{"id":263,"date":"2014-01-15T12:43:40","date_gmt":"2014-01-15T12:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/2014\/01\/15\/teaching-stratification-and-blogging-as-pedagogy\/"},"modified":"2015-08-25T16:43:21","modified_gmt":"2015-08-25T16:43:21","slug":"teaching-stratification-and-blogging-as-pedagogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/2014\/01\/15\/teaching-stratification-and-blogging-as-pedagogy\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Stratification and Blogging as\u00a0Pedagogy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The excellent teaching idea and resource below is from <a href=\"http:\/\/tressiemc.com\/about\/\">Tressie McMillan Cottom<\/a> one of the brightest sociological minds on the Internet. If you\u2019re not already following her on Twitter (<a href=\"tressiemcphd\">@tressiemcphd<\/a>) you should be, she\u2019s prolific and always thought provoking. And if it isn\u2019t already abundantly clear, I\u2019m a huge fan of hers. This teaching activity was first published on her blog <a href=\"http:\/\/tressiemc.com\/2013\/12\/13\/teaching-stratification-and-blogging-as-pedagogy\/\">tressiemc.com<\/a> and she graciously agreed to share it with us.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I mentioned <a href=\"http:\/\/tressiemc.com\/2013\/06\/28\/crowdsourcing-a-new-syllabus-teaching-contemporary-stratification\/\">before<\/a> that I try to push my pedagogy beyond what worked for me as a student.<\/p>\n<p>I am teaching \u201cClass, Status, and Power\u201d this Spring. It is a basic sociology stratification course. This term I will experiment with offering alternatives to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hastac.org\/blogs\/cathy-davidson\/2012\/01\/21\/should-we-really-abolish-term-paper-response-ny-times\">The Paper<\/a>. I am starting with a platform I am most comfortable with: blogging. I know it is not a huge stretch from the essay but I think it is different in important ways. First, it redefines audience for student-writers. Second, students can leverage talents\/skills in visual storytelling in ways that they cannot with written essays. Third, in a nod to the reality of the neo-liberal environment I always try to draw explicit connections for students between sociology and applied, marketable skills.<\/p>\n<p>However, you\u2019ll notice that there is still a traditional, much-maligned \u201cterm paper\u201d that all students must write. My current position is that diversifying the writing abilities of students is not the same as abolishing one form for another. Writing a clear argument without the benefit of media is still a valuable skill. I believe it engages different types of thinking and reasoning processes that are more valuable, not less, as digital writing ascends in popular culture. I may evolve on that. For now, my typical student at Emory intends to go to graduate or professional school. I do not think we need one more credentialed financial wizard or scientist that cannot tell a clear story using words on a piece of paper. But that is so judgey of me. I own that.<\/p>\n<p>In this blogging assignment I benefited a great deal from work shared online by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.briancroxall.net\/lit-tech\/assignments\/blogging-assignment-and-evaluation\/\">Brian Croxall<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/\">Mark Sample<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/flavors.me\/jadedid\">Jade E. Davis<\/a>. It seemed only fair that I pay that forward by sharing the current draft of the blogging assignment I have written for my class. I welcome any feedback, especially from you pedagogical superstars that have toyed around with these things for awhile.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/tressiemc.files.wordpress.com\/2013\/12\/soc-214-critical-analysis-blog-guidelines2.pdf\">Download SOC 214 Critical Analysis Blog Guidelines<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The excellent teaching idea and resource below is from Tressie McMillan Cottom one of the brightest sociological minds on the Internet. If you\u2019re not already following her on Twitter (@tressiemcphd) you should be, she\u2019s prolific and always thought provoking. And if it isn\u2019t already abundantly clear, I\u2019m a huge fan of hers. This teaching activity [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1982,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30650],"tags":[16463,30731],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-for-teachers","tag-assignments","tag-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1982"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":405,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions\/405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}