Teaching Sociology

Good classroom practice both results from and contributes to the larger body of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.  To that end, I am currently working on papers with Dr. Richard Pitt (my dissertation advisor).  I’ll link to these papers as they become available.

The first of these papers addresses the benefits of using stakeholder meetings as way of improving on traditional two-sided debates.  Where the traditional debate format obscures the complexity of social issues by simplying them into pro-con, this/that, dualisms, stakeholder debates require students to evaluate positions from multiple perspectives.  This, of course, is a key component of developing a sociological imagination.  This paper was published by Teaching Sociologyhttp://tso.sagepub.com/content/38/3/215.short

The second set of papers concerns the benefits of racial diversity in the classroom.  Specifically, we understand that diversity works to improve educational outcomes for all students, but we still know relatively little about how this happens.  We explore if race is a significant factor in determining the kinds of topics students discuss as well as the kinds of strategies they employ.

Our proposed method to investigate this topic involves analyzing two types of classroom data.  First, we will examine the public discourse that students produced for a coursewide electronic discussion board.  These broadcast comments will help us to understand if race plays a role in the kinds of issues students are likely to raise and discuss as well as giving us insight into whether race is a factor in the strategies or structure of these discussions.  Second, we propose to analyze the statements made by students in course journals.  These writings are not intended for classwide consumption, instead existing as confidential between the student and the professor.  The same questions will be asked of these data and the results compared with the first study in an attempt to discern whether there is a substantive and/or meaningful difference between public and private discourse from students of different racial or ethnic backgrounds.  We anticipate that these findings will have strong applicability to all educators and administrators as we seek to maximize the benefits of racial and ethnic diversity on campus.  The first of these papers, “Activating Diversity: The Impact of Student Race on Contributions to Course Discussions,” will be published in The Sociological Quarterly in Spring 2012.   The second, “The Impact of Racial Diversity in the Classroom: Activating the Sociological Imagination,” is under review at Teaching Sociology.


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