Archive: Sep 2011

One of my co-advisors, Elizabeth Boyle, was recently telling me about using children’s books in the classroom.  She shared that she uses The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales as a tool to teach students about postmodernity.  For example, the book illustrates that truth is relative by telling stories from the point of view of atypical characters.  It also exposes the grand narratives that structure language and thought that we often take for granted.  So, I wanted to pass along that teaching tip.  What undergrad wouldn’t enjoy reading a children’s book for an assignment?

Here is a link to an article that discusses the book’s connection to postmodernity: http://www2.unca.edu/postscript/postscript21/ps21.5.pdf

And, here are the slides that Elizabeth uses in the classroom.

The grand majority of  the undergrad students in our classes will not end up working in academia, and many will ask, “What can I do with a degree in Sociology?” We recommend our “Embedded Sociologists” feature–where Hollie and Kia, as well as Suzy Maves McElrath and Sarah Shannon take a closer look at sociologists who work outside of the academy–to help your students get a sense of a sociological perspective  and what a background in sociology can offer them in the job market.

We think this article would work well in an Intro class because it offers a rich description of how a sociological imagination can be used outside of the classroom in future careers. It would also be a good addition to a senior thesis class, for those students who want to go to graduate school, but may not want to work in academia. We hope this article will also be useful to graduate students thinking about taking an alternative path.

Read the full text online!

A few questions to get a discussion of this article started:

1) Were you surprised at the range of careers sociologists can have?

2) According to the sociologists interviewed in this article, how can the sociological imagination be used to address real-world problems and solutions?

3) What are some ways that you have used your sociological imagination outside of the classroom?

4) Why have academic sociologists and non-academic sociologists generally not worked together? According to the authors, what are the possible consequences of such a disconnect?

Tensions between religion and science are not new.  Today, many people assume that scientists are athiests, but little is actually known about their religious and spiritual views.  To learn more, Elaine Howard Ecklund conducted a study of religion among scientists.  She explores the results of the study in the 2008 Contexts feature “Religion and Spirituality Among Scientists.”  Below are a few questions to accompany the article.

1)    Does the finding that scientists often hold religious views surprise you?  Would you assume it varies by discipline? Why or why not?

2)    Why do you think a greater proportion of scientists are atheists than the general population?

3)    Considering that 69% of social scientists surveyed identified as spiritual, how might you explain a reluctance to discuss religion in an academic setting?