Category Archives: Teaching

Rapping toddlers, inappropriate grandparents, and early structuralism

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In my discussion sections for Contemporary Sociological Theory, we recently reviewed early structuralism and the work of Ferdinand de Sassure and Claude Levi-Strauss. The students had already been over this content in lecture with the course instructor, Andy Szasz, so my task was to give them an opportunity to review the material, ask questions about things that confused them, and practice using the key concepts. As I’ve been doing much of this quarter, I used video clips submitted by my students as part of their section assignment to accomplish all of these goals.

I should note a few things.  The week before we had already done an in-depth review of Sassure, focusing in particular on his concepts of the “signifier” and the “signified.”  We had used this cartoon, also submitted by a student,to distinguish between the two (I pointed out that the signifier of the Cherokee language is visible in the cartoon, but because none of us speak Cherokee, we could not understand the signified, or meaning, of that text).  We discussed how other theorists later used Sassure’s work in linguistics as the basis for a body of theory that places great emphasis on the cultural structures (rules/norms/patterns…) that shape social life. We discussed how the language you learn as a child depends on what culture (or cultures) in which you grow up. Then we reviewed how other aspects of our lives are also shaped by larger cultural “structures” over which individuals usually have little control.

After watching the video below, the students divided into small groups and worked through the Sassure section of the day’s worksheet, which tasked them with writing down sentences about the video that used key words/concepts from the reading.  They also had to find a quote from the reading that applied to the video. I got the idea for using this video from The Sociological Cinema.

As it turned out, many of the students had a hard time applying Sassure to the video. I think adding song and movement to regular speech adds a lot of layers of complexity (not present in the cartoon we used the week before) that made the clip harder to analyze.  Some of the students got a bit confused when the conversation veered towards whether the child’s babbling speech is the signifier (in which case the signified is unknown to the audience because he has not yet mastered English) or whether his entire performance is the signifier (in which case the signified could be seen as successfully conveying the act of rapping).  Another student was stumped on whether  or not the child had a specific meaning/signified he was trying, but failing, to convey. These were all good questions that some of the students were able to follow and respond to, but other students got increasingly confused as the conversation went on. If I use this clip again I’ll have to think about how to better support the discussion.

Next, we worked on Levi-Strauss’s theory of kinship rules as an example of another kind of cultural structure that shapes people’s lives and social interactions.  I showed the video below and had the students fill out the relevant section of the day’s worksheet. The video shows an actor entering into a scene unknown to him. He has been dressed up to look like an old man but otherwise has no information about his character nor  about the characters played by the other actors. The other actors have all been given a loose script to work with ahead of time.  Because the Sassure conversation took longer than I was expecting, we had less time to discuss this video, but I think analyzing it through Levi-Strauss’s work was a fairly straightforward experience for most of the students.

Consumer society and “haul videos”

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Have you ever heard of “haul videos?” I hadn’t until one of my  Contemporary Sociological Theory students recently turned one in as part of an assignment.  As described in this New York Times article, haul videos depict people showing-off recent purchases, or hauls, and posting the resulting videos on YouTube to share with others. It was a perfect fit for our topic that week: Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 critique of consumer society in One Dimensional Man. Here’s what we did in class:

Notes:

  • I had the video below playing as students got to class, and then showed the beginning of it again during class.
  • I used this worksheet to guide the student work and class discussion.

First, we worked  through these big picture questions individually for a few minutes:

  1. What is the historical context in which Marcuse wrote this book?
  2. What is Marcuse’s main argument?
  3. How does his argument relate to Marx?  To other Frankfurt School theorists?

After reviewing this questions as a group, we looked at this advertisement and then watched the beginning of the haul-video below (most of them had already seen the later content, which gets repetitive, as they arrived in class). After they saw the video projected onto the screen in full-screen mode, I exited full-screen and drew their attention to how many people have seen the video before (779,798!), and was pleased to hear little gasps go up around the room. : )

In small groups, I had the students use Marcuse’s ideas to analyze the video and the ad. They also found quotes in the text that related to the media pieces, and discussed to what extent Marcuse’s 1964 critique still applies today. Finally, we discussed everything as one large group.

The culture industry past, present and future

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Last week in my discussion sections for Contemporary Sociological Theory we covered Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of the ‘culture industry.’  In a nutshell, as far back as 1944 these two had serious concerns about the growth of mass communications. They were particularly worried about our shift away from recreational activities that involved active participation (like playing music or talking on the telephone) to things that required only a passive absorption of programming created by an increasingly centralized industry (such as film and radio).

Here’s how we worked through the concept…

First, we tackled the big questions:

  1. What is the historical context in which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote?
  2. Why were Horkheimer and Adorno surprised by the events of their times?
  3. What is the question driving their work?
  4. How do Horkheimer and Adorno answer this question?

To help the students answer these questions, I showed this video of Disneyland’s “Carousel of Progress” Act as it was shown from 1967-1973 (thanks for the suggestion Bernie Zaleha!).  This exhibit took place well after Horkheimer and Adorno published their critique, but I still found it helpful in visualizing an approximation of the historical moment in which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote.

After we answered the four questions above to our satisfaction, I showed this clip from the movie Wall-E. Each week a handful of my students are responsible for submitting media items for use in class, and I thought this one was particularly effective at illustrating a futuristic take on the culture industry.

Next, students divided into small groups to find quotes from the reading that illustrated content from both videos.  They spent 10 or 15 minutes on this task, and then we discussed their quotes together as a larger group.  Finally, we discussed whether or not Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry is still relevant today.

All in all, I had a lot of fun. And usually if I’m having a good time, there’s a decent chance my students are too. : )

Marx, the Simpsons, and hog farms

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What do Marx, the Simpsons, and hog farms have in common?  If you were a student in my discussion section for Contemporary Sociological Theory, you’d know!

This week we did a brief re-cap of Marx’s ideas on how workers misunderstand the capitalist system in which they are enmeshed.  Next week we’ll discuss how Frankfurt School scholars combine these insights with those of Freud to explain mass support for fascist and Nazi regimes during the World War I and II era.

To help my students understand Marx, I showed these two short videos and asked them to think about the following questions while they watched.

1. How can Marx be used to analyse these videos? Which Marxist concepts do you see illustrated? (hint, estrangement/alienation and commodity fetishism) 

2.  How far does Marx take us in analyzing these videos? What do you see that is NOT well explained through his work? (hint: a consumer-based solution)

Pushing my students to think about the strengths and, importantly, the limitations of social theory’s ability to help them understand the world around them is a big part of what I do in this class. Fun stuff.

: )

Visualizing environmental inequality with Google Earth

Posted in Environmental justice, Teaching, Tech support, Visual communications by

My former student Mia Renauld recently sent me a link to a great post by Tim de Chant on his blog Per Square Mile. It features side by side aerial images of poor and wealthy neighborhoods in the same city. He got the images from Google Earth and invited his readers to do the same and send in what they came up with.  The result is a study in contrasts – the wealthy neighborhoods have dramatically more tree coverage than the poor neighborhoods.

I thought these paired images would be great to use in teaching environmental justice and inequality. Poor communities of color have a disproportionate burden of pollution as compared to wealthier, whiter communities.  They also have fewer environmental amenities like parks, sidewalks, and the trees in these photos.  See the photos from two neighborhoods in and next to Oakland below, or click on over to Tim’s post for more.

In an introductory class I might show both images without their neighborhood names and ask students to tell me which community they think is wealthier, and discuss why.  Or I might ask them to go home and bring in their own side-by-side images from other places to share. Or I might just add them to a powerpoint as a visual example of environmental inequality.

West Oakland

Piedmont

Teaching my first environmental justice class

Posted in Environmental justice, Participation, public sociology & campus-community collaboration, Teaching by

I taught the first of what I hope will be a long career of classes in environmental justice this quarter.  It was a 40-student upper-divison sociology course formally titled “Environmental Inequality.”  My advisor Andy Szasz usually teaches it, but he had other responsibilities this year so I got to teach it instead.  I had a great time coming up with my own syllabus, and Andy kindly sat in one day to observe and offer tips based on his many years of classroom experience.  My father’s death in late January made this a difficult quarter, and Andy, Kevin Cody, Bradley Angel and Flora Lu helped get me through it with last minute guest-lectures and help with grading.

Since it was my first time teaching the class, I focused on getting the syllabus and lectures in order and didn’t get particularly creative with the class assignments and evaluations (5 pop quizzes, a take-home midterm and a take-home final).  Hopefully there will be opportunities for that later.  Instead, I chose a fairly straightforward lecture format interspersed with discussion, small group-work, movies and multi-media clips.

I’ve pasted the readings below, and added links and short descriptions of some of the things I did in class.  You can also find a complete version of the syllabus with the rest of my syllabus collection here.

I.       Understanding Environmental Inequality

January 9th               Introduction

  • Perkins, Tracy and Julie Sze. 2011. “Images from the Central Valley.” Boom:  A Journal of California 1(1):70-80.

Ice-breaker: Share Squares

Video: Youth On Fire

January 11th             Toxic distribution

  • Lerner, Steve. 2010. Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
    • Introduction
  • Bullard, Robert, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha and Beverly Wright. 2007. Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: 1987-2007: Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States. Cleveland, OH: United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries.
    • Ch. 4: A Current Appraisal of Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States – 2007

Lecture activity: My Town, Your Town.  I adapted the activity for use in lecture as described at the bottom of the link.

Visual: I showed some of my photos from the Voices from the Valley exhibit

January 13th               Conceptualizing the environment and environmentalism

  • Gottlieb, Robert. 1993. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
    • Introduction: Where We Live, Work and Play
  • Rechtschaffen, Clifford, Eileen Gauna and Catherine A. O’Neill. 2009. Environmental Justice: Law, Policy and Regulation. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
    • Ch. 1, pgs 22-25.
    •  Letter, Circa Earth Day 1990.
    • Principles of Environmental Justice. The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. 1991

Lecture aid: What Is the Environment and What Do People Do There?

Video: Bird Like Me (5:48). I asked the students the following questions to get discussion going: What tensions did you see in the film? What different conceptions of the environment did you see? How does Wyatt Cenac feel about the Audubon Society’s involvement in Turkey Creek?  How do the residents feel? You can read my other posts on using this Daily Show clip in the classroom here and here.

January 16th              Holiday

January 18th             Cumulative impacts of toxic exposure      

Guest speaker: Jonathan London (UC Davis)

  • London, Jonathan, Ganlin Huang and Tara Zagofsky. 2011. Land of Risk/ Land of Opportunity: Cumulative Environmental Vulnerability in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Davis, CA: UC Davis Center for Regional Change.

January 20th             Resource Extraction

Guest speaker: Flora Lu (UCSC – Latin American and Latino Studies)

  • Lu, Flora. “Petroleum Extraction, Indigenous People and Environmental Injustice in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” In International Environmental Justice.  Frederick Gordon and Gregory Freeland, Co-Editors. ILM Publishers. Forthcoming.       

January 23rd              Accidents and Disasters

  • Harrison, Jill. 2006. “’Accidents’ and Invisibilities: Scaled Discourse and the Naturalization of Regulatory Neglect in California’s Pesticide Drift Conflict.” Political Geography, 25(5), 506-529.

Activity: I asked the students to 1.) create a definition of an accident and come up with examples and 2.) discuss and take notes on when something ceases to be an accident and becomes ‘something else,’ and to come up with more examples of what the ‘something else’ might look like.

After we discussed their work, I asked the students to consider why it matters if something is determined to be an accident or not. We then made two lists of words on the chalkboard.  In one column we put words that are used to describe problems as individual and unique, and in the other column we put words used to describe broad societal problems.  Column A filled up with words like “bad apple,” “bad actor,” “individual,” “accidental,” “the exception, not the rule,” “local,” and “outlier.”  Column B filled up with words like “structural,” “widespread,” “patterned,” “everyday,” etc.

January 25th             International development

  • Agyeman, Julian, Robert D. Bullard, and Bob Evans, eds. 2003. Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Ch. 1: “Environmental Space, Equity and the Ecological Debt” by Duncan McLaren

January 27th              Barriers to political participation

  • Cole, Luke and Sheila Foster. 2001. From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press.
    • Ch. 5. Processes of Struggle: Grassroots Resistance and the Structure of Environmental Decision-Making
January 30th              Using science, contesting science
  • Corburn, Jason. 2005. Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
    • Introduction
  • Shearer, Christine. 2011. Kivalina: A Climate Change Story. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
    • Ch. 1: Blueprint for Denial

Video: A Debilitating Medical Mystery (7:23) I asked the students to analyze the video based on the content of the reading assignment.

February 1st               Women and advocacy

  • Wallace, Aubrey. 1993. Eco-Heroes: Twelve Tales of Environmental Victory. San Francisco, CA: Mercury House.
    • Mrs. Gibbs Goes to Washington.
  • Perkins, Tracy. 2012. “Women’s Pathways Into Activism: Rethinking the Women’s Environmental Justice Narrative in California’s San Joaquin Valley.” Organization & Environment 25(1):76-94.

February 3rd                 Take home midterm

II.      What Causes Environmental Inequality?

February 6th               Regulations, the market, social capital and discrimination

  • Rechtschaffen, Clifford, Eileen Gauna and Catherine A. O’Neill. 2009. Environmental Justice: Law, Policy and Regulation. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
    • Ch. 3: Theories of Causation

Activity: The Story of Luis.  See pages 3-4 in chapter 26 of Helping Health Workers Learn.  I used this story to help train the students to analyze root causes of social problems. I read the story aloud and then asked the question, “Why did Luis die?” However, since I did not think the students would answer in the linear fashion modeled on pg. 4, I had them call out as many possible causes of Luis’s death as they could think of in no particular order.  As they called them out, I wrote down their answers on the board in loose columns. The columns on the left were the most individualized (“he stepped on a thorn”) and the columns on the right were the most social (“global capitalism fosters social inequality”).

February 8th               Regulatory Failure

  • Bernstein, M. 1955. Regulating Business by Independent Commission. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pgs. 74-95.
  • Rechtschaffen, Clifford, Eileen Gauna and Catherine A. O’Neill. 2009. Environmental Justice: Law, Policy and Regulation. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
    • Ch. 5: Regulation and the Administrative State, pgs. 140-143

February 10th             Colonialism                                                    

  • Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.
    • Ch. 4: Bounding the Land
    • Ch. 5: Commodities of the Hunt

Movie: In the Light of Reverence (77 min., available on Netflix)

February 13th             Commodification of land and labor

  • Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
    • Chapters 3-6 

February 15th             Capitalism

  • Faber, Daniel. 2008. Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice: The Polluter-Industrial Complex in the Age of Globalization. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
    • Ch. 1: “Not All People Are Polluted Equal: The Environmental Injustices of American Capitalism.”

Video: Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground (20:29)

III.          What is being done?

February 17th             Protecting individual communities

  • Cole, Luke and Sheila Foster. 2001. From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press.
    • Preface: We Speak for Ourselves: The Struggle of Kettleman City

February 20th             Holiday

February 22nd            Policy advocacy, electoral politics and the courts in the US

  • Website: Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment. http://www.crpe-ej.org/crpe/. Read entries under “Campaigns” including: Civil Rights, Clean Air, Dairies, Climate Justice, National, Forgotten Voices, Don’t Waste the Valley, Pesticides, and Power to the People.
  • Website: The Women’s Foundation of California – Women’s Policy Institute. http://www.womensfoundca.org/site/c.aqKGLROAIrH/b.982359/k.8397/Womens_Policy_Institute.htm
  • Website: Communities for a New California. http://www.anewcalifornia.org/
  • Pellow, David Naguib and Robert J. Brulle, eds. 2005. Power, Justice and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
    • Ch. 10: “Environmental Justice and the Legal System” by Holly D. Gordon and Keith I. Harley.

February 24th             International advocacy

  • Carmin, JoAnn and Julian Agyeman. 2011. Environmental Inequalities Beyond Borders: Local Perspectives on Global Injustices. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
    • Ch. 7: “Global Environmental Governance and Pathways for the Achievement of Environmental Justice” by Beth Schaefer Caniglia
  • Keefe, Patrick Radden. 2012. “Reversal of Fortune.” The New Yorker, Jan. 9, 38-49.

February 27th             Research

  • Pellow, David Naguib and Robert J. Brulle, eds. 2005. Power, Justice and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
    • Ch. 4: “Mission Impossible? Environmental Justice Activists’ Collaborations with Professional Environmentalists and with Academics” by Sherry Cable, Tamara Mix, and Donald Hastings.

Activity 1: We made a list of common problems that arise between activists and academics in one column, and in a second column listed explanations for these problems.

Activity 2: Students got a chance to see a real world example of how one group of academics and activists are trying to work together productively. I handed out copies of the San Joaquin Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Project’s “Principles of Collaboration” document. You can see them here.  Students read them individually and identified where they saw the activists’ interests being protected and where they saw the academics’ interests being protected.

Lecture aid: Voices from the Valley project overview.  An alternate example of an academic (me) trying to work productively with activist groups.

February 29th             Market-based vs. command-and-control environmental management

  • Rosenbaum, Walter A. 2008. Environmental Politics and Policy. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
    • Ch. 5: More Choice: The Battle Over Regulatory Economics

Video: The Story of Cap and Trade (9:56)  I asked the students to watch for 1) tensions between market-based and command-and-control regulation and 2) potential environmental justice implications of cap-and-trade regulation of greenhouse gases.

March 2nd                   Government Responses

  • London, Sze, Liévanos. 2008. “Problems, Promise, Progress and Perils: Critical Reflections on Environmental Justice Policy Implementation in California.” UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy 26(2):255-290.

March 5th                   Cross-movement organizing

Guest speaker: Catalina Garzón (Pacific Institute)

IV.   Broadening the Lens

March 7th                   Renewable Resources

Guest speaker: Bradley Angel (Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice)

March 9th                   Climate Justice

March 12th                 Food Justice

Guest speaker: Alison Alkon (University of the Pacific)

  • Alkon, Alison and Julian Agyeman, eds. 2011. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
    • “Introduction: The Food Movement as Polyculture” by Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman
    • “Conclusion: Cultivating the Fertile Field of Food Justice” by Alison Alkon and Julian Agyemen

V.    Looking Back, Looking Forward

March 14th                    Outcomes

  • Pellow, David Naguib and Robert J. Brulle, eds. 2005. Power, Justice and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
    • Ch. 1: “Power, Justice, and the Environment: Towards Critical Environmental Justice Studies” by David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle
    • Ch. 5: “Who Wins, Who Loses? Understanding Outcomes of Environmental Injustice Struggles” by Melissa Toffolon-Weiss and Timmons Roberts

March 16th                 Moving forward

  • Bullard, Robert, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha and Beverly Wright. 2007. Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: 1987-2007: Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States. Cleveland, OH: United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries.
    • Ch. 2: Environmental Justice Timeline – Milestones 1987-2007
  • Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Hope in the Dark. New York: Verso.
    • Ch. 1: Looking into Darkness
    • Ch. 10: Changing the Imagination of Change
    • Ch. 12: The Angel of Alternate History
    • Ch. 14: Getting the Hell Out of Paradise

Take home final

Teaching classical sociological theory through the media

Posted in Teaching by

Each quarter I try structuring my classes differently so that I can experiment with a variety of teaching styles. This quarter I worked as a teaching assistant for my department’s “Classical Sociological Theory” class, which covers changes in European and U.S society that occurred during and after the Industrial Revolution.  I required each student to sign up for one week in which to turn in a relevant media piece and an accompanying one-page essay.  Here are the instructions I gave them:

Each of you are responsible for finding a news article, short video, cartoon, photo collection or other piece of media relevant to our readings once during the quarter. Your assignment is to select a media piece (10 min. max) that will help the rest of the students relate what we are reading about to current events, or help them understand one of the week’s theories better in its historical context.  E-mail me a link to this item the Friday before discussion section, along with a one page type-written paper describing how you suggest using the item in class and what its strengths and limitations are for understanding the relevant theory. 

I really liked this assignment.  I designed it primarily to give me ideas to use as a starting place for what to do in class each week, but it has educational value for the students too.  Each week I had between 5-8 one-page papers to skim for ideas.  I didn’t always end up using something that the students suggested, but they always got my mind moving in the right direction.

Sometimes I organized the entire class around one or more media pieces, and other times they played much more marginal roles.  I used them in a variety of ways:

  • showed the media piece and asked the students to identify which theory it best illustrated
  • showed the media piece and asked the students what a particular theorist would think of the events depicted
  • prepared an ungraded quiz in which the students first watched a series of media clips, then individually responded to written questions that asked them to identify which theory the clips best illustrate
  • played the clips while the students came into class or while I took attendance to set the tone for class
  • showed clips to give students a sense of the historical context in which a particular theorist lived

When everything works well, the media pieces help make theory less abstract and more memorable, help students relate to theory by showing its relevance to current events, and test the boundaries of student understanding of theory by asking them to apply it in a new context and identify what parts of the theory fit and what don’t.

Next time I use this approach, I’d like to spend more time discussing the limitations of using the theory in question to interpret the media piece.  I expect this would help the students understand the theories in a more nuanced way, but I often ran out of time to do it.

Mini media library

Here are my favorite pieces. Some of these were submitted by students, some I found myself, and some are from other teaching assistants and faculty.  I did not use all of them in class.

Feudalism

Marx

Weber

Durkheim

  • Mechanical society: Baraka clip

The enlightenment and the counter-enlightenment

Foucault

Write a literature review, practice innovation

Posted in Research & writing, Teaching by

Convincing students of the value of writing a literature review as part of a research proposal can be a hard sell. They must research a huge body of academic scholarship on their topic and adjust their own research question so that it meaningfully builds on what has already been done.  Especially for the many students not planning a career in academia, I think it can feel like an exercise they do just to satisfy the course requirements rather than because they think they’ll get much out of it.  We talk about it helping them develop their critical thinking skills, but I suspect that isn’t particularly motivating, since all their other classes and assignments are supposed to be doing the same thing.

However, the process of writing a literature review is also good practice in innovation.  Knowing what has already been done in your field makes it much more likely that you’ll be able to recognize and develop ideas that are unique and interesting, and learning this process is a valuable skill.  For example, I sometimes talk to students who want to create whole new organizations to address social problems they care about.  I usually encourage them to first research the existing organizations in that field and learn from what they’ve done before striking out on their own.  Nonprofits need to know what their partners and competitors are doing and be able to describe how their work is different to be able to find funding.  I imagine it is the same in other fields.  Businesses that offer new, useful products not offered elsewhere have an edge over other businesses.  Journalists who have found a new angle on an old problem are more likely to get published and read than those that write things similar to what has been written before.  Lawyers do a “document review” process to help them understand how similar cases have been litigated before putting together their own cases.

Drawing these parallels between the process of writing a literature review and shaping a research project around it and it’s equivalent in other fields could also lead to some interesting discussions about scholarship and innovation.  For example:

  • Is a new research project/product/organization always better than old one?
  • What are the similarities and differences between innovation in academia and in other fields?
  • Is innovation always rewarded?  What are its risks?
  • Can anyone innovate?
Certainly innovation isn’t all about hard work.  There’s a certain amount of luck and historical timing involved too.  But I suspect that broadening the discussion of writing a literature review to include similar tasks in other fields may make the process more concrete and valuable for students.

Action research syllabus collection

Posted in Participation, public sociology & campus-community collaboration, Research & writing, Teaching by

Although all academics hope their research makes an impact in the real world, some take extra steps to make that outcome more likely.  This small but vibrant sector of academia talks about their work with terms like action research, participatory action research, public sociology, engaged scholarship, activist scholarship, applied research and more. I’ve recently acquired three fascinating syllabi in this genre and added them to my collection.  Two are intended for graduate students and one for undergrads.

I must say blogging is a great way to share my various little treasure chests of these sorts of things.  I hope you enjoy them too!

This collection also has a permanent home under the “Teaching” tab on the menu at the top of this site.

Blogging in the classroom

Posted in Participation, public sociology & campus-community collaboration, Teaching by

I’ve always been interested in learning about ways that teachers link what they do in the undergraduate classroom to real world events.  I’ve seen this include asking students to bring in news clippings that relate to the course content, developing collaborative research assignments on new local city policies that are then presented back to the public, archival work, creating and testing environmental education curricula for partnering community organizations, and a variety of other service-learning projects.

So I was very interested today to see the results of a public sociology course taught by my colleague Prof. Alison Alkon at the University of the Pacific.  Over the course of a semester Alison trains her students to identify sociological concepts in the media, find press coverage of current events that lacks a sociological perspective but could benefit from its inclusion, and then create a media piece that uses sociology to help explore an issue of their choice.  The class projects have resulted in the following two blog posts:

Creating writing assignments that students can later submit to a blog of their choice seems like a great way to engage them in issues they are passionate about, with the extra motivation that comes from writing something that could be read by people other than their teacher (both posts generated spirited debates in the comments sections that follow them).   I hope Alison will keep us informed as more of her students get published!

More blogging ideas:  See sample assignment ideas for working with the Sociological Images blog here.  See Alison’s public sociology syllabus here.  See the website of a professor whose students write guest-posts on his own blog here.