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.