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.)

****

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.

During the Fall of 2023, First Publics published a series of interviews with four authors of Intro to Sociology textbooks: Dalton Conley, author of You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist; Shamus Khan, one of the authors and editors of A Sociology Experiment; Lisa Wade, author of Terrible Magnificent Sociology; and Kathleen Korgen, one of the authors and editors of Sociology in Action: Introduction to Sociology. 

We invited them to tell us why they decided to write an Intro to Sociology textbook and the challenges they faced when teaching and writing introductory content prioritizing public sociology. In this post, we highlight some of these interviews’ common themes. You can also check all of the interviews here.

1. Why write/edit an Intro to Sociology textbook?

Our textbook authors discussed several motivations for writing or editing their Intro to Sociology textbook, including breaking the mold, increasing accessibility, and taking a student-centered approach to training and exciting a new cohort of sociologists, a common thread for all our authors. In this way, our textbook authors focus on their students as a public, one that the discipline must meet where they are and has the potential to form into a public sociologists themselves. 

“Our idea was that textbooks had variable quality and were too expensive. They were driven primarily by a profit motive, owned, designed, and operated by large corporations that didn’t have the interests of students or faculty at heart. For students, we wanted to prioritize providing the highest quality presentation up-to-date with the latest research; it was also essential to be truly financially accessible. For faculty, we knew we had to provide a low barrier to entry, particularly for faculty who are teaching pretty considerable loads” – Shamus Khan, A Sociology Experiment

“That was a really big part of the motivation, and a big part of how I thought to write a book that would be accessible to first-gen students like myself, and others who are marginalized in academia. I did this not by making the ideas simple, but by making them irresistible. I thought I could help students push themselves to overcome some of their fears of higher ed and the deprivations of their previous educational experience if I made the book worth reading.” – Lisa Wade, Terrible Magnificent Sociology 

2. How Intro to Soci textbooks can promote Public Sociology?

Authors and editors spoke about the various ways they conceptualize the publicness of the Intro to Sociology classroom and how the textbook facilitates this connection. More specifically, they were concerned with how to encourage students to make connections to current events and care about sociology beyond their grades and the classroom. In doing so, the textbook content can encourage students to challenge their taken-for-granted realities, but only if instructors have the resources to best engage students beyond their initial engagement with the textbook and in the independent discourse the instructor is trying to build. 

Connecting Sociology with students’ lives and interests

“I think that the connection to public sociology is an important one and one I believe in. Ideologically, I’m all for it. But to get there depends on good teaching that gives students a connection between themselves and the topic. That’s what we want to do in all subjects, right? To get buy-in from students so that they realize that there’s something in it for them that is interesting or maybe transformative. But you need them to want to learn the material. (…) You need to grab them and bring them into the subject matter so they feel that there’s a reason they should want to read this chapter, not just that they must read this chapter. It makes learning possible. That’s just good teaching.” – Kathleen Korgen, Sociology in Action: Introduction to Sociology

Challenging students’ preconceptions

“I consider the textbook probably the most important form of public sociology I have done in my life because it’s reaching more people at an important formative age, trying to shape how they view big public issues, as C. Wright Mills has put it. (…) I feel like getting young students to think as public sociologists in some ways is easier, in some ways harder. They’re already thinking that way, on the one hand. On the other hand, in pushing them further to understand big issues or to question their own orthodoxy that might be in line with sociological mainstream thinking, my goal is not for them to have certain views about certain topics, but to have a way of thinking and engaging with public issues that is critical and skeptical. I think that part might be harder these days.” – Dalton Conley, You May Ask Yourself

Creating a textbook that is helpful to faculty’s different needs and constraints

“I think it is absolutely something that can be done through textbooks. In general, sociologists in R1 institutions can be pretty dismissive of textbooks. But I think we need to remember that this is how most people are introduced to sociology, right? If we can create a textbook like the one we did, that is useful, that is helpful for the contingent faculty that we’re producing all the time to reduce their workloads and actually give them resources that are helpful for them.” – Shamus Khan, A Sociology Experiment

3. What were the challenges in writing an Intro textbook?

The authors also highlighted different challenges in writing an Intro to Sociology textbook. One common difficulty was keeping up with transformations in society and making sense of current events while also writing a text that could be relevant beyond the present. Authors attempted to overcome these challenges in different ways, such as by constantly updating content through new editions, making sure content reflects the most current research, or providing resources online to speed up the publishing process. Another challenge is making sure the book considers diversity and inclusion. This meant guaranteeing that the books’ language was sufficiently inclusive of different identities but also incorporating various standpoints and theoretical paradigms so Sociology as a discipline could reflect diversity in its canon, research questions, and methods. Inclusion also meant considerations over affordability, a concern especially centered on the dynamics of interacting with the publishing industry.

Keeping up with transformations in society

“I’d say one of the big challenges I’ve encountered is that our social understanding of American society and social norms have evolved so rapidly. It’s very difficult to keep up with that in the textbook. For example, in one section about how colleges are adapting to non-binary students, we’ll talk about the college experience a lot because we want to be relatable to the students themselves. I gave the example of the pronoun “zee”, which was for a while in the running for a third, gender-neutral pronoun. But by the time the book came out, it was very clearly entrenched that “they” was the non-binary pronoun of choice in the U.S. So, we looked really odd and out of place. The next edition, which we’re doing now, is going to change that.” – Dalton Conley, You May Ask Yourself 

“What ends up happening in most textbooks is that they have one author who writes an initial version of a textbook, then, the publisher hires out the edits to other people, and these edits get approved over time. In our case, we are a pain in the neck to our authors every year because they have to update their materials and we ask them to do so with the newest research in mind.” – Shamus Khan, A Sociology Experiment

Making a book that considers diversity and inclusion 

“I worked hard to expand the scope of students who would feel like they belonged in sociology, not just as research subjects but as researchers. (…) Then, I foreground standpoint theory. I try to make it clear, both explicitly and subtly, that difference is an epistemic resource. I say so in the introduction. I introduce standpoint theory, and I argue that we need everybody involved in sociology if we want to get to the truth. (…) I tried to make sure that no matter who you are – if you were trans, an immigrant, a single mom, a person with disabilities – there would be a sociologist profiled who you could identify with.” – Lisa Wade, Terrible Magnificent Sociology

“Many college students are working as well as going to school, and they have a limited amount of time. Imagine there’s an instructor who, every time they assign a chapter, also does an activity. We want to make sure that our activities get to the point quickly and that they don’t take too much time. (…)  I’m teaching students who come from just a wide variety of racial, class, economic, and educational backgrounds. (…) So yes, often I imagine little kids in the background, or sometimes my students might be holding a baby as they’re trying to read or type. Some of them are taking the class on their phones. We have a lot of students who have come from community colleges. So I was thinking about the community college students too, as I wrote and edited the book. So, I realize you don’t want to write such things as ‘Think about your dorm and your roommates.’ Some textbooks just assume that “traditional” type of college student.” – Kathleen Korgen, Sociology in Action: Introduction to Sociology

In my almost twenty years of working with system-impacted individuals my goals have always been two-fold: 1. Advocate for those incarcerated or formerly incarcerated; 2. Do what I can to chip away at a system that is premised on violence, harm, and social stratification based on race, class, gender, age, ability, and geographic location. In early 2021, I began facilitating restorative justice programming within New York City juvenile facilities.¹ This led to teaching a credit-bearing Introduction to Sociology course in spring 2023. To date, thirty-nine youth have received college credit. This success is not magic or luck, but rather a collective effort of many individuals and organizations who supported, trusted, and gave space for this course to grow. Here, I reflect on the three main areas that made this course thrive. 

Earning Trust

Building trust within carceral settings, specifically with youth, takes time and patience. It is built through consistency and reliability. Weekly programming highlights the former and following up on previous meetings underscores the latter. The main concern is that I am not a cop. In this space, my approach could not simply be dismissive of this concern but rather reassuring them by giving a level of transparency about myself, the work that I do, and my opinions on the criminal justice system. For many, their entire world has been policed, even beyond traditional law enforcement contact. Creating a space that allows for open discussion is a tactic I have used to earn trust. Finally, trust is built through various incentives such as reading materials from comics to academic books, a variety of snacks, and the use of a tablet with downloaded music, which is both used as a learning tool and a recreational activity. 

Modified Learning

There are a variety of restrictions imposed on the youth such as not having access to the internet, smart devices, or other electronic tools. Even traditional learning tools such as pens, notebooks, and textbooks have restrictions. For example, youth are only able to use “jail pens” which are short, translucent, flexible pens (that quickly run out of ink), cannot have notepads with spiral metal binds, or have textbooks with hardcovers. To both comply with and circumvent this restricted access to learning, I created a customized softcover textbook and playing cards as well as purchased “jail pens” and other supplies such as notepads all within compliance of facility rules.² The textbook provides a curated learning experience of understanding traditional sociological theory, themes, and concepts in a palatable manner that does not rely on generic or out-of-touch examples. The playing cards, which feature sociological and restorative justice terms yields a certain level of osmosis. Many of the youth play a variety of card games throughout the day, which reinforces memorization and learning as they use the cards. 

Limits of Theory and Need for Practice

As I teach, I attempt to avoid abstract jargon. Instead, I begin with a question: “If offered a pair of Payless or Jordan sneakers, which would you choose?” Almost exclusively, the youth choose the latter. I follow up with “why?” This exercise allows me to introduce the concept of sociology in a tangible and applied manner. I highlight how individuals (e.g., Michael Jordan) influence society and how society (i.e., consumer culture) influences individuals, showcasing the basis of sociological inquiry. Further, I incorporate drill music,³ a subgenre of hip hop, as a space to have discussions on structural violence and insight into the experiences of poverty; being witness, victim, and perpetrator of violence; and vulnerabilities surrounding mental health and drug abuse. Ultimately, drill is a voice for many urban impoverished Gen Z youth to articulate and archive their experiences. I embrace this music to help educate and articulate sociological concepts. For example, students have written essays on how lyrics discuss individual pain and institutional trauma. Additionally, artists are storytellers, providing opportunities for qualitative analysis of lyrics. 

Education as Abolition

Activist, organizer, and prison abolitionist, Mariame Kaba, says, “Hope is a discipline,⁴” which reminds us that change does not come from only wanting it but through the work we do. In sum, hope is an action. This is my goal with teaching inside youth facilities. The expansion of more social science courses will not happen overnight but “we are building the plane while flying it.” We are learning, crafting, and continuing to expand our vision. My hope is to continue to offer social science courses to incarcerated youth in New York City, expanding beyond Introduction to Sociology. We already have proof of concept as a student from the spring 2023 cohort was released, graduated from high school, and enrolled in a CUNY community college with the plan of double-majoring in Nursing and Sociology. The tools, talents, and gifts are there, we just need to give our youth the opportunity and hope. 

Calvin John Smiley, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology at Hunter College-CUNY. Smiley’s scholarly work addresses social justice, inequality, and race. He is the author of two books. Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (2023), explores how individuals navigate and negotiate reentry after leaving carceral spaces with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas. Defund: Conversations Towards Abolition (2024), examines the 2020 uprisings that led to the global call for the defund of police and carceral apparatuses. Beyond this, he is the co-editor, along with Keesha M. Middlemass, of Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Coming Home (2020). Outside of academic work, Smiley works with incarcerated youth in New York City.

My first semester of teaching Introductory Sociology was to a class of 120 students, and I had just completed my Master’s degree. I didn’t have a lot of pedagogy prep and was told I could construct my course any way that I wanted. I was told to, “play to my strengths” – and for me, that meant utilizing popular culture, which was my main area of research. I decided to structure each week of a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday course around two days of lecture and then a Friday class where I showed something from popular culture and then we analyzed it using what we had learned in the previous two lectures.

While this plan was initially meant to be a one-semester strategy to save me from having to create 3 brand new lectures from scratch, and instead only focus on making 2 lectures per week, I quickly realized this strategy was 1) bringing students to class on Fridays (when there was no attendance policy), 2) helping students learn materials rather than simple memorize them for a test, 3) involving students in the co-creation of lecture materials, and 4) helping me expand the definition of “popular culture” for both my students and myself.

Getting students to want to attend class is no easy feat without an explicit attendance policy, especially post-pandemic. Fridays seem to have the lowest attendance rates, so implementing a teaching strategy that effectively brings more students to class on Friday is a win. I encourage students to bring a small snack, relax, and enjoy watching sociology come to life. I even offer for them to bring friends if I’m in a room large enough. I start each class with a list of concepts, theories, perspectives, etc to “Watch For”, give some background on the item we will be watching, and then start the show. Afterward, large classes break into small groups to discuss what they found; in smaller classes, we can stay as a large group. I make sure to have a few clear connections that will be testable material for their notes. This strategy has also proven especially useful recently with concerns over Artificial Intelligence because AI wouldn’t know what we had watched or what connections we had used in discussions.

I encourage students to email me suggestions for these days, but they must make an argument for how it fits our material. I get a lot of suggestions from students. I try to use as many as I can, which they love, because they are seeing things they enjoy, and they are co-creating materials that they describe as having a strong impact on their agency in the course. Students who are not from or familiar with American culture share things from their culture – which is beneficial to all students in the class and students like the inclusivity it brings. It also helps me to stay up to date with what is trending for my students, which is extremely beneficial to me as both a teacher and pop culture researcher.

I know students are learning class material, rather than memorizing it because they tell me about seeing class concepts when they encounter popular culture outside of class – they say it’s a “switch” they can’t turn off, and now they share sociology with their peers, family, and on social media occasionally! For me, this demonstrates how teaching sociology can be public sociology, and hopefully make the world a better place.

If you want to start incorporating popular culture into your own classes but don’t know where to start, I recommend https://www.thesociologicalcinema.com/about-us.html. They offer phenomenal suggestions for free and also share the goal of advancing public sociology.

Anna S. Rogers is a senior lecturer at the University of Georgia. She teaches courses for the sociology department and the criminal justice program. She is currently the Undergraduate Coordinator for the Sociology Department. Her research interests include pop culture, gender, and cultural criminology.

In a classic piece on community-based learning (CBL) in sociology, Mooney and Edwards define CBL as a broad term that incorporates many kinds of educational experiences that move students into the larger community or bring the community into the classroom. CBL in the classroom has shown to be valuable in connecting social realities to individual experiences and helps “develop increased political awareness, leadership skills, and civic literacy.”

While well intentioned, many have documented how CBL inadvertently reinforces unequal power dynamics when students are seen as providing a “service” to less privileged communities, when the needs of community partners are not properly considered and CBL creates additional burdens. With these benefits and critiques in mind, I decided to try a small-scale version of CBL by inviting a community advocate, a specialist from a local diaper bank that addresses diaper needs in the greater community, to conduct a guest lecture in my Sociology of Family course at the University of Georgia. Establishing trust between the instructor and community partner is critical to the success of incorporating CBL in the classroom. I was careful to engage the community advocate in a meaningful conversation beforehand, so that I could ensure that both the students and the community organization were benefitting from the visit. During our phone conversation beforehand, the community advocate relayed her excitement about the opportunity to educate my students and informed me of the ways in which the diaper bank benefits from this outreach (developing relationships, recruiting volunteers and possible internships).

The class I teach is an upper-level course focused on using a sociological approach to studying the institution of the family and draws Sociology, Human Development, and Family Science students.
I had three goals in mind for the visit: I wanted to provide a real-world example of how societal factors influence parenting abilities and decisions, give space in my class to a community actor who is immersed in the work, and present my students with a clear and accessible pathway to get involved in a solution. To prepare for our session, I assigned students a brief article published in Contexts that defines diaper need and describes how class blindness works to make the societal failures invisible.  

During the visit, the community advocate provided students with examples that demonstrated the very real consequences that parents in their own community are facing. After she spoke specifically about the bank’s mission, the class engaged in a deeper discussion about the inequalities that perpetuate diaper needs and disparities and the societal stigma that parents face. This led to the burning question from students, “What can we do?” Students lined up to talk to her after class, asking about volunteer and internship opportunities. The students and I together decided to host a class diaper drive, which resulted in the collection of 579 diapers to donate. I was most struck by the initiative students continued to take outside of the class afterwards, planning their own diaper drives.

This experience was an example of CBL on a small scale. As I continue to experiment with CBL I think that increasing the stakes slightly, (e.g., having students visit or work with the bank) might deepen student learning. In the future I might also discuss the price of diapers, and  incorporate a component in which students can talk about the experience of buying diapers, and how this experience is influenced by their social location.

Shelby L. Clark is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Georgia. She has taught courses on the Sociology of Family, Sociology of Gender, and Research Methods. 

I started my teaching career as an Assistant Professor in August 2020. Three out of the five sociology courses I taught that term were Introduction to Sociology. Amid the uncertainty of policies and consequences related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the anxiety in my classrooms was palpable. I saw that we needed scientific research to navigate the physical and social space we now lived in and competency in consuming reports from health officials, media, politicians, and other opinion leaders. As I planned my Intro classes, I identified two ways I could help as a sociology professor. The first was pedagogical: taking actions to teach and foster learning under these challenging circumstances. The second was communicating with and assisting students in engaging with more than just my class or academic goals. The various circumstances of the pandemic drove home to me that it was vital not to lose sight of the human factor and to use my knowledge of sociology to weave the two components together to practice sociology.

On the first day, I always tell my students that my classroom is a place to discuss various social topics that they may not otherwise discuss and delve into how we can use the science of sociology to understand them, including how to interpret the onslaught of information from news outlets, social media, and other sources of information. I view teaching an Intro to Sociology class as an opportunity to help students engage with society by providing sociology’s language, theories, and applications and encouraging them to use these tools in their daily lives. Sometimes, what the student learns to use as tools to look at the world comes into conflict with the views of their family and friends who have not thought about social issues more broadly. This is not uncommon, but I saw it heightened during the pandemic, as views on politics, medicine, and health policy were heavily debated in the public sphere and institutions of higher learning. I approached this by capitalizing on the opportunity that Intro to Sociology classes present to model for students how to introduce and discuss various topics grounded in empirical data in conversations outside of the classroom. I modeled for students how to make sociological ideas relatable and non-threatening by finding common ground and developing ways for the students to engage with each other in the classroom.

The reality of teaching sociology during a traumatic event, such as a global pandemic, is that some, if not many, of us, were experiencing trauma directly related to the pandemic—for example, testing, quarantines, and emotional and physical health concerns. In addition, some of my students lost family members to complications from COVID-19. Most knew of at least one person other than family who had been hospitalized or passed away from the disease. Some students had recovered from the initial COVID-19 infection but suffered lasting symptoms. I kept much of the academic structure in place, keeping a routine in the classroom and a sense of normalcy as much as possible. I used time with students to explore issues related to the pandemic when the topic was appropriate, worked to create makeup plans when needed, and reevaluated my policies on late work. These efforts stemmed from my approach to teaching. I seek to build a community of learning in my classroom, showing compassion and empathy, where communication is allowed, appreciated, and encouraged but not forced.

For example, I took the customary greeting of students at the start of class as an opportunity. I started each lecture with a check-in. I asked how everyone was doing and paused long enough to see or hear responses. This simple question was as much for me as for the students as we created a communication bridge necessary for teaching and learning. The conversation was not forced; sometimes, we talked for five to ten minutes, and other times less than a minute. It allowed me to address student concerns and questions about the class, college policy, or general concerns. It also allowed me to show the students how to find answers to their questions from valid sources, such as the college’s policy webpage, and establish communication practices. I wanted to encourage communication to stave off any tendency that my students might have to withdraw or not feel heard or seen. However, it was not without its challenges; wearing masks to protect our health interfered with voice projection and facial cues. The use of social distancing presented an obstacle to traditional breakout sessions. To counter these new barriers, I used online discussion boards projected on the classroom projector screen to encourage class participation. This practice was successful and helped accomplish many of the goals of small group work.

Through this experience, I learned that students are engaged with life and bring a lot to the table if given the time and patience to participate in the classroom. I always thought I was flexible in my approach to teaching. During the pandemic, I learned I could be even more flexible and that trying new approaches, such as different activities or lecture styles, is essential. I learned to give myself and others more grace. I think I always did this, but I believe I grew in my capacity to give myself grace and to let go of course policies that did not serve the purposes of the classroom.

One big takeaway is that I came to appreciate that I have a tool bag in sociology to assist in dealing with, surviving, engaging with, or working toward changing any social condition. Also, the more willing I am to be a learner and change my approach when needed, the more it helps me with my goal of teaching sociology in a way that is useful to those learning. I strive to help students learn the tools of sociological inquiry at an introductory level and use them to improve their lives and others in some way. I genuinely believe that teaching Intro to Sociology helps me grow and learn as an educator.

Jeff Shelton (Ph.D.) is an assistant professor of sociology at Wayne State College. Shelton has
served the college community as the chair of the Psychology and Sociology department and the
college Institutional Review Board, as a member of the Faculty Senate, and as faculty adviser for
student PRIDE and the Psychology and Sociology Club. Shelton’s teaching and research interests
are in medical sociology, research methods, the study of work and professions, and social policy.