Recognizing that most of my students will not become professional sociologists, I want them to learn as much from doing sociology as they learn about doing sociology. I therefore design my courses around broadly-relevant skills that are crucial for engaged citizenship and for professional success in a variety of fields. I especially want my students to learn how to critique claims they encounter in the public sphere with scientific reasoning and theoretical thinking and then how to communicate that analysis effectively.
To realize these learning goals, I have gradually shifted from a primarily lecture-focused style of instruction to integrating active learning exercises into nearly every class. To be sure, I still endorse the lecture as a valuable learning tool: lectures provide a space to set up a puzzle and lay out the terms of scholarly debates. Speaking from the podium is where I can bring my enthusiasm for the material to the table and inject energy into the classroom. Lectures can incorporate a variety of instructional modalities in order to connect with different learning styles. For example, my presentations are highly visual, frequently using data visualizations, images, and short documentary film clips.
Nevertheless, I decided to move my lesson plans beyond the lecture. For one, students have different levels of comfort with participation depending on the group size, so breaking out into paired or small group discussions has been an effective way to make sure each student exercises their voice in every session. Mixing up the format, for instance by holding a debate, makes the class more fun and engaging. Project-based learning has been especially fruitful for integrating self-directed learning with achieving course goals. For instance, in my course Poverty and Place, students work throughout the term on a research paper that describes experiences of poverty in a specific geographic setting and analyzes it by reviewing a social scientific literature about general issues that this case raises. Their overarching goal is to develop an argument about how their case study contributes to this literature. In-class activities are laid out for students to make discoveries about their case that simultaneously build their understanding of substantive sociological issues. For example, during a discussion of residential segregation, students break into groups to investigate the redlining maps assembled by the Mapping Inequality project and look for connections to present-day measures of wellbeing visible in Social Explorer maps at the Census tract level.
A research paper of this complexity can certainly be challenging for undergraduates, but I make sure it is achievable for everyone in the class by breaking the assignment into stages and offering ample scaffolding and feedback along the way. Students sit down for individual meetings with me after key steps in this progression, even though this entails an extensive time commitment on my end. By providing a space for formative assessments throughout the research and writing process, it is justified by the payoff in student growth. It has led to end products they are proud of and that build their professional development, as shown by those who have used the papers as their sample writing in graduate school applications or developed them further in capstone projects and submissions to conferences or publications.
Another reason individual student meetings are central to my courses is that I recognize that undergraduates have varying levels of experience and comfort speaking with instructors or other adults in professional settings. I suspect that it is often precisely the individuals who are most hesitant to approach professors that have the least mentoring resources outside of the classroom. These meetings provide a welcoming space for me to learn how I can support students from historically marginalized social groups. For several of my undergraduates, getting over the hurdle of walking into my office for the first time has opened the door to building sustained mentoring relationships. I typically write around eight letters of recommendation per year in support of their applications to graduate and professional programs and last year I was nominated by my department for a campus-wide award for mentoring undergraduates.
Teaching at both introductory and advanced levels has sensitized me to differences in students’ starting points and to techniques that keep those who are struggling from falling behind while also encouraging advanced students to challenge themselves. I have led both small honors seminars and larger classes with predominantly working class and first generation students at the City University of New York. The diversity of students’ social backgrounds in my classes has been a tremendous source of insight and I try to be mindful of how their positionality—and mine—matters for classroom dynamics. Since most sociology courses study social disparities that affect the very students in the room, I put considerable attention into actively fostering a learning environment in which all students feel comfortable, even when discussing an issue that hits close to home. As there does not seem to be any single magic bullet for accomplishing this, I try to incorporate a variety of strategies consistently throughout the course experience, from outlining expectations for respectful class discussions to asking students to fill out questionnaires about various concerns they may have several times through the term.