A stressed-out woman holds her head and looks at her computer.
Teaching Assistants have experienced an increased workload during the transition to online learning. Photo via PickPik.

In the last few months, higher education institutions have faced the challenge of moving in-person coursework to various online platforms in response to COVID-19. During this unprecedented time, a graduate level course at the University of Minnesota called “Teaching Sociology” launched a project to evaluate how instructors were handling the transition. The graduate students administered a survey to the Sociology department’s instructors and teaching assistants and issued a final report highlighting broad trends and making recommendations for the department to consider as the crisis continues and planning for the fall begins. Given how widespread these issues and challenges are, we thought it might be useful to share some of those ideas here on TSP, with particular focus on the experience of teaching assistants.

The survey found that, much like their instructors, nearly all TAs experienced an increased workload with the transition online. This increased workload was due to both technological learning curves and increased overall time demands. In addition to the extra emails, students expected TAs to respond more quickly and have increased availability outside of already extended office hours. Yet perhaps most salient is the proportion of TAs who noted an increase in emotional labor. TA’s provided anecdotes of dealing with students’ panic and anxiety over the rapid transition online and students’ upheaval in their personal lives. They also reported being on the end of increased student frustration and emotional outburst. In a more extreme case, one TA noted that they had received aggressive emails from students, but many more reported students’ frustrations being communicated directly.

While the survey was meant to provide reflections on the rapid transition to online teaching, the findings suggest some important considerations regarding the roles of and challenges faced by teaching assistants during unsettled times. Borrowing from the literature on workplace harassment, we find that individuals in low- to mid-level supervisory positions, such as TAships, often experience such challenges in their roles.

TA weekly hours worked pre- and during COVID, Spring 2020 

Note: this includes both 25% and 50% appointments.

The literature on workplace harassment suggests that, unfortunately, backlash against low and mid-level supervisors is not uncommon. Although many would view the authority of a supervisor as providing a protective measure from harassment, research suggests that it provokes backlash from subordinates. As a result, workers in supervisory roles are more likely to experience harassment, and that likelihood increases even more if they are female. 

In contrast, in the United States, people in higher supervisory positions such as an executive or department head are less likely to experience sexual harassment. Given that women in low- or mid-level supervisory positions are often on career tracks for these higher level positions, it is somewhat surprising that they are the most likely to experience workplace harassment.

While this literature focuses on women and sexual harassment in the workplace, these frameworks are useful for understanding the harassment faced by others in low-level supervisory positions, such as TAships. TAs may receive more “blowback” from undergraduates who hesitate to make demands or express frustration with professors, and this backlash is likely to fall more heavily on TAs who are women and/or people of color.

Because TAs often have a lot of responsibility but relatively little power, our findings suggest that instructors consider the following recommendations: 

  1. In designing remote courses, reconsider assignments and expectations for students and TAs. This may require giving TAs ample time to deal with technological challenges, as well as additional training in how to provide tech support to students.
  2. Both instructors and TAs reported a significant increase in extensions and accommodations. Consider creating a shared document so that TAs may better manage a range of deadlines and accommodations.
  3. Establish and reinforce norms and expectations for respectful communications with students throughout the semester. 
  4. Recognize and discuss responsibilities around emotional labor. Discuss which student comments or emails should go directly to the instructor and which should be handled by the TA.
  5. Put explicit email and office response hours in the syllabus to help manage and bound TA work hours.

Works Cited

Olle Folke, Johanna Rickne, Seiki Tanaka, and Yasuka Tateishi. 2020. “Sexual Harassment of Women Leaders.” Daedalus 149(1): 180-197. 

Heather McLaughlin, Christopher Uggen, and Amy Blackstone. 2012. “Sexual Harassment, workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power.” American Sociological Review 77(4):1-23.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation on May 14, 2020 and has been republished under a Creative Commons license.

College students don’t have to appear in person to do good. Tom Werner/Getty Images

At Troy University in Alabama, students went online to help a county with a high infant mortality rate in the state of Georgia to analyze health disparities and develop solutions.

At Cornell University, where I teach, law students are providing legal services online to death-row inmates in Tanzania and children and young farmworkers in upstate New York.

At five state universities in the U.S. heartland, students are helping Michigan towns create government websites.

These are all examples of “e-service learning” – that is, service learning that takes place online. Service learning refers to a wide range of student experiences meant to help a community organization, local government or business.

I am an education researcher and – along with my colleague Yue Li – I am investigating the best ways to engage students in e-service learning, both here in the U.S. and around the world.

Even though colleges and universities have shut down their campuses due to COVID-19, e-service learning shows how college students can still do their volunteerism in the virtual world. Students need not be physically present to help support local government, local nonprofits and vulnerable individuals like farmworkers, all of whom have a greater need for the help of volunteers due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vast benefits

Service learning is not meant only to help community organizations, governmental agencies and businesses. It’s also meant to advance the student’s individual academic goals.

A key part of service learning is for students to reflect on the service they actually do and how whatever they are studying – whether it be health, law or the environment – relates to the real world. Reflection also helps students clarify their personal values and gain a sense of civic responsibility.

Better outcomes

Compared to peers who didn’t do service learning in college, graduates who did participate in service learning report higher levels of civic-mindedness. That is to say, they are more likely to work with others to achieve public goals.

For community organizations, the benefits of having college students help with their work are vast. Students can offer companionship for elderly clients, become role models for high school students or simply serve as an extra hand to tackle a nonprofit’s back-burner project.

Research applied

Through e-service learning, communities can gain access to the latest university research. For instance, residents of Gracias Lempira, Honduras, and Rohne Village, India, used engineering research to build electricity-free water purification systems. And in Louisville, Kentucky, students from several universities created models to help residents decide where to plant trees to cut down on air pollution.

Each partnership has unique benefits. For instance, an official at an international climate action group – Team 54 Project International – remarked on how a Cornell University student played a key role in gathering information for a tree-planting guide. The guide will be used to help plant trees in Serbia that are suited for the region. The guide will also serve as a template for similar tree-planting projects around the world.

Is virtual the same?

Can students still have a meaningful service learning experience in cyberspace?

A study of business marketing students shows that students who engaged in online service learning gained the same skills, such as the ability to work well with others and understand cultural and racial differences, as those who worked alongside their partners in person.

Back in 2013, some university scholars predicted that online technologies would disrupt in-person university teaching as it was known, including service learning.

What I have found is instead of disrupting in-person teaching, e-service learning has enhanced it. It does this by offering opportunities for any student and any nonprofit with an internet connection to form a partnership on short notice. E-service learning has also added new opportunities for busy students to help NGOs overseas, U.S. nonprofits and local governments in other states. Students help with everything from disaster planning to food waste and hunger issues.

Ever since colleges and universities have been forced to move their instruction online due to COVID-19, critics have worried about whether or not they’re doing a good job. But as schools continue to teach online for the summer and possibly even the fall, similar attention should also be paid – in my view – to how well they are engaging students in service learning online.

Especially with employees working from home due to social distancing, e-service learning may prove itself as one of the most effective ways to prepare students to solve the kinds of problems they will encounter once they start their careers.

[Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter.]The Conversation

Marianne E. Krasny, Professor of Environmental Education and Civic Ecology, Cornell University

A protester marches in a rally against the use of Native American caricatures as sports mascots. Photo by Fibonacci Blue via Flickr.

This resource is the final project for “Race and Racism in the U.S.” The course is designed to explore how race structures contemporary issues in the United States. The course focuses on historical and contemporary race issues to demonstrate that race is a constructed system of privilege, power, and inequality embedded in everyday life. Using sociological theories and methods, students learn to locate claims about race in society by examining media, news, television, and other fields of public discussion.  

This final project reflects students’ ability to assess the dominant social narratives of race in the United States. Students use secondary sources and critical content analysis to uncover what people think and feel about race.

Assess Narratives

Narratives are repeated stories or discourse that help people make sense of the world. Narratives can clearly say something about race; other times, the message is implicit. In the case of this course, narratives make sense of racism or racial dynamics in our society. Narratives are active — they are telling people to think or act in a specific way. Myths, stereotypes, and “common sense” statements can all act as narratives. They can be positive or negative. It is important to uncover unspoken assumptions about racialized populations that have the power to influence policy and social behavior.

Throughout the semester, students learn how to recognize narratives about race, how to use secondary data and content analysis methods to uncover what is being communicated about race, and using historical data to understand how the narrative came to be.

For the final project, students started with a topic they are interested in- then considered what is said repeatedly in that topic. The process of locating a narrative is difficult since many narratives are implicit and their repetition embeds them as “common sense.” While this is difficult, it is one of the goals of this class to teach students to scrutinize repeated ideas about race in society that contribute to structures of racism.

The final project follows this process of inquiry:

  • Start with a narrative about race that is present in society
  • Assess what this narrative is saying about race
  • Ask: What data do we need to assess this statement? Or How do we know? What kind of evidence would we need to have to know about this narrative?
  • How did we get here? What is the history of this phenomena- How does this history influence the narratives we hear in society?

Write For a Public Audience

The goal of the final paper is to write a short assessment of a popular narrative on race or race issues.  This paper should be written in a style that is appropriate for a common reader, a piece that could be published on a website like The Society Pages, or an online news source. The writer’s job is informing the reader. You (students) do not have to take a stance for or against the narrative, though you can if you have sufficient evidence to support your stance.

An important component of this assignment included teaching about writing for the public. The Society Pages graduate editor, Allison Nobles, provided a writing workshop in class on how to write clear, concise, and supported pieces that are accessible to many readers. The workshop included an insider view on editing writing for The Society Pages modeled with submissions from student authors.

Build up to the final project

This final project is a culmination of the teaching and learning throughout the term. Each section taught skills that supported the final project. The first section of the course introduced students to the history of race in the United States highlighting structures that continue to reinforce racial inequality today. Students considered their racial social position, seeing themselves in a racial social order. Race theories helped examine racial issues from different perspectives. Contemporary theories on race help to see through the implicit nature of current race talk, building student skills in identifying racist ideologies in everyday language. Research methods lessons examined what types of data and evidence is used to understand how racism works in society, paying attention to the potential for bias in dominant research methods.

The rest of the course was divided into three sections:

  1. The first section modeled the process of inquiry for the final project using a topic on race (Race and the Food System).
  2. In the second section, students practiced the process of inquiry as a class. Students selected narratives within a topic introduced by the instructor (Race and Immigration).
  3. The final section guided students through their research process. In-class activities allowed students to reflect on their research, get feedback from peers, the instructor, and the teaching assistant.

Assessing Popular Narratives on Race, Final Project

Requirements:

  1. Clearly states the narrative.
  2. States what this narrative is saying about race- there might be more than one point to be made.
  3. Provides a historical context for how this narrative developed.
  4. Utilizes at least 4 outside sources, one of which must be academic, the others can be news or academic. No op-eds, opinion, or blogs that are not supported with data.
    • Note: No use of your own personal experiences as data for this assignment
    • Examples of data: Ethnographies (Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies), Interviews, Primary documents from archives (journals, cookbooks, immigration records…), Documentaries, Statistics (Census), News articles from trustworthy sources

Writing:

  1. No jargon- Jargon is language specialized for a field and may not be easily understood by the general public. Instead of trying to be fancy with your words, be direct and say what you mean.
  2. Provide readers with a hook at or near the beginning- this is a great place to center the reader on why this is an important topic to understand. A “hook” draws the reader in- makes them interested.
  3. All statements supported by evidence. All evidence cited. If you don’t know how to cite sources, please look to your resources (writing center, writing sources on the course canvas site, the internet). If you have attempted citations and are not sure if it is correct, cross check with a resource, then if you are still unsure you can ask your TA or instructor for feedback.
  4. Discussion of the topic should be organized in a logical order.
  5. Paper should be without grammar and spelling errors (points not taken off in the draft but will be in the final paper). It is up to you to locate errors.

Assignment 1: Topic Proposal

DUE: One Month Before Final is Due

Topic proposal will respond to the following prompts:

  1. What is the narrative about race you are taking on?  This should be clearly stated as a narrative and NOT as a broader topic. If you need help, ask for it.
  2. Why is this interesting to you?  (4 sentences)
  3. What data do you want/need to assess this narrative? What kind of information or knowledge will be helpful to understand and discuss this narrative? Why is the data you are pursuing going to be useful? Remember, data can come in many forms. (4 sentences)
  4. Provide at least 2 sources that you plan to use with a couple of sentences on why they will be helpful for this paper. Sources should include: Author name, date, title of website/publication, Title of document, web address (if applicable).

You can type the responses to each prompt and paste them into the assignment template which is accessible on our course website.

Some example narratives from students in the course include:

  • Where are you really from?
  • Sports mascots using indigenous people are “honoring” them
  • Mexico is not sending its best people
  • They are stealing our jobs
  • Make America Great Again
  • Black Lives Matter/ Blue Lives Matter/ All Lives Matter
  • #TakeAKnee
  • (Insert racialized group) is sexy/not sexy
  • Angry Black Woman
  • Dreadlocks, braids, and natural black hair are “unprofessional.”
  • Undocumented immigrants/“illegals” are not entitled to basic human rights
  • Muslims are terrorists
  • Blacks are lazy, which is why they are uneducated
  • Real American
  • Asian Americans are Rich
  • Black people are in prison because they are violent
  • Black women are innately hypersexual
  • Affirmative Action is discrimination
  • Work Hard= American Dream

Assignment 2: Rough Draft of Final Paper

DUE:  Two Weeks Before Final is Due

Draft should meet all of the requirements of the final paper, missing requirements will result in a 4 points (10%) grade reduction for each missing element. The goal of this assignment is to take a complete paper and improve upon it through revision. Revision is an important step in good writing.

Length: 1,500 words MAX

***NOTE***  Drafts can be slightly longer than the final paper, since editing wording to be shorter is easier than adding something that is missing.

Assignment 3: Peer Review of Final Paper 

DUE:  One Week Before Final is Due                           

Peer reviews will be completed online using the same process that was followed for Paper #1. You will be automatically assigned a paper to review. Peer reviews are not anonymous so be aware of your tone in the comments.

Rubric will be provided in class and on the course website.

Final Paper

DUE: Final Class Meeting

Final Paper submissions must have revisions highlighted so we can easily assess your progress from one paper to the other.

Length: 1,000-1,100 words

RUBRIC

Final Paper-  (40 points)  (Points earned/40 points = percent/100%)

Content (15 points) (38% of grade for final project)

  • The narrative being addressed is clearly stated (2) (5%)
  • Clearly connects the narrative to race (5) (12%)
  • Historical context of how the narrative came to be/developed (5) (13%)
  • Positionality is discussed- how does your social position influence how you approached this subject (3) (8%)

Organization (4 points) (10% of grade for final project)

  • Point of the paper is clear in first paragraph (2) (5%)
  • Ideas in the paper follow a logical progression (2) (5%)

Sources (6 points)  (15% of grade for final project)

  • At least 4 sources outside of course. One source is academic. No opinion (2) (5%)
  • Sources are cited throughout (4) (10%)

Writing  (15 points)  (37% of grade for final project)

  • All statement supported by evidence. (5) (13%)
  • Clear writing: ideas and points are clear and direct.  No jargon used, specialized language defined/clarified   (3) (7%)
  • Hook- has found an interesting way to draw reader in (2) (5%)
  • Direct quotes: Used no more than 2 (2) (5%)
  • No grammar and spelling errors  (points not taken off in the draft but will be in the final paper) (2) (5%)
  • Maximum 1,100 words (Final) 1,500 words (Draft) (1) (2%)

Monica Jarvi is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Minnesota.


Volunteers work with youth to create posters for an HIV awareness campaign. Photo by Peace Corps via Flickr.

Service-learning is an extremely high-impact educational practice. Research shows that it increases students’ social responsibility and civic-mindedness, awareness of stereotypes, tolerance for diversity, and commitment to continued civic engagement and development of multicultural skills like empathy, patience, reciprocity and respect. Teachers may assume the benefits of service-learning come from relatively advantaged students reducing their prejudices through contact with relatively disadvantaged service populations. This is only part of the story, though. New research shows that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are actually more attuned to structural — instead of individual — explanations of inequality during service-learning.

Sociologists Molly Clever and Karen S. Miller analyzed their students’ written reflections on a service-learning project focused on food insecurity. The students came from Introduction to Social Justice and Social Problems courses at a small, private, liberal arts college in rural Appalachia. They were predominantly white, but varied in their social class background. The service-learning project involved touring a local food bank and then planning, preparing, serving, and dining at a meal with their food-insecure neighbors. 

Clever and Miller analyzed their students’ written reflections before and after the experience, and compared the learning processes of students from low socioeconomic status (SES) to their middle- and high-SES peers. They found that low-SES students focused more on the impact their service had on others rather than on themselves. They were also more attuned to what the people they were serving were learning and to systemic explanations for inequality. These differences suggest that the common way of thinking about the benefits of service-learning — that is, as outcomes produced through prejudice reduction — fails to capture what low-SES students are getting out of the experience.

Based on these findings, Clever and Miller offer several suggestions to improve service-learning pedagogy for students of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Instructors should:

  1. Include essay prompts that encourage students to engage more critically with their assumptions about the service population. 
  2. Create more opportunities for students to directly engage with the service population. 
  3. Assess outcomes other than prejudice reduction, since it isn’t the most important learning outcome for all students.
  4. Be thoughtful about how the relationship between students’ social identities and service site contexts could impact the student learning experience.

Molly Clever and Karen S. Miller. 2019. ““I Understand What They’re Going through”: How Socioeconomic Background Shapes the Student Service-learning Experience.” Teaching Sociology. 47(3) :204-218.

John Chung-En Liu and Andrew Szasz. 2019. “Now Is the Time to Add More Sociology of Climate Change to Our Introduction to Sociology Courses.” Teaching Sociology.


Picture of Earth drowning in a sea of flames via CCO Public Domain.

Young people around the world want to talk about climate change. Intro to Sociology classes could capitalize on students’ interest by demonstrating how sociological thinking is useful for understanding it. For instance, one unit could focus on the factors that make social movements–like the Youth Climate movement–effective. Another could illustrate how inequalities in housing and access to resources mean that climate change will disproportionately impact less advantaged. Still others could show how our socialization shapes how we think about the importance of protecting the environment, or how social institutions can impact climate change and its effects.

Despite this potential, the typical introductory sociology text devotes less than 3 percent of its total pages to environmental sociology. And, according to a new study by John Chung-En Liu and Andrew Szasz, in the 11 most popular textbooks, climate change hardly comes up. In one it is never mentioned at all. Using content analysis, the authors found that eight textbooks present the scientific evidence as unequivocal: climate change is real and will likely have catastrophic consequences. One textbook gets the facts wrong, conflating climate change with ozone depletion, and one other encourages students to debate the “controversy.”

The authors argue that Intro to Sociology courses should offer a sociological–not just physical–explanation of its causes, describe the impacts already observed and predicted future impacts, and illustrate how the world’s peoples, institutions, and governments have responded so far to scientists’ and activists’ warnings about the threat. Szasz has even developed a module devoted to sociological analyses of climate change. By incorporating lessons on climate change into the sociology classroom, instructors can help students to educate themselves about one of the most serious social conditions they will face, and demonstrate the power and relevance of sociological thought.