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A section of my Sociology of Education course is devoted to primary and secondary education policy. We tackle one of the biggest policies that has shaped K-12 education —school choice. I assign my recent book, Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality, as well as short videos and popular opinion news articles to provide context for the discussion. In a short 75-minute seminar, I have found that diversifying my pedagogical approach by alternating discussion, group, and independent activities ensures students understand policy impacts across multiple levels. I do this by splitting the class into intervals–a 15-minute lecture and personal reflection, and 30 minutes each for a team project and an independent visual analysis. Each class module centers on a different instructional method and policy lens. I find this mode of teaching pairs well with a lesson on policy because my goal is to encourage students to think about policy from multiple perspectives.

Mini-Lecture and Personal Reflection

To begin our conversation on policy, we explore personal experiences and reflections. I ask students to reflect on the schools they attended and how school choice might have shaped their educational contexts. We turn next to a broader discussion of policymaking and policy experiences based on the assigned reading. We cover the major debates and students evaluate key questions and arguments for and against school choice. I intentionally develop questions that encourage students to think about how policy has impacted their own lives, how policy appears in current news outlets, and how policy is experienced differently by various actors in the education sector. Grounded in an understanding of how a policy like school choice shapes student learning, students are ready to apply these frameworks in an interactive activity. 

Active and Peer Learning

In the first guided group activity, students apply their understanding of policy in a role-playing activity. I use the “School Choice and Inequality: Choosing Schools Activity” developed by Alanna Gillis and published in the Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology. Students evaluate family descriptions—families with varied income levels and racial and ethnic backgrounds who are all deciding on a school for their child. As students role play as a parent with an elementary-aged child, they think through the available options and consider how the introduction of a new policy shapes decision-making for families. I use this conversation to demonstrate how a policy like school choice, while intended to reduce inequality, may actually create great constraints and barriers for many families. 

Project-Based Learning and Visual Analysis

To wrap up our policy discussion, we circle back to media representations and visuals in an independent activity. Here, I allow students to choose which visuals (1. charter school websites, 2. charter school advertisements, 3. school choice movie trailers/posters) they would like to examine.  I ask students to think about how messages about charter schools and traditional public schools are disseminated by deciphering and comparing advertisements, websites, and movie trailers. Students can pick from a list of national charter school websites or school choice movie trailers. After examining their chosen media depiction, students share the messages that are transmitted. As a class, we think about how these media visuals shape on-the-ground perceptions for families and the overall effectiveness of policies.

Building Critical Frameworks

By the end of the seminar, students gain a deeper understanding of policy and why policy matters, potentially opening their eyes to new career possibilities, the news and media, and even future research questions they might explore for a senior thesis or a research paper. I see this most clearly on students’ open-response midterm exams and their final school district projects. In course reviews, students also share their appreciation for the real-world applicability of the course material. 

I find that this varied mode of teaching works across classes in the social sciences and is particularly useful for seminars as well as introductory and more advanced courses. Diversifying the ways we approach policy in the classroom setting also teaches students to think critically about the frameworks they use in their everyday lives to evaluate policy. More broadly, these activities make the classroom a more inclusive space, reducing barriers to participation and engagement and providing students with room and flexibility to interweave their social locations and lived experiences.

Bailey A. Brown is an assistant professor of sociology in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Spelman College. Brown researches and teaches on the sociology of education, research methods, urban sociology, race and ethnicity, and inequality. Brown is the author of Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality (2025).

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Let’s face it, teaching sociological research methods is always challenging, even in so-called “normal” times. It’s part of the core curriculum that can be a pretty tough sell, especially to undergraduate students who don’t see themselves as future researchers. But, at least in the U.S. context, times are far from normal. Higher education is under attack, generative AI has infiltrated our classrooms whether we like it or not, and misinformation is rampant. Here at First Publics, we are thinking deeply about how to teach sociological methods in light of these current challenges. What role can sociological research methods play in the context of crisis? What is the value of research methods courses? How can these classes equip students to face the contemporary polycrisis we find ourselves in?

On November 6^th, 2025, we asked three award-winning and experienced instructors to help us answer these questions: Steve McKay (Professor of Sociology and Director of the UCSC Center for Labor and Community, University of California Santa Cruz), Patricia Richards (Professor of Sociology and Women’s & Gender Studies, University of Georgia), and Naomi Sugie (Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California Los Angeles). The answers they provided invited us to rethink what methods classes can and do teach students. The three agreed that methods classes should help students produce and engage in good research, not only by teaching them methodological tools and techniques but also by helping them problematize the everyday world and foster meaningful connections with communities outside the university. Importantly, they also stressed that research methods courses can teach students to become discerning consumers of information—especially amid attacks on science, the spread of misinformation, and the unregulated use of AI.

Problematizing the everyday

Our impulse when thinking about methods courses is typically to jump to skills and techniques, but our panelists reminded us that we need to begin by teaching students how knowledge is situated. That is, even before we can teach those skills, before we can even ask good research questions, we have to engage students in disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions. Drawing on W.E.B. DuBois and feminist theorists such as Dorothy Smith, Patricia Richards talked about problematizing the everyday:

“Feminist methodologies, as I teach them, have three main components. They start by making the everyday world problematic, and they do so in order to demystify structures of domination.” (start 9:16) 

Elaborating on this point, she made suggestions for how we can use theory to that end. Citing Dorothy Smith, she added:

“Women having to step outside of themselves in order to… see themselves from the perspective of the other, in order to understand themselves within the dominant perspective of knowledge. [Those insights] have been useful for opening up for students, a more critical eye to the assumptions going into how knowledge is built, and how they might build knowledge differently.” (start 1:01:01)

Introducing the idea that research can be emancipatory and action-oriented in some respects, Richards suggests that considering the needs of the community is a core way of engaging students. This point was echoed by Steve McKay, who suggested that engaging communities in research can help universities demonstrate their value in the context of right-wing, populist attacks on universities:  

“One thing is to understand some of the attacks… particularly from the right, as populist, right? And it’s an anti-elite [attack]. But that, from the right, gets paired with an anti-liberal bias, right? So, [it becomes an] attack on science. But it’s fundamentally an attack on elitism. So, if we think about it in that way, and to think about [how] universities are on their heels trying to defend themselves because they’re getting tagged as elite, as irrelevant. And they’re having a hard time defending themselves sometimes, right? Because we can be absolutely elite. And so, what are universities doing, sometimes they’re trying to reassert their public missions… to demonstrate their value beyond the academy, right?” (start 10:17)

Of course, working with communities outside of the classroom means building meaningful connections with them: a topic our panelists turned to next. 

Fostering Meaningful Connections 

For the panelists, working with the community means co-creation and co-production throughout the research process and letting the community guide the research agenda that is useful to them. As McKay put it: 

“We try, in some ways, [to] pursue projects that are meaningful to our community partners. But we always start with two really simple questions… What do you know but can’t prove? And what do you need to know to do your work better?” (start 34:01)

In his role as director of the Center for Labor and Community at UCSC and the instructor for the Community Engaged Research Practicum, McKay has demonstrated how methodological training can be grounded in community priorities through projects on housing, low-wage labor, and immigrant belonging. As McKay put it, responding to a crisis often requires first listening to the needs of community collaborators and then engaging in what he called “reverse engineering” (starts 13:25). 

Richards explained how she prompts students to think about issues of reciprocity and collaboration and co-creation because “that’s the research that creates transformation” (starts 45:22). Naomi Sugie further elaborates, saying: 

“In times of crises, [community partners] really shine a light on how research methods are really like, a conversation with community groups, and that those conversations make research projects better, like was said by someone at the beginning of this conversation, and I think that times of crises really kind of show the power of those partnerships very well” (starts 39:16).

In her experience conducting research alongside both students and communities, Sugie has found that communities are “closest to understanding the rapidly changing environment,” (start 21:29) particularly during moments like the pandemic and lived experiences in prisons, jails, and immigration. Engaging in collaborative research can equip students to be better producers of information but also, importantly, discerning consumers. 

McKay agreed, sharing the types of questions he hopes his students learn to ask about research after taking methods courses: 

“[I] teach them about being skeptical. How was that research collected? What was the wording on that survey? Who asked these folks? ” (start 24:19)

Similarly, Patricia Richards teaches students to address the credibility of what they are reading and the information they are consuming explicitly. For her, the key is to help students ask critical questions about the research process “every step of the way” while providing them with a list of questions and assignments that encourage that engagement (start 25:16)

All three panelists agreed that it has become our responsibility, as instructors of methods courses, to prepare students to be critical consumers, especially in this moment. 

At First Publics, we were thrilled to engage in this conversation with Steve McKay, Patricia Richards, and Naomi Sugie. The panelists reminded us of the critical role research methods courses play and invited us to rethink why we teach methods. We look forward to the remaining webinars in this series, which will continue to discuss why, how, and who we teach.