Here’s a simple learning activity to be used in class with Andrew Cherlin’s Contexts article “Should the Government Promote Marriage?” from Fall 2003 (also found in the Contexts Reader). Students would need to be able to reference the article as they work on this in small groups. Click here for a PDF of this worksheet.

Directions: Get into groups of 3 or 4. As a group, find evidence given in the article that supports both sides of this debate.

1)      Imagine that you are a proponent of the “Marriage Movement.” What evidence can you find in this article that supports your argument that marriage is the best family form?

2)      Now, imagine you are part of the “Diversity Defenders.” What evidence can you find in the article that supports your argument that marriage is one of many positive family forms?

Now that you have examined some evidence for both sides of the debate, discuss and answer these questions with your group:

1.  Do you think the government should encourage people to get married? If so, is there a specific group that should be targeted? If not, why not?

2. Do you think that a child who is raised by married parents benefits from their marriage?

3.  Do you think that children who are raised within other family forms (e.g. single mothers, single fathers, gay and lesbian couples, etc.) inevitably miss out on some benefits because their parents are not married?

This is a case study that could accompany any discussion on rights and cultural relativism.  For example, it could be paired with any article in Contexts that deals with religion, culture, etc.  Another option would be to use it with “Keyword: Culture” by Joseph R. Gusfield in Contexts, Winter 2006.  Click here for a pdf version of the case study.

Kelly is discussing women’s rights with a group of her friends before their International Law class starts.  As an avid feminist, she prides herself in her belief that women and men are equal.  She says to her friends, “I feel sorry for the women that feel like they have to submit themselves to men.  I mean, look at Muslim women.  Why should they have to cover their heads or faces?  They are beautiful.  It’s a violation of their human rights to be treated as inferior to men.  Why should they have to wear one if men don’t have to?” 

Several of Kelly’s friends look uncomfortable and motion with their eyes to the right of Kelly.  She glances over and realizes that Salma, who is originally from Kenya, is sitting next to them wearing her hijab.  Thankfully for Kelly, their professor enters the room and begins the day’s lecture. 

 After class, Salma approaches Kelly as she putting her things away in her backpack.  Salma explains that she heard Kelly’s conversation and that she wears a hijab because in her culture it is empowering.  To her, a hijab is a sign of her submission to Allah.  It also makes it so that men judge her by her personality rather than by her appearance.  Surprised, Kelly apologizes.  Yet, she is confused.  She thought hijabs were degrading and a violation of women’s fundamental rights.  How could two people view women’s right so differently?

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you agree with Kelly that hijabs violate women’s rights?
2. If human rights are universal, how do we account for cultural differences?
3. Are human rights and cultural relativism fundamentally incompatible?  Which one is more important? 
4. Who has the power to decide how human rights are interpreted? 

This is the first in a series of posts that offers learning activities to accompany Contexts feature articles. This first post is designed to be used with Robert J. Sampson’s Winter 2008 article Rethinking Crime and Immigration,which can be read for free online.

This learning activity would ideally be used before the students read the article.

Take your best guess at the following questions regarding recent immigration to the United States:

1. True or False:  Immigration is associated with lower crime rates in most urban, disadvantaged neighborhoods.

2. Where are most recent immigrants in the U.S. originally from?  You can choose more than one.

a. The Middle East
b. Africa
c. Asia
d. Latin America

3. What percentage of the world’s immigrants come to the United States?

a. 40%
b. 25%
c. 10%
d. Less than 1%

4. What is the most common reason that people emigrate to the U.S.?

a. Employment
b. Escape persecution or harsh conditions (seeking refugee or asylum status)
c. To join a family member
d. Fleeing criminal charges

5. True or False:  Most immigrants come to the U.S. legally.

6. Where did most refugees who resettled in the U.S. come from in 2002?

a. Iran
b. Former Soviet Union
c. Afghanistan
d. Sudan
e. Vietnam

7. Immigrants made up ____ percent of the U.S. population in 2000?

a. 5
b. 11
c. 22
d. 29

8. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the total number of immigrants living in the U.S. was more than 31 million.  How many undocumented immigrants were living in the U.S. that same year (estimated)?

a. 7 million
b. 10 million
c. 15 million
d. 20 million

9.  In 2000, almost three quarters of immigrants settled in ___ states?

a. 4
b. 5
c. 6
d. 7

10. About what percent of recent immigrants do not speak English in the home?

a. 55
b. 65
c. 75
d. 85

Answers: 1) True, 2) C&D, 3) D, 4) C, 5) True, 6) B, 7) B, 8) A, 9) C (California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois), 10) D

Adapted from PBS Independent Television Series Immigration Myths and Realities Quiz. Detailed explanations of the answers are found there.

Have you ever wondered if there was an online community of sociologists sharing ideas and resources in a single place? It turns out, Danish sociologist Lars Damgaard has started just such a community — sociologically.net.

About sociologically.net, Damgaard writes:

The vision of Sociologically.net is to connect the globalized world of sociologists, sociology students or any other form of sociological allies who share the interest in the subject of sociology.

I am convinced that this vision a good idea, if you agree, please don’t hesitate to inform your colleauges, friends, co-students about the existence of Sociologically.net. As more and more people interested in sociology join the website the quality of the content of the site will improve.

Like most sites, the content is organized by ‘tags,’ see below for the topics covered on this unique site.

Most popular tags

recognition jazz critical sociologycapitalism max weber sociology of emotions Hegel social stratificationmaster-slave dialectic critique social spacedialectics hegemony sociological imagination Bourdieu feeling rulesoutsiders spirit deviance Gesellschaftpierre bourdieu The Philosophy of Moneyrationality panopticon The Metropolis and Mental Life sociology organismsurvival of the fittest choice philosophyQuantitative methods powerFoucault class analysis marx social action emotions Frankfurt schoolnew features agil philosophy of science marxism Critical theoryparsons Gemeinschaft The Strangerevolution chicago schoolSociologically.net

There is so much to explore! Join the site and expand the community of sociologists.

The June issue of the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (Volume 5, Number 2) has a great article on multimedia options for the classroom by sociologist Michael Miller at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The article, entitled “Integrating Online Multimedia into College Course and Classroom: With Application to the Social Sciences,” describes “an approach for efficiently incorporating online media resources into course and classroom.”

The article discusses pedagogical rationale for making use of online media resources, as well as types of materials that can and should be used, locating and delivering programs and clips, as well as technical issues, like copyright obligations. The piece also deals with some of the most common problems that instructors and students have when using online materials.

Read the article.

A few weeks back, Jay Livingston posted about using blogs in sociology classes. He points to two examples:

• a group blog Jenn Lena created for a class project, My Sociological Imagination. Each week, different teams of students were responsible for posting to the blog and for commenting on one another’s posts.
• Mrs. Castelli, a high school teaching outside Chicago, has links to blogs written by her students.

When I taught an undergraduate Political Sociology class a few years ago, I also tried the group blog approach and it was mostly a success. My general experience was consistent with Lena’s experience: blogs encourage a higher quality of writing, but the promise of vibrant online discussions in the comments is mostly unfulfilled. (My hunch on this: students tend to wait until the night before the class to read that week’s postings & this doesn’t fit the asynchronous nature of blog commenting. Scheduled online chats may be one way around this.)

If you’re interested in using blogs in your classroom, here are a few things you may want to consider:

• There is a traditional blog format (i.e. daily, diary-style postings in reverse chronological order), but the medium is much more flexible than that. Think of blogs as a general purpose online publishing and discussion platform and the uses for blogs in your class may become more apparent. Some assignments fit the traditional “blog post” mold quite well (weekly reactions to the readings, for example), while others may be less “bloggy”: using the blog to share ideas or drafts of formal papers, collecting online resources about particular topics, etc. (Many of us have access to things like Blackboard or Moodle, which have tools for doing these things, but they also tend to be slow, ugly and complicated. Blogs, or wiki’s, often work just as well or better.)
• Privacy. On the one hand, having a fully public blog has many advantages: it can motivate students to do their best work because they know people will actually read it, it can draw the attention and participation from those outside your class, etc. On the other hand, this may make many students uncomfortable. For example: think back to a writing assignment you had as an undergraduate. Would you want someone to google your name today and have that assignment pop up? One option is to make the blog entirely private: only you and your students can read the blog. Another option is to require/encourage your students to use nicknames on the blog.
• There are many free services for setting up blogs: WordPress.com and Blogger are probably the two most popular, but there are many options. For example, it may surprise you that even with today’s supposedly tech-savvy youth, technical barriers are still a significant problem. With that in mind, a blogging service like Tumblr, which aims for a super simple, stripped down interface, may be a great choice. Your own institution may host their own blogging software as well, which may be worth looking into. (For example, the University of Minnesota hosts UThink Blogs for students, faculty and staff.)

To close, I’ll just echo Livington’s remarks:

So, at least when it comes to blogging, the kids are all right. And maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, these kids have never known a world without the Internet. Putting your ideas about sociological concepts out there in a blog for the world to see isn’t much different from creating and customizing your page on MySpace of Facebook. Now if only they could learn to use their spell-checkers.

“No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know”

~ Woodrow T. Wilson (28th President of the United States)

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

Wikipedia: “often the best place to start, worst place to stop”

– Dan Gillmor, via Eszter Hargittai .