Teaching Resources

As always, we at Teaching the Social World advocate the use of technology and multimedia materials to spice up any course, and including films during class time is a great way to keep students engaged in the material.

On her website, University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Pamela Oliver posts a list of great films and clips to show for sociology instructors teaching about social movements. [Note: Oliver replicates this collection of films from a social movements listserv, unnamed on the page.]

• There is a BBC documentary on the Tienanmen movement which illustrates very well many collective action problems and is substantively gripping and emotional. Its title is “The Gates of the Heavenly Place” and should be available from www.bbc.co.uk
• There are a number of videos about the anti-corporate globalization movement. Most of them have been made by the movement themselves, and thus have a fair amount of boosterism. One of the better ones is “This is What Democracy Looks Like” about the protests in Seattle. Its available from Big Noise Productions http://www.thisisdemocracy.org/order.html Another one is Breaking the Bank – about the protests against the World Bank/IMF in Washington http://www.whisperedmedia.org/btheb.html
• There’s an interesting documentary on Stonewall and the gay/lesbian rights movement that is available through PBS. There is also “Making Sense of the Sixties” that is useful in tracking various movements. I’ve also used the series “Chicano!: History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement” and the series “Eyes on the Prize I” and “Eyes on the Prize II” (civil rights movement) because they are both useful in showing the rifts, grassroots involvement, and government involvement/infiltration in their respective movements.
• Beyond the many good suggestions already offered for videos to teach about social movements, another rich video series is “A Force More Powerful: Nonviolent Action in the 20th Century.” This new PBS series is six 30 minute stand-alone sessions describing and analyzing six different campaigns: Nashville student sit-ins of 60s with Jim Lawson; Indian independence with Gandhi; South African transition to democracy; Philippines people power revolution in mid-80s; Solidarity in Poland in the 80s; and a sixth that escapes me at the moment. All are excellent, and just the right length for classroom use, followed by discussion. There is also a companion book by Peter Ackerman, with same title.
• A great film that I always use in teaching social movements is: “Freedom On My Mind” which documents Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. What really makes the film great is the juxtoposition of clips from 64 and interviews with participants 30 years later, including Bob Moses, Heather Booth, and grassroots Black leaders from Mississippi.
• Another excellent film is “The War At Home” about the movement against the Vietnam War on the Madison campus of the U. of Wisconsin. I also recommend With God On Our Side, an excellent multi-part documentary series made for PBS about the rise of the Christian Right. The documentary series is a supplement to William Martin’s book of the same name. It would be a useful contrast with Eyes on the Prize to show how religion influences social movement activists in very different ways.
• In my class on the Civil Rights Movement, in addition to segments from the extraordinary “Eyes on the Prize” series and “Freedom on My Mind” already mentioned, I also show as background “A. Philip Randolph: For Jobs and Freedom,” which connects the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the person of E.D. Nixon, Randolph’s connection to the March on Washington movement, and much more. The segment on the Child Development Group of Mississippi from the 5-part “America’s War on Poverty” series is a useful follow-up to what happened in 1965 after the Freedom Summer of 1964.
• For my class on Gender and Social Movements I show the excellent two-hour “One Woman, One Vote” program on the Woman Suffrage Movement. I also show between the “One Woman, One Vote” segments program 5, “Outrage,” from the British “Shoulder to Shoulder” series, on the Pankhurst family, to add some excitement and a bit of international perspective.
• “Before Stonewall” is excellent on the origins of the Gay and Lesbian Rights Movements; the sequel “After Stonewall” is good but more difuse and scattered (I don’t show it). I do use “The Times of Harvey Milk” as a wonderful introduction to the politics of the GLBT movement, as well as an essential part of local (northern California) history — it shocks and grips our 20-year-old students who weren’t born when Milk and Mayor Moscone were assassinated, and Senator Dianne Feinstein’s career was relaunched.
• On women in the labor movement, there is a very moving segment on the “revolt of the 6000,” the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and its consequences in part 4 of the “New York” series. And finally there is the old standby, “Union Maids,” on women in labor and the left in the 1930s and 40s, now available in video to replace your university’s tattlered celluloid film.
• I’ve also taught a class on the Conservation and Environmental Movement, which has been less systematically documented in videos than the movements above. “Battle for the Wilderness” is good on the early conflict between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, between preservationism and utilitarianism in conservation. “For Earth’s Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower,” is a little too much a personal tribute, but it introduces this remarkable leader and his involvement with the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and Earth Island Institute. On the 30-year struggle against strip-mining in eastern Kentucky, I’d recommend “To Save the Land and People, ” a video from Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY. I also use “Butterfly” on Julia Butterfly Hill, which is problematic but involves young students and is a jumping off point for a good discussion.
• On the student movement of the 1960s, I’ve found “Berkeley in the Sixties” to be most useful; good cuts from past to present, the activists are reflective and often self-critical, and it gives a good feel for the importance of the civil rights movement boosting student protest, the Vietnam War, the rise of Black Power, and the beginnings of the women’s movement. Better in several of these respects than the recent film on SDS (IMHO). Of course again we gain student interest from the local history aspect of Berkeley.
• Women Make Movies in NYC has some excellent films on the women’s movements in the US, the Beijing Conference, and one on cultural feminism focusing on punk music artists.
• “Ballot Measure 9” — on activism surrounding the Oregon anti-gay ballot measures. And the PBS documentary, “Mean Things Happening” (part of the Great Depression series), about labor organizing in the 1930s.

Read more.

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing. 

– John F. Kennedy

Many sociology instructors (especially at the college-level) are required to have students complete formal evaluations of their teaching and course structure, but these one-size-fits-all evaluation templates don’t always relay valuable information back to instructors. For that reason, some instructors elect to use additional evaluations to learn more about what their students thought of the class.

The University of Akron’s Center for Teaching and Learning has a great template that instructors can give to student to have them evaluate the course in greater detail. The template, available for download in this post, includes questions about the student’s learning style and experience, in addition to more conventional questions about the course and instructor.

Have you developed any especially effective evaluation strategies? Comment below and get the discussion going!

In the interest of maintaining a diversity of topics for instructors of sociology, I spent some time this week searching through syllabi for courses in the sociology of law. I came across one in particular that I thought offered a number of interesting readings and dealt with administrative issues and overall course structure quite well. The syllabus is designed for a course called ‘Sociology of Law and Legal Institutions‘ by Daniel John Steward of Oberlin College. The syllabus is available online. [Click here]

The course uses the following books, as well as additional online materials and journal articles outlined in the syllabus itself.

Balkin, Jack M. ed. 2002. What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal Experts Rewrite America’s Landmark Civil Rights Decision. New York, NY: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-9890-X.

Friedman, Lawrence M. 2004. Law in America: A Short History. New York, NY: The Modern Library. ISBN 0-8129-7285-6.

Sutton, John R. 2001. Law/Society: Origins, Interactions, and Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. ISBN 0-7619-8705-3.

Stewart articulates the following objectives for the course:

Law will be examined as an institutionalized field of contests over the rules of social life. We will open the semester with readings on the historical development of core institutions such as courts, codes, constitutions, criminals, and counsellors. With this common ground, we will then turn our attention to some of the questions and concerns that sociologists (and other law & society scholars) raise with respect to these institutions. For example: To what extent can we use changes in legal form to understand changes in social relations? How do some legal rules acquire legitimacy for members of a society—and why are other rules ignored or despised? Do legal rules (and their enforcers) inevitably serve powerful political or economic interests—or does law have some autonomy? How do legal institutions enable and constrain movements for social justice? We will consider this last question through a study of the history of racial segregation in schools and the legal and cultural significance of Brown v. Board of Education. Over the course of the semester, students will be expected to:

• Appreciate the challenge and complexity of living in accord with a rule of law.
• Cultivate their legal literacy by approaching legal rules and institutions from several perspectives, including those of legal professionals, active citizens, and social critics.
• Enhance their research and writing skills through the completion of a course notebook.

Indiana University has a fantastic web-based tutorial that outlines how to recognize plagiarism, and even includes an ‘identifying plagiarism’ quiz that provides writing samples and outlines the right and wrong way to cite primary or secondary source material.

The Basics:

• You use another person’s ideas, opinions, or theories.
• You use facts, statistics, graphics, drawings, music, etc., or any other type of information that does not comprise common knowledge.
• You use quotations from another person’s spoken or written word.
• You paraphrase another person’s spoken or written word.

Recommendations:

• Begin the writing process by stating your ideas; then go back to the author’s original work.
• Use quotation marks and credit the source (author) when you copy exact wording.
• Use your own words (paraphrase) instead of copying directly when possible.
• Even when you paraphrase another author’s writings, you must give credit to that author.
• If the form of citation and reference are not correct, the attribution to the original author is likely to be incomplete. Therefore, improper use of style can result in plagiarism. Get a style manual and use it.

Head to the tutorial page…

Identifying plagiarism — 10 items

Take the plagiarism test and print out a certificate…

As I was looking through some back issues of Teaching Sociology (the ASA journal dedicated to instruction and pedagogy), I was struck by an article published last summer about the use of ‘non-traditional texts’ for undergraduate sociology classes. The piece was especially interesting to me as I was drawn to the discipline through an intro course organized around novels and short stories.

The article, by Ursula Castellano, Joseph Deangelis, and Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, entitled ‘Cultivating a Sociological Perspective using Nontraditional Texts’ was published in Teaching Sociology, Vol. 36, 2008 (July: 240-253).

The authors argue that “novels, mysteries and nonfiction books can provide undergraduate students with an accessible and exciting place to explore sociological concepts. Using storytelling as a pedagogical tool, we teach students key theoretical ideas by analyzing the books in their specific socio-cultural contexts.”

Castellano and co-authors provide concrete strategies for using these types of readings in undergraduate sociology courses to reach a number of student learning goals, including “increasing engagement, enhancing conceptual understanding and improving analytic ability.”

The article even provides sample assignments and exam questions!

Is a recording of a lecture a substitute for the real thing? A new study by psychologist Dani McKinney suggests that the answer may be “Yes.” (via New Scientist).

In fact, a podcast of a lecture may be better. Students watching a podcast can pause and rewind through missed points, they can pick their strongest time of the day to focus, and they can wear headphones to tune out distractions.

Just as students can stumble into a lecture hall and nap in the back row, simply listening to a podcast isn’t as important as how the students use the podcast: students who listened to the podcast one or more times and took notes while listening actually scored better on the test than students attending the lecture.

All the usual disclaimers apply: this was just one study of only 64 students, in one lecture, with one test. However, it does encourage us to take a closer look at podcasts as a powerful tool for teaching.

about podcasts

Podcasts are like radio or television shows you can download to your computer and listen to or watch wherever and whenever you want, on your computer or on a portable player such as an iPod. All you need to start podcasting is a podcasting client, such as iTunes.

contexts has a podcast!

If you want to hear an example, I’ll shamelessly plug our very own Contexts Podcast. We release episodes every other week and each episode features an interview with leading scholars—frequently authors from our magazine—and discussions of our favorite discoveries. Each episode is about 20-25 minutes long and are great to listen to on your daily commute or even to assign to your students to compliment your own course material.

On our podcast homepage we have links to many other podcasts listed in the sidebar that you may find interesting. If you find other good ones: let us know & we can recommend those too!

teaching with podcasts

But this post started with a study of podcasting lectures themselves, not just using them as supplementary course material. But podcasting your own lecture isn’t that hard, and some sociologists are doing it already, such as Gianpaolo Baiocchi’s Sociology of Race Relations (iTunes link), and Tina Fetner’s Intro to Sociology (iTunes Link).

If your university participates in iTunes U (for example, our home, The University of Minnesota, does), then it’s easy to get your podcast put online where others can find it. With the rise in online distance education, universities are increasingly well-equipped to handle this sort of thing, so ask around on your campus. Hopefully, you’ll find IT support people excited you’re trying something new & willing to help. (I know we benefited greatly from help from our college’s IT unit when we got started.)

Remember the study’s findings though! Encourage your students to listen to each lecture twice, or at least go back to the parts they struggled with later. Also, the students who did the best had printouts of slides to follow along with as well. And they still took notes, even though they weren’t in the physical class room.

Deciding how to evaluate your students is often very difficult, and maintaining a fair and consistent strategy for grading student work will make your life much easier. Two of the most common types of grading systems are ‘norm-referenced’ and ‘criterion-referenced.’ These are by no means mutually exclusive, and many instructors feel most comfortable combining elements of each one.

Norm-Referenced Systems

Definition

In norm-referenced systems students are evaluated in relationship to one another (e.g., the top 10% of students receive an A, the next 30% a B, etc.). This grading system rests on the assumption that the level of student performance will not vary much from class to class. In this system the instructor usually determines the percentage of students assigned each grade, although it may be determined (or at least influenced) by departmental policy.

Advantages

Norm-referenced systems are very easy for instructors to use. They work well in situations requiring rigid differentiation among students, where, for example, due to program size restrictions, only a certain percentage of the students can advance to higher level courses. They are generally appropriate in large courses which do not encourage cooperation among students.

Disadvantages

One objection to norm-referenced systems is that an individual’s grade is determined not only by his/her achievements, but also by the achievements of others. In a large non selective lecture class, you can be fairly confident that the class is representative of the student population, but in small classes (under 40) the group may not be a representative sample. One student may get an A in a low-achieving section while a fellow student with the same score in a higher-achieving section gets a B.

A second objection to norm-referenced grading is that it promotes competition rather than cooperation. When students are pitted against each other for the few As to be given out, they’re less likely to be helpful to each other.

Criterion-Referenced Systems

Definition

Norm-referenced tests measure students relative to each other. Criterion-referenced tests measure how well individual students do relative to pre-determined performance levels. Teachers use criterion-referenced tests when they want to determine how well each student has learned specific knowledge or skills.

In criterion-referenced systems students are evaluated against an absolute scale, normally a set number of points or a percentage of the total (e.g., 95-100 = A, 88-94 = B, etc.). Since the standard in this grading system is absolute, it is possible that all students could get As or all students could get Ds.

Advantages

Students are not competing with each other and are thus more likely to actively help each other learn. A student’s grade is not influenced by the caliber of the class.

Disadvantages

It is difficult to set a reasonable standard for students without a fair amount of teaching experience. Most experienced faculty set criteria based on their knowledge of how students usually perform; thus, criterion-referenced systems often become fairly similar to norm-referenced systems.

Other Systems

Some alternate systems of grading include contract grading, peer grading, and self-evaluation by students.

In contract grading instructors list activities students can participate in or objectives they can achieve, usually attaching a specified number of points for each activity (e.g., book report = 30 points, term paper = 60 points). Students select the activities and/or objectives which will give them the grade they want and a contract is signed. It is advisable to have qualitative criteria stated in the contract in addition to listing the activities.

In some classes, a portion of a student’s grade is determined by peers’ evaluation of his/her performance. If students are told what to look for and how to grade, they generally can do a good job. The agreement between peer and instructor rating is about 80%. Peer grading is often used in composition classes and speech classes. If used, it should always be done anonymously.

Students can also be asked to assess their own work in the class and their assessment can be a portion of the final grade. This method has educational value since learning to assess one’s own progress contributes to the university’s goal of preparing students to be life-long learners.

A research analysis found that the percentages of self-assessors whose grades agree with those of faculty graders vary from 33% to 99%. Experienced students tend to rate themselves similarly to faculty while less experienced students generally give themselves higher grades than a faculty grader. Students in science classes also produced self-assessments which closely matched faculty assessment. If self-assessment is used, the instructor and student should meet to discuss the student’s achievement before the self-evaluation is made.

These and additional resources are available online at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

What do you find to be the most effective evaluation strategies for your students? Do students favor one form while you favor another? Why?

For many instructors, putting together a syllabus is the first (and often daunting) step toward a new teaching experience. A few years ago, at the American Sociological Association’s annual meetings, a panel on ‘Teaching Sociology for Beginners’ dealt with syllabus construction, among a number of other topics aimed to provide more resources for first-time instructors of introductory-level courses. The sociology department at the University of Buffalo has made some of these materials available electronically. 

Check out the links below.

• Essential Elements of a Syllabus: University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Office of Educational Development
• Online Syllabus Workshop: Brown University
• Learning-Centered Syllabi Workshop: Lee Haugen, Iowa State University Center for Teaching Excellence
• Preparing a Syllabus: from The Penn State Teacher II: Learning to Teach; Teaching to Learn

Managing conflict with students in the classroom is something that many instructors struggle with. Both new teachers and those with years of experience often express anxiety and frustration about how to address some of these issues. The following tutorials are provided by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

Why is it important to address these issues?

Managing a classroom well–balancing your instructional authority with your students’ concerns–comes with experience. Sometimes painful experience! Small problems poorly handled can distract you from teaching well and cast a pall on the semester. And while many are ready to complain about situations, we don’t often engage in constructive talk about how to manage and minimize the troublesome issues when they arise.

These scenarios help instructors think about what to do when a student complains about a great, doesn’t think s/he will ever ‘get’ the concept, misses work because of a sick child, disputes classroom or assignment directions, or asks you to meet off campus.

How to use the tutorial:

Select a scene (see below) and you’ll have a chance to view an encounter between a student and an instructor.

Following the clip, you’ll likely want to think about how you might have handled the situation—there’s no single correct approach. After you’ve formulated an opinion, you can choose to listen to several teaching consultants to see how they might have worked with the student to resolve the conflict.

Transcripts of both the scene and the advice are available on every page and further resources can be found on the workshop’s resources page.

Take a look at the scenes below…

Scene 1 – Why Did You Take Points Off?
Scene 2 – I’ll Never Get It!
Scene 3 – Could You Talk to the Professor for Us?
Scene 4 – It’s a Zoo in Here!
Scene 5 – Let’s Meet for Coffee
Scene 6 – I Had to Go to a Funeral
Scene 7 – Sorry, but I Don’t Always Understand You
Scene 8 – Do the Problem for Me!
Scene 9 – I Had a Sick Child!
Scene 10 – You Never Told Us That!