because there is no institutional safety net to catch them. Higher education depends continuously on the extra labor of people who are already stretched to their breaking points.

I still believe in cross-campus collaboration. I still think there is value in connecting students across place and I plan to attempt this project again  However, if it again falls apart,  I remind myself that what matters most is not necessarily preserving the original design but preserving the learning.

JoAnna Boudreaux is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Sociology at the University of Memphis. She also serves as the coordinator of the internship program. Her pedagogical approach is centered on creating a collaborative learning environment, connecting sociological concepts to the local community, and exploring innovative teaching methods. She teaches a variety of courses on topics such as race and ethnicity, sociological theory, medical sociology, gender and society, and knowledge production in the age of AI.

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Our latest webinar focused on how — and why — we teach methods. Joined by Drs. Vanessa Gonlin (Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Georgia) and Jennifer Turner (Senior Research Associate, Institute for Women’s Policy Research [IWPR]), we discussed engaging students in methods, fostering a critical lens, and preparing them for careers beyond the classroom. The full conversation can be seen here; below, we summarize (editing for clarity) and reflect on these themes.

A Grounded Approach to Teaching Methods

Both panelists know firsthand the anxiety students bring to methods courses. Rather than ignore it, they lean in. They employ approaches that bring the student into their learning and grounding methods in their own experiences.  This makes methods feel accessible rather than intimidating. 

Vanessa opens each class with a brief mindful meditation: “engaging in breathing, grounding, centering ourselves, finding peace and serenity within ourselves, knowing we can always come to ourselves for support and stability at any time during this process.” (6:23)

This reduces anxiety and reframes the process of engaging methods positively. Building on this,  Jennifer shared: 

“It’s not always about having the right answer. I think getting comfortable, or helping students get comfortable with asking questions, and knowing that you don’t always have to have the right answer. Sometimes it’s more important to know what questions to ask than it is to have all the answers.” (26:06)

For Jennifer, helping students get comfortable with the challenge of learning methods goes hand in hand with demystifying them. She urges students to start with observing the familiar spaces they move through every day, like campus: 

“My strategy is to help students understand that methods are tools to help them understand the world. So, really demystifying what methods are and having them apply methods to their lives in a very real way. So one of the exercises I would do with my qualitative methods students is have them go to the student center on campus and take field notes and observations – just have them think critically about how we observe, because we’re always observing the social world.” (8:39) 

This first step builds comfort with methods while nudging students toward the “so what” questions by connecting everyday patterns to larger social contexts and problems.

Engaging a Critical Eye to Methods

Grounding students is only the beginning. Both Vanessa and Jennifer emphasize the importance of positionality and helping students recognize that who they are shapes how they see the world, apply methods, ask questions, and engage with participants. Jennifer said: 

“We know that when we’re doing research, there’s already a power dynamic between the researcher and the research participant. How do we deconstruct that? It’s something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. How can we engage with our communities in a way that is respectful, [and] not as transactional as possible.” (12:20)

Vanessa elaborated from a quantitative methods perspective, offering a concrete example of how discussion of positionality happens in her methods classroom: 

“The way that I engage in this is having my students do critical reflexivity statements… critical reflexivity in a quantitative methods arena, would be more like, what questions are you asking? Who’s funding the research that you’re doing? What’s the question order that you have? ….If you’re doing [research on] gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, how do you ask questions on a survey in a way that people understand and is supportive of their identities…..” (15:46)

This critical reflection on positionality opens the door to a broader, more critical approach to methods — one that connects systems of power to personal experience in service of the communities being studied. Vanessa draws on her quant crit background to explain:

“Quant crit builds on critical race theory, and so quant crit is basically saying: let’s consider the limitations and some of the weaknesses of quantitative methods… and let’s consider how we can actually address this and be more supportive of the communities that we want to study…” (16:41)

She later elaborated, 

“ …you might question that and say well, we are all subjective, and we all bring our own beliefs into the research that we do, the questions that we ask in the first place, the people that we talk to, the way that we analyze data, etcetera. So if we’re recognizing that, maybe we can strive for objectivity, but we are all subjective, and maybe that can help us think about the value of other people’s perspectives and experiences, because if I’m on a research team, but I’m studying a group of people that’s outside of my own group, I’m bringing my own perspectives, beliefs, thoughts about that group into the research.” (48:32)

What Next? 

Our panelists also offered insights on why methods skills and tools are important for our students beyond the classroom. Jennifer spoke directly to what research teams in non-academic settings are looking for:

“I would say intellectual curiosity….genuine interest in whatever the research topic is. They don’t have to be an expert on the topic by any means, but just a genuine interest and a passion, to some extent, for the project. And cross-disciplinarity flexibility is also really important, specifically in the context of a think-tank or, I guess you could say, an academia-adjacent context, because oftentimes you’re working with researchers that don’t come from your same field.” (26:43)

The conversation came full circle here. As both panelists noted earlier, methods isn’t about right and wrong. It’s about the questions we ask and the impact they have. Jennifer reflects that same spirit in how she thinks about assessment:

“… what did we find in this? What were we hoping to find? Did we achieve this goal?… and sometimes those [goals] are tied to funders, right? So you might have a funder deliverable that you’re trying to meet and funder deliverables often require that type of reflection at the end of a project, where you assess what you learned and what you could have done better. You think about how your research findings can be applied broadly. You think about the impact of your research.” (29:41)

Vanessa adds that responsibility extends to consuming research, not just producing it: “I think it leads people to have a more critical lens on the work that they read, even if they are not engaging in data collection or analysis themselves.” (18:28)

We’ll close with Jennifer, whose words capture what sociology distinctly brings to methods:

“One of the things that I really love about sociologists, and why I really like being a sociologist, is that we think about people, and why the work we do, the topics we study, matter to people. … About how [research] affects people in their everyday lives, or how people make decisions in their everyday lives, and what factors come into play when people make decisions.” (36:04)

Teaching methods is ultimately about producing responsible knowledge and responsible consumers of it. We familiarize students with tools, demystify their fears, and help them find the methods best suited to their questions. But technical skill building is only part of it. A critical lens grounded in positionality or quant crit approaches must travel with students from the classroom into every research setting they enter.

Our panelists made clear that success, then, isn’t measured by methods mastery alone, but by the responsibility students develop toward the communities they study. How they ask questions, collect data, and analyze findings has real consequences for how populations are understood, and for the decisions made about them. Sociology methods instruction can help students, as Jennifer puts it, “build relationships that are not transactional, but authentic and ethical” (28:11) and to carry that ethic with them into the world.