Tuesday, March 31, 2009

invisible baggage

This was a short but worthwhile artlcle that can serve as a reminder that we all have "invisible baggage" we carry around with us. When you consider the diverse population of each class we either teach or will be teaching it is probable that students have much more on their mind than what you are addressing in that classroom.
As teachers we will be making a connection with our students and if we encounter a student withproblems we have to be prepared to know the resources available at our colleges and universities to be able to direct students to get the help they need.
We also have to be prepared to handle difficult situations in the classroom. I recall one year when I was teaching religious ecucation to fifth graders one of the girls in the class was in a very bad sledding accident. I had to be able to anwser the student's questions about how she sick she was and it was important that I answered in a calm way not to upset the class. That was a difficult time for the class. What was most upsetting to the students was looking at her empty desk. One day I asked the students if we could change the classroom a bit. They all thought it would be a good idea and that's what we did. The small changes made a difference in the class and soon we were back in a routine.
What made that situation easier was that the fifth graders had their parents to speak to about their classmate. In a college setting that is not always the case. A teacher may be the only resource a student has to turn to. This could put a teacher in a difficult position and that is what I wonder about. If a situation arises, will I be able to provide the right guidance to the student and stay distant enough to be effective?
At the end of the article are three things the author believes we should practice...(1) be empathetic and kind without comprimising academic standards (2) be nonjudgemental and practice acceptance and (3) become familiar with campus and local resources. I think these are good guidelines to remember.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Making Theory Meaningful: The Student as Active Participant

Patricia M. Lengermann and Ruth A. Wallace
Teaching Sociology, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jan., 1981), pp. 197-212
Published by: American Sociological Association

I chose the article because theory can be difficult to teach students. The article begins by discussing that most students taking sociological theory are in the class because it is a requirement. They argue that students often believe theory is boring and that by teaching through a lecture format where the students are passive, it reinforces their belief of theory as dreary and impractical.

The authors believe that the best way to show students the importance of theory is to start with something the students know well- their own experiences and situations “of deprivation, anxiety, stress, their own biographies and problems” (pg. 200). The authors then take students through a series of exercises, which allow students to realize the ways in which theory “makes personal biography and personal problems more meaningful” (pg 200). The authors state that, “the natural outcome of this exercise is that students realize the connection between their personal situation and the organization of society, between biography and structure” (pg. 200).

The authors’ goal is for students to see how theory links in with society and individuals’ personal experiences so that theory becomes meaningful to them. It is their hope that by students’ understanding theory and having the ability to critically apply it to their lives and society, that new theoretical insights will be had. The authors say that the goal of their theory courses is to teach students to how to detach “themselves from the mere experiencing of the ongoing process of life and to turn their attention consciously, formally, and analytically back on that process;” the authors call this “rational knowledge” and cite it as the main adaptive attribute of humans (some sociologists refer to this as reflexivity) (pg. 200). The authors state that sociological theory is the rational attempt of sociologists to reflect on and make sense of parts of the human social experience. By teaching theory to students as “a way of making sense of aspects of the human experience” and having students reflect on and analyze their own situations as relating to theory professors may be able to truly engage their classes in courses which are normally viewed as aloof and impractical in relation to daily life.

One of the most important techniques the authors state, as helping engage students, is to make theorists real people by teaching about their lives. A variety of activities are discussed as helping to accomplish this such as reading articles and books about theorists’ lives to writing letters to living theorists asking questions. Some of my best theory teachers greatly helped me and engaged my classmates during theory courses when they discussed the lives and times of theorists which allowed us to understand why they came up with their theories and what influenced them. It was also very interesting and helpful for us to know that most theorists and sociologists were trained in a variety of fields and were simply trying to solve problems when they created their theories- they weren’t simply a bunch of trained sociologists sitting around trying to be grand theorists. The broader application of this article is that it points out the importance of showing students how a course relates to their lives by taking concepts which seem abstract and showing students how they apply in current times directly to them or others around them.

Some of the other activities listed for getting students involved in theory courses are holding debates on theories, role playing theorists positions, take home essay questions (where students focus on specific events and look at what occurred before, after, and during the event analyzing it from several theoretical perspectives) and using examples from the media to illustrate sociological theory.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Interpersonal Teaching Style and Student Impression and formation

This article is from College Teaching Spring 2009. The premise of the article is that learning is a social process and the interpersonal skills of the instructor play a role in student learning. The basis for the article was a study that was conducted using 85 undergraduate students. Two different styles of instructors were video taped and students had to give their impressions on the instructors based solely on their demeanor. There were two styles of instructors; authoritative and authoritarian. An authoritarian instructor was described as appearing stiff, rarely making eye contact with students and has a general air of condensation. On the other hand the authoritative instructor is described as more at ease with the material and more comfortable with the students.
In making the video, the script remained constant but what changed was the eye contact that the instructor made with the students, verbal and vocal characteristics and mannerisms. The “authoritarian” instructor was stern, frowned, made little eye contact and tapped his pen on the podium. The authoritative instructor used a soft, varied tone of voice, smiled and made frequent eye contact. The “control” instructor read the material devoid of any emotion or character.
The results of the study rated the authoritative instructor more positively than the authoritarian instructor viewing the authoritative instructor as likely to be fair, accepting and calm. The students also thought that the authoritative instructor would be more likely to trust the student, have high expectations, be interested in the student and be available for help.
The study was conducted to gage immediate impressions that students have of their teachers. What we see is that from a short period of exposure the students were able to create an impression about an instructor that would most likely have an effect on their learning. Based on the results of the study it is possible that although an instructor may be well versed in the subject matter if the instructor conveys has high demands of the students and is stiff and condescending, this demeanor may have a negative impact on learning. The study also suggested that more research should be done on this phenomenon since these impressions may also lead to a self fulfilling prophecy in a students learning.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

early college high school

Promoting Early College, Inside Higher Ed., 26 March, 2009

This isn't an article from a teaching journal, but I did want to alert you to the early college high school movement and research emerging on it. The article discusses how at-risk high school students seem to benefit more from challenging academic work on college campuses than from on-site high school interventions. The programs generally involve students working towards and earning a two-year associate's degree at the same time as they are earning a high school diploma. You can find more information at the Early College High School Initiative.

Harvard University Press has also published a book on the subject: Minding the Gap:
Why Integrating High School with College Makes Sense and How to Do It , Edited by Nancy Hoffman, Joel Vargas, Andrea Venezia, and Marc S. Miller



Wednesday, March 25, 2009

CTCH 602 - Confessions of a Closet Teacher

Lynn Barnsback
CTCH 602 Spring 2009
Marketing Education Review – Volume 18 Number 2, Summer 2008
Confessions of a Closet Teacher
Doug Hoffman & Mike Palmquist

The title captured my attention. The article starts with a 12 step program style dialogue about teaching. It is cute and entertaining, a good beginning, but unfortunately not really for this article. The article segues from here into its proposed main question “… is there a relationship between increased research productivity and funding or would some business schools be better off funding quality education and student development to attract donors?”

The authors briefly discuss the race for rankings that some schools face, and that the research that produces grants is considred necessary. They argue that there are 500 plus schools not in the top 25 rankings and that the push to research might not be best there; “the shift towards emphasizing research is not cost free”. Some of these include library budgets, hardware/software, large class size, more research associates, increased use of adjuncts to allow faculty time to research. (This appears to be the link to the 12 step, Closet Teacher monologue.) They ask another question “Will there be a payoff that exceeds these costs”.

Next, there is a review of the reasons donor’s give, first showing a difference in endowments. Harvard has 11 billion over Yale, and 34 schools over the 1 billion mark. Some schools have as little as half a million. The point appears to be “the rich get richer” and that research may not drive that much with such great disparities. Reasons for endowments vary. One variable is the type of school it is; giving a large endowment to a small or public school can have a much greater impact on the institution and allow the public more access to the information and donations, grants especially, look at this. Donors also can get business schools named after them, or not (a group of alumni at University of Wisconsin Madison donated money so it would not be “branded” or named.) Reasons given by most were: attract better faculty, increase student scholarships, begin new programs, and “because it is an excellent education”.

The authors summarize that schools may not be giving donors what they want. “Taking the faculty out of the classroom and replacing them with adjuncts so the faculty can write” may not be what brings in the endowment money. That appears clear to me based on the information above however the authors “have a feeling that” the increased research that is required may not be providing the benefit the institutions suspect and may be costing schools much more instead. The arguments for their opinion should have been stronger here.

The article was very short, and although the closing argument was OK, they could have done a more in depth and through job of researching and reporting on this topic. It felt scattered, and could have been two or three different articles; What motivates Donors to Donate? What is the correlation between endowments and faculty research? And the article I really wanted to read, teaching for the love of it and avoiding or working the research trap. I would have to say, with the exception of some interesting tidbits about endowments, I learned very little.

Confronting the Social Context of the Classroom: Media Events, Shared Cultural Experience, and Student Response

Source: Teaching Sociology, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), pp. 463-470
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/131894


I chose this article because it provides teaching techniques for incorporating current events into sociology courses, which is something I would like to do. I think it is important to discuss the things that are going on in the world which affect and interest students and to explain the events sociologically and have students attempt to explain them sociologically as well.

The article discusses one teachers attempt to bring a discussion of rape and media into the classroom and why it seemed to fail during one semester. The authors explained that because the media was blaming video games, music, popular culture etc. for the violent acts of youth students were particularly determined to defend music, games, and other things which might promote violence and to dismiss sociological arguments. Therefore the authors suggest that part of having successful discussions on current events involves discussing how and why the media frame news coverage in particular ways they state that their goal is: “Our goal is to encourage students to consider the ways in which the news, as a source of information, mediates between public events and personal knowledge. We hope that these exercises will demystify the news production process, and help students to reflect upon their personal responses to the media and to consider possible alternative readings of the social landscape” (pg. 468). The authors then provide three teaching techniques critical consumption, comparing media sources, and analyzing overall news coverage.

The first requires that students individually or in a group do a thorough analysis on a news article, which is over substantial interest to the class (a current event or something which pertains to the course topics). The student(s) would be required to answer questions such as:
“Who is making statements about the issue? Is the person an expert? A politician? An activist? A religious leader?
What are their qualifications?
Who might benefit from these statements?
Who might be harmed?
How do the statements characterize the group being discussed?
Are the group members characterized as victims, heroes, or deviants?
Does the discussion focus on individual or systemic explanations?
Does the discussion focus on individual or systemic solutions?
How else might the facts in the article be interpreted?”

The point of having students deconstruct news articles is to show them how people’s viewpoints are in part shaped by the “explanations and solutions” of prominent media figures.

The second teaching technique entails having students break into groups and giving them many articles on the same event from different media sources both mainstream and alternative and having them look at how the events/issues were covered differently and why. Why did one choose to interview someone while another interviewed someone else or presented the story differently? The point is for students to see the range of ways a single event can be covered and why or why not it would be beneficial for particular people/groups to present the news in those ways.

The final teaching exercise is for students to do content analysis on the overall coverage of a particular event and to then write a reflection paper “in response to the patterns found in the coverage:
Which stories were most prominent?
What point in the event was the coverage most extensive?
Which topics received the most space?
What are the consistencies across the coverage?
Are there missing pieces?”

The students can then present their findings to the class.

The importance of this article is that you can apply the teaching techniques to other course material such as having students modify the same types of questions to have students deconstruct an individual’s argument, research, theories etc. I think only by students deconstructing things themselves will they understand that some groups have a vested interest in presenting things a particular way and excluding some things all together which applies to what they are taught in school, what is in textbooks, mainstream music, mainstream art, news…(this to me was the most important part of the article- teaching students to critically think)

Teaching Human Sexuality

Sprecher, S. and Pocs, Ollie. (1987). Teaching Sexuality: Two Techniques for Personalizing the Large Class. Teaching Sociology. Vol. 15. No.3 pp. 268-272


Since the lesson plan that I am currently working on is focused on human sexuality, I thought I would review a relevant article for this week. However, the article was hit and miss. Two major drawbacks were that it was written for university professors lecturing 300 or more (My classes are capped at 50). The second drawback was that it was written for a professor teaching a human sexuality course (I am just teaching the topic briefly in an intro class). With that stated, it did offer some useful techniques.

First, it recommends re-action/application papers that are revised by the professor and returned throughout the semester weekly (in line with Bain's ideas of learning being a work in progress/providing student feedback). I have already decided to include weekly response papers i my sumer courses, however in larger course it can be incredibly time consuming. The Authors state that they address this problem in the abstract, however they just state that its really not that time consuming. My guess is that they both had TA's reviewing the paper's and providing feedback, which is fine but community college teachers do not have that luxury.

They also propose critical reading assignments. In this assignment students find their own article concerning sexuality and critically analyze it. What messages does it send? What does it assume? How is our cultural norms around sexuality represented in the article? etc. They aso mention doing a response paper topic on "How would you respond to someone close to you coming out of the closet", which I think would be a great discussion started.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

The Art of Listening with Depth, Uderstanding, Flow and Imagery

The Art of Listening with Depth, Understanding, Flow and Imagery
By Jessica Johnson and Midori Koga
From The Journal of Music Teachers National Association – Dec/Jan 2006/2007


“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides!” – Arthur Schnabel

Defining the concept of artistic listening is very difficult. Artistic listening is not necessarily the same thing as hearing. Anyone playing music or attending a concert maybe hearing sounds but may not be fully participating in the act of listening with depth, focus, intent and understanding.

The article I chose from the journal of Music Teachers National Association talks about the art of listening that helps musicians improve their performance ability and overall musicianship. When we teach music it is our goal to help our students, at every level of study, to achieve that elusive state of “artistic musicianship.” We focus on our attention to tone, rhythm, reading, technique, character, phrasing, dynamics, color, voicing, understanding of harmony and theory, and the list goes on. But how about listening?
Johnson and Koga point out that it is crucial to teach students about improving the ability of listening in order to help them to become independent musicians. It is because that when students are truly listening, they have the ultimate tool with which they may begin to make artistic choices for themselves and their musical interpretations.

In this article, the authors list several ways of developing and improving the students’ artistic listening ability as follow:
EXPLORATION OF SOUND POTENTIAL
Understanding the Piano: one must learn the design and the mechanics of the instrument in order to have awareness of the sound quality.
Guided Experimentation: exploration of less traditional sounds on the piano, such as plucking the strings and playing harmonies and clusters help the student become more familiar with the sound potential of the instrument. Improvisation also can be another tool.
LISTENING THROUGH CONTINUOUS MOTION
Continual Motion as a Tool to Sustain Line: learn to do an imperceptible motion that is only felt internally.
Continual Motion to Create an Undulating Rhythmic Pulse: learn the fact that rhythm channels the emotional surge which the music creates.
DEVELOPING AN AURAL IMAGE
Silently Hearing
Musical Understanding and Stylistic Awareness: understanding the historical context, stylistic components and compositional process of piece will help students develop a concept of sound and form intelligent and stylistic oral images.
Musical Imagery: by establishing the aural image and physical choreography prior to playing, the ear is the dominant guiding force in the musical process.

The authors have applied above exercises to their teaching and seen improvements from the students. They say that students were better able to feel music in larger phrases, develop their own concept of sound and connect with music on an emotional level.

According to the authors, developing artistic listening skills is a life-long pursuit that requires constant nurturing by the teacher. And they add: finding creative ways to explore the composite sound, to attend to continual nature of music via singing and movement and to develop an aural image all serve to strengthen a student’s ability to really listen to the sounds they are creating.

Composer Aaron Copland said that listening is a talent. He described the ideal listening would combine the preparation of the trained professional with the innocence of the intuitive amateur, and it also possesses the ability to lend one to the power of music.
While listening is a talent, it is teachers’ responsibility to teach and encourage students to reach their full potential in terms of their sensitivity to listening. And through this, the students will learn the true meaning of music making.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Overcoming "Doom and Gloom"

Johnson, B. (2005) Overcoming "Doom and Gloom": Empowering Students in Courses on Social Problems,
Injustice, and Inequality. Teaching Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 1. pp. 44-58

While I initially wanted to stick to strictly “Classroom activity” article, this article grabbed my attention. The author addresses the problematic tendency of sociologists to exaggerate the unchangeable state of social problems. As a sociologist, Johnson recognizes the need to discuss social problems as symptoms of deeper societal phenomena. However, he writes that too many sociology teachers come to only cover the deep roots of societal problems without discussing any solutions, or the successes of past campaigns against unjust societal institutions and practices. Even less sociology teachers are willing to spend class time discussing the individual actions that can be taken by the students to support or create needed structural changes. He outlines four kinds of common student responses to social problems courses;

Disengaged: "To tell you the truth, current events, politics, and the like just don't interest me. It's confusing, and if you try to worry too much about that stuff you just get depressed."

Do-gooder: "I don't know why we can't just work together and cooperate. We need to fo- cus on helping each other instead of fighting all the time."

Cynic: "There's no point in trying to fix the problem, because our society is so rotten to the core that you might as well say 'fuck it' and at least try to have some fun while you can."

Social Change Agent: "Each of us has the responsibility to inform ourself about the world's complex problems and do something about them."

All too often as teachers we strive to move the disengaged by simply driving home the importance and seriousness of a social injustice. We then outline the statistics supporting our claim, cover the theories of why those statistics are present, and maybe even cement the importance of the issue with a heart wrenching video. But then we just move on to the next social problem to be covered, or offer implausible or downright impossible solutions (i.e. Communist revolutions, eliminating gender norms, removing national boundaries, etc.) Even if we have successfully moved that disengaged student, we have framed the problem as insurmountable. Without any discussion of possible solutions students do one of three things; they move back to their previous state of disengagement. They become a paralyzed cynic, or they begin to lean on empty “do-gooder” statements that remove any personal responsibility outside of their own thoughts.

Johnson Moves on to outline that any discussion of a social problem should follow 5 steps; (1) identify the process through which social problems are constructed (How they are discussed, why we consider them a problem, (2) identify existence of the social problem (Studies that show it is real and not a cultural myth), (3) identify core causes of the social problem (for example over-consumption causing pollution, living in a consumer culture, etc.), (4) identify structural solutions to the social problem(changing of cultural norms around social status being based in consumption), and (5) identify individual actions that contribute to structural solutions (Beginning to lessen your own consumption, getting involved with local groups that are spreading information to others).

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Stratification on the Menu: Using Restaurant Menus to Examine Social Class(Naliyah blog 4)

By Wynne Wright & Elizabeth Ransom
Teaching Sociology Vol. 33, 2005 (July:310-316)

I chose to report on this article because I was interested in finding a good class exercise for my teaching assignment. I decided to do something related to social class and thought this was a very interesting way to look at and discuss such a concept. The authors believe that over the past two decades food has increasingly become an indication of “social class and cultural capital for a growing number of Americans.” They cite the numerous cooking shows, channels, and books that have become popularized in recent times. The point of the article is to outline a class exercise where students are given menus from various food venues and asked to rate the social class they believe the restaurant caters to based on the following questions:

“1. Are the prices easily accessible to a wide population?
2. Does the menu assume specialized knowledge (e.g., sauces, wines, foreign languages)? (i.e., cultural capital)
3. Are there numbered entrees or easy-to-read food names? How many entrees are offered?
4. Are photos of the food used or does the menu use other artistic images?”

The authors said their goal was for students to understand how restaurants (“everyday taken-for-granted institutions”) expose differences in class and to teach students how to identify such differences “through the analysis of culturally representative artifacts.” This is a really important activity because it makes students think about how things they never viewed as “class-based” or as discriminatory may actually be (in the way that they are set up). It can be a great activity to lead into talking about class inequality, class- consciousness, race, ethnicity and class, or the institutionalization of discrimination. It is an activity that can be using to begin a variety of discussions and/or introduce various concepts.

This is an exercise which is interesting and with which everyone can relate. We all eat food and we choose the food we eat based on different things, one of which is price. In our respective teaching fields it is important to pull in activities like this which are interesting, fun, and a little out of the ordinary. Such exercises reign in the student’s interest in the beginning because they are not the average class work, which then makes it much easier to convey important conceptual and theoretical information.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

The Art of Training Teachers

The Art of Training Teachers
An Interview with Frances Larimer by Yeeseon Kwon
Clavier Magazine, February, 2002

The article I chose to report is an interview with Frances Larimer, who was one of the pioneers of piano pedagogy program in the U.S. I was intrigued by the title at first then I learned how one piano teacher’s passion and endeavor for teaching piano affected many areas of piano method last few decades.

When Frances Larimer began to teach piano after graduating from high school in the late 1940s the only help she found was from a few old books and methods, which I could easily relate to my own teaching experience in early 1990s. She put teaching aside for five years until she completed her master’s degree in performance at Northwestern University, where she eventually taught for several decades and created pedagogy programs for piano majors in graduate school.

She says in the interview that she learned about teaching piano primarily by trial and error and thought there should be an easier way for others to learn to teach. Her background was typical of most graduate piano majors in the 1950s in that one can perform, accompany, and play in chamber ensembles - not much difference compare to those years I've studied. She saw piano major students graduate without any skills in teaching and that motivated her to start a program in piano teacher training. She designed a program that emphasized teaching internships as well as coursework that covered how to structure lessons, diagnose playing problems, and evaluate materials and methods. From my point of view, even at this time, many students(including myself) do not realize the varied approaches for teaching students of different ages and performance levels. I also know that it is hard to understand these issues without taking a pedagogy course, teaching experience and going to music conferences and workshops. Until she helped Northwestern to launch its master’s program in pedagogy in 1972, and doctoral program in 1977, she endeavored to make the rest of the music faculty believe the importance of how organized and structuralized teaching method can affect students’ (future teachers’) learning. She believed that there are three major components that would work the pedagogy program succeed, and as result, she was able to execute the plan by practicing the following: study of the art of teaching, which includes among other learning to evaluate methods and teaching materials, developing diagnostic skills, and understanding teaching approaches; observing masters teachers at all levels of instruction; and taking part in supervised intern teaching. There are things that I liked about her approach of teaching: teaching should be comprehensive and include basic fundamentals for learning music at a pace that allows students to more than just play pieces. Theoretical information, some kind of creative work, and sightreading are also important. In addition, I also believe that supplementary materials should be interesting, with some educational value to prepare students for the masterworks.

Learning music is a hard work, yet it is quite enjoyable when it touches and moves one’s heart and soul. Teaching music is also a hard work. It requires one’s outstanding performance ability and experiecne, yet it truly shines when a teacher makes its learning process more inviting and exciting.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Golden Duck Awards

Lynn Barnsback
CTCH 602
Spring 2009

Journal Article
Marketing Education Review
Volume 18, Number 1 Spring 2008

Golden Duck Awards: An Interactive Game to Facilitate Class Participation
Barbara Ross Wooldridge

The article explains the use of an actual Golden Duck, and a competition designed to help marketing professors encourage more and better class participation. The Author cites that “participation is frequently posited as an “active learning” strategy to engage students in the class (Dallimore et al 2006). ….Yet, studies have shown that the college classroom tends to be a spectator sport for students with professors speaking approximately 80% of the time”. Most of the syllabus I read appeared to have programs, usually class participation points, to help elevate the problem of ill prepared and under enthusiastic students. It is clearly a problem.

Wooldridge’ premise with this simple “Game” is that “competition can motivate students to maximize performance”. The Golden Duck is just that, a statue of a Duck that a student can win at semesters end. A smaller rubber duck is used during class, passed from student to student but only with “DUCK worthy” participation. Student add more context to their answer-just get the duck. At the end of class they vote for the best contributor and who gets to take the rubber duck home. At the end of the course, the students vote for the overall best contributor who then gets the larger duck statue, runners up receives the smaller rubber versions. Note, she does not give any points for participation; the Duck is the only motivator.

The Duck works best with classes for 25-40 students and used in classes that are primarily lectures. If class preparation slacks off, the Duck may “not want to play” and it is not used. This tactic can usually get the class to improve the quality of the participation.

The Author feels this is a successful tactic based upon the following information. 1. Her static’s that student’s participation increased from 30 to 95%. 2. The “Duck” also shows up in her evaluations as a favorite component of the class- spurring students into participation sometimes just so someone else does not get to win it. 3. Her evaluation scores have also improved although her course content remains the same. 4. After the course has concluded the Duck lives on. Former students will mail her ducks, bring the duck to other classes for luck and even travel with it.

The most important part of the Golden Ducks powers however are that it gets students to better prepare for and actively participate in class. They become better critical thinkers because they want to evaluate or argue a point and determine duck worthiness. Not to be overlooked, it allows the students to have some fun.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Teaching Sociology From Everyday Life

Burkart, Julia. Teaching Sociology From Everyday Life. Teaching Sociology. Vol. 19 (No.2). April 1991. Pages 260-263

This is a really good overview of how to get sociological concepts across to intro students using their shared experience of “college student”. After reading Naliyah’s post, I wanted to find something that fit into the “Concept teaching” model. I agree that attempting to teach "the facts" about another culture can be counterproductive and lead to stereotyping. I encountered this while teaching stratification and the Caste system, the textbook skimmed over the caste system in India and gave the impression that this was a backwards and exotic tradition. Instead of highlighting that social stratification is present in every society, just in different forms, students learned about the “evilness” of the caste system. This could lead to cultural insensitivity and justify preconceived notions of another society, which is the exact opposite of what we are attempting to accomplish.

So what examples do you use? I found this article as a good starting point. It highlights using the students’ everyday lives to exemplify the concepts that you are presenting. In order to get across the idea of bureaucracies the author offers the following questions;

"If you are a work-study student, how are your hours translated into a check?" "How are class sizes controlled during registration?" "How do I know this class will fit into this room?" "How does this room get cleaned every night when we are all home? Who makes the schedules of the cleaning crew?"

By using the students’ everyday life experience of the college classroom, we can teach concepts and give a concrete example, without oversimplifying other cultures.

The author provides examples of how to teach though everyday life in a few different topics. I think this model is also useful in avoiding the teacher as knower/student as listener problem. This model allows students to participate more easily, because we are using the concepts to explain things that they experience daily, and have opinions about. I believe this technique is much more effective at introducing basic sociological concepts then giving examples of far away cultures that the students likely know little about.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity: Strategies for Comparative Multicultural Courses
Dennis J. Downey and Ramon S. Torrecilha
Teaching Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Jul., 1994), pp. 237-247

Naliyah Kaya

I chose this article because I want to look at ways of sociologically addressing race. The article caught my eye because it said we should not address race in a “group a week” format, which made me curious as to what they meant by that term. The article talks about the growing requirement of multicultural studies in undergraduate education and how such courses are best approached. The article criticizes the often utilized format of studying one racial, ethnic, cultural, gender group per week stating that there is no way to address the complexities and comparisons of such groups thoroughly in such a limited amount of time. The authors state that students often end up with a superficial understanding of such groups and walk away thinking they understand such groups yet may actually have gained more misconceptions and stereotypes. For example, the authors discuss that there were only three weeks to discuss the lived experience of all Asian Americans; by the time they were discussing Vietnamese Americans they only had a half hour and thus presented on one part of Vietnamese culture which is very distinct and had to do with astrology, as a result many students walked away viewing all Vietnamese Americans as overly exotic and mystical.
Instead of trying to cram the history and culture of many groups into a short amount of time or selecting only a few groups to spend significant amounts of the course discussing the authors suggest a concept oriented approach. The concept oriented approach means studying what race, ethnicity, culture, racism, ethnocentrism etc. are and mean. By studying the concepts in-depth students gain the tools necessary for critically assessing, comparing, and understanding the history, culture, and lived experience of groups different from themselves. The authors encourage students to look at the histories of groups who differ from themselves, but spend the course teaching and discussing the concepts. The authors then give a brief overview of what a sample syllabus might look like when utilizing their approach and suggest adding a one credit additional course in which students watch specific films which look at the history and lived experience of various groups and then have discussions. They advocate this approach because of the increase in audio and visual stimulation present in current times. How one approaches teaching multicultural courses depends very much on the amount of allotted time as stressed by the authors who discuss which textbooks might be used dependent on if you have a quarter versus semester system or want time to assign various additional readings versus relying more on one book. If possible, on a semester system I think it would be nice to combine the two ideas of concept teaching with films by focusing on the concepts for the first half of the semester and then watching films and discussing how the concepts apply for the second half of the course.
The authors make a very valid point that often in multicultural courses only a select few groups are chosen to be studied and even the groups chosen are often presented only superficially. It is not even realistic to think the history, culture, and lived experience of one group can be critically understood and assessed in one course. The alternative of concept teaching is a very valid argument. In fact it is difficult to understand how we can expect students to critically understand and assess anything if we do not give them the tools (understanding of concepts) necessary to grapple with the complexities of race, ethnicity, and culture in America; we could never expect someone to understand a language if we did not give them the definitions of words.
The idea of concept teaching can definitely be applied to other courses such as women’s studies; instead of focusing only on a few groups of women and their experiences, concepts such as femininity, sexism, and the glass ceiling can be examined which can by applied across the board to understanding the lived experience of women with an encouragement for students to study the histories of specific groups. Perhaps students can each be encouraged to pick a specific group within the course (for multicultural course pick a specific racial, ethnic, cultural group or person) and do a presentation on that person or group at the end of the semester.