Abstract
In this article, I ask for whom is our teaching developed? Although we typically think that it is developed for our students, there appears to be a considerable gap between how our curriculum, especially Introductory Sociology is organized, and what we know about current college students. Drawing on data on enrollment in sociology and overall in colleges and universities along with recent scholarly portraits of college students by Nathan (2005), Clydesdale (2007), and Arum and Roska (2011), I offer the following argument: (1) Our “students” are primarily those who take Introductory Sociology, and this class, indeed, is our public face for most nonacademics; (2) given where U.S. college students matriculate, all too often, Introductory Sociology is likely being taught by someone not as well connected as we might like to our main professional organization; (3) comprehensive textbooks dominate the Introductory Sociology market and contain more information that can reasonably be covered in one semester; (4) college students are “practical credentialists” who spend relatively little time outside of the classroom on their studies; and (5) whether or not we as sociologists agree on what needs to be covered in Introductory Sociology and other courses, we have derived these understandings among ourselves, paying little attention to what skills and knowledge our students want and/or need. If Introductory Sociology really is our public face, we clearly need to spend a considerable amount of time in making sure that this is how we want to be seen.
In 1938, the eminent sociologist Robert S. Lynd delivered a series of lectures at Princeton that became the basis for his book, Knowledge for What? Written against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Lynd (1939) called for large-scale social planning by social scientists as a way to improve society. In many ways, his book might be more accurately titled “Knowledge for Whom?” Almost four decades later, in homage to Lynd, Alfred McClung Lee’s 1976 American Sociological Association (ASA) Presidential address (published in American Sociological Review in December 1976) and later book (1978) was titled “Sociology for Whom?” In these, Lee urged his sociology colleagues to analyze for whom is sociology developed?
At the risk of stating the obvious, the title of my article is a takeoff of both Lynd and Lee. More specifically, I try to apply Lee’s question to teaching by asking for whom is our teaching developed? At first glance, this might appear to be a rather trivial question with a clear answer: Our teaching surely is developed for our students. Although most might readily check this box on a survey form, I am going to argue that how we collectively practice our teaching suggests otherwise. To do so, I draw on a variety of sources:
student data: enrollment in sociology and overall in colleges and universities
sociology course enrollment
recent scholarly portraits of college students
Tim Clydesdale (2007), The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School Rebekah Nathan (2005), My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (2011), Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.
In knitting these different pieces together, I advance an argument that the recent literature on college students suggests a picture of them that is at considerable variance—based on how we organize our instruction, especially in Introductory Sociology (Intro.)—with how we appear to conceive of them.
Before turning to this, I need to mention a few caveats. My first caveat is a personal disclaimer: Across more than three decades of my career, I have taught Intro. more frequently than any other course. Sections have ranged in size from fewer than 20 to 600 students and in a variety of formats (e.g., seminar style to mass lectures attached to as many as 24 discussion sections; reliance on monographs/original scholarly articles to textbooks with course-wide computer-based testing banks; “sage on the stage” style lecturing to collaborative, active learning). Whatever shortcoming I may suggest in how “we” have taught and organized our curricula is one that I initially became aware of in my own teaching. Second, as I will cite in the following, in the past three decades trying to decide what the Intro. sociology curriculum should be has almost become a cottage industry in our discipline. There has been a considerable amount of very good work done by excellent scholars; not only do I want to call more attention to this scholarship, but I also try to share some data that may spur more of us to grapple with this issue. Third and in a related vein, the purpose of this article is less to provide a single answer to the question, “Teaching for whom?” and more to prompt discussion. What happens in our curriculum, and especially in Introductory Sociology, affects all of us and requires that more of us actively participate in discussion.
Setting the Stage
There has been a considerable amount of research done in the past three decades on what can be best described as what we want students to learn in sociology in general and in Introductory Sociology in particular. Although the first seminal work on teaching sociology is Goldsmid and Wilson’s (1980) Passing on Sociology: The Teaching of a Discipline, it was D’Antonio’s (1983) oft-cited article, “Nibbling at the Core,” in which he developed a set of concepts, ideas, and topics that should be included in every Introductory Sociology course that may have prompted the most attention and debate.
A decade later, much of this crystallized into the (original) ASA report, Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major (ASA 1991). In this report, ASA argued that Introduction to Sociology should undertake the task of providing a survey of the discipline as a whole, including theory and research methods, along with focusing on the core concepts in the field. This report was revised and updated in 2004 (ASA 2004) and serves as the “Bible” for evaluating undergraduate sociology curricula. In his 2004 article, Wagenaar—a key inspiration for the original Liberal Learning—reported the result of a survey of 301 sociologists, in which he asked them to identify how much coverage various concepts, topics, and skills should receive both in Introductory Sociology and in the sociology curriculum in general. At the top of the list were the sociological imagination, stratification, sociological critical thinking, social structure, culture, applications to students’ lives, and socialization.
In 2001, ASA established a Task Force to create a high school sociology curriculum that could also be a model for Introductory Sociology at the college/university level (Howery 2002). The Task Force was chaired by Carolyn Persell, and subsequently she and her colleagues have done a wide range of work on developing both a high school sociology curriculum and an introductory course (more information is available on the resulting Web site: http://www.asanet.org/introtosociology/home.html). In a recent article, Persell (2010) asked 103 leading figures in sociology to rank the importance of each of 30 learning goals established by the ASA Task Force on introductory sociology. Their responses indicated that the most important learning goals were: the importance of structural factors in social life, being able to place issues in their contexts (including international and comparative ones), being able to explain social inequality, and being able to understand the scientific method. Persell (2010:337) concluded that “From this evidence and that in a number of other studies cited, there appears to be agreement on the learning goals for an introduction to sociology course. Perhaps it is time now to focus on how best to teach these learning goals and assess how students learn them most effectively.”
Work done by Bruce Keith and Morton Ender (2004a, 2004b), however, casts some doubt on how much convergence there actually is, as (a) fewer than 1 in every 10 of the sociologists surveyed by Wagenaar (2004) agreed that any of the top five concepts should be taught in Intro. (e.g., the sociological imagination was at the top of the list of concepts to be taught, yet only 9.8 percent of respondents ranked it in the top five!) and (b) there is considerable variation between textbooks in what is covered (e.g., less than 3 percent of concepts were found in 90 percent of textbooks).
The most recent work comes from Greenwood and Howard’s (2011) First Contact: Teaching and Learning in Introductory Sociology, a book that should be required reading for all sociologists who teach Intro. After reviewing the state of the field, they cast a skeptical eye on how much agreement really exists among sociologists regarding an Introductory Sociology core, concluding “that this is a question that our discipline should be addressing” (Greenwood and Howard 2011:52). I am echoing their call, but suggest that before we survey ourselves, we pause to take a step backward by considering who are students are, what their interests are, and who teaches Intro. and where is it taught. These, I suggest, may cause us to rethink how we design Intro. and, in so doing, perhaps modify the rest of our curriculum.
Students in Sociology
We all realize that more students take Introduction to Sociology than any other sociology course—mainly due to its role as in the general education curriculum. 1 I want to expand on this a bit and provide a rough approximation of the gap between those who take Intro., those who major in sociology, and those who go on to sociology graduate programs. I argue that although showing that few Intro. students wind up in graduate school is hardly breaking news, it is both important to get a sense of how uncommon this it is to do so and to make sure that these data figure into how we conceive of the course.
Unfortunately, although we have good data on majors, degrees, and graduate enrollment, we only can approximate how many students take Intro. I have tried to do so in Table 1, as the first row contains estimated enrollment in Introduction to Sociology. I derived this estimate from two sources. The first comes from extrapolations from textbooks sales in the United States and Canada gathered by PubTrack Higher Education. 2 PubTrack is used heavily by publishers, bookstores, and others in the industry for new and used book sales for particular titles. They purport to have information that represents approximately 11 million students. Second, given that according to The Digest of Educational Statistics (Snyder and Dillow 2011) there are about 20.4 million college students in 2010, I estimate that somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 to 2 million students take Intro. to Sociology every year.
Estimated Enrollment in Sociology
Sources: Enrollment in Introduction to Sociology: books sold (2006 data) from Monument Information Resources (now Pub Track HigherEducation); sociology majors: Snyder and Dillow (2011: Table 242); sociology BA/BSs awarded: American Sociological Association (2012); graduate school: American Sociological Association Research and Development Department (2010).
The Digest of Educational Statistics (Snyder and Dillow 2011) reported that there were approximately 128,000 sociology majors in 2010; this means that 6.4 to 8.5 percent of all students who take Intro. ended up majoring in sociology (see Table 1, row 2). There is some face validity to this figure, as it surely reflects the likelihood that the overwhelming number of students takes Intro. to fill a distribution requirement.
According to the ASA (2012), 29,000 undergraduate degrees are awarded in sociology annually. This corresponds well to the 128,000 majors—as it means that 22.6 percent of majors graduate each year. However, it is important to note that these degrees represent less than 2 percent of all students who take Intro. each year.
For the past several years, the Research and Development Office at the ASA has been involved in studying the career outcomes of sociology majors. According to this study, Launching Majors into Satisfying Careers (ASA Research and Development Department 2010), by 2009, approximately half of the 2005 BA/BS cohort was in graduate school. Using the estimates in Table 1 (row 4), this means that about 14,500 sociology BA/BS holders enter graduate study annually. 3 Although at first blush this appears to be a fairly sizable number, it is important to recognize that it represents less than 1 percent of their colleagues who took Introductory Sociology with them. Narrowing it even further, the ASA estimates that only 25 percent of those who go to graduate school do so in sociology—I’ll round this to 3,500 students (Table 1, row 5). Thus, roughly 1 out of every 8 students who earn a BA/BS degree in sociology enters graduate study with us, but they constitute a mere .02 percent of those who take Intro.
There is one other additional point that can be drawn from the data in Table 1, a “good news, bad news” construction. On the positive side, approximately 1 in every 10 to 13 college students takes introductory sociology every year. The bad news, however, is that since relatively few wind up majoring in sociology, for most college students, sociology is Intro. And, because college is the primary place that adults encounter sociology, the public face of sociology is Introduction to Sociology. To the extent that this is true, it places increased importance on what occurs in this course.
Where Are Our Students?
If one used popular portrayals, papers presented at the ASA, articles published in Teaching Sociology, or the content of professional chatter, it appears that there is a considerable gap in our collective understandings surrounding the types of institutions where we think students attend and where they actually study. Put simply, because the most high profile scholars are much more likely to work in research/doctoral universities, it is not surprising that these types of institutions occupy more space in our public discourse. Their faculty are generally opinion leaders and the ones most directly responsible for research breakthroughs, scholarly accomplishments, and so on.
However, as the data in Table 2 show, most U.S. college students do not attend these sorts of institutions. In fact, the modal institutional type is the community college, as in 2010, almost three in every eight college students (38.8 percent) went to a two-year college. 4 In contrast, slightly more than one in every four students (27.3 percent) attended a research/doctoral university. Just more than one-fifth of U.S. college students (20.9 percent) are in master’s granting universities, while 10.9 percent attend baccalaureate colleges.
Enrollment in Degree Granting Institutions, 2010
Source: Snyder and Dillow (2011, Table 244).
Although surely interesting in and of themselves, these data have important implications for Introductory Sociology. Taken together, approximately two-thirds of students are either in a research/doctoral university or in a community college. Assume that the distribution of those taking Intro. more or less mirrors this, so that two of every three Intro. students are in one of these sorts of institutions. It may seem unusual to combine data from research/doctoral institutions with that from community colleges, but when it comes to who teaches Introductory Sociology, they have some key commonalities. Consider that (a) less than 5 percent of ASA members are from two-year colleges, (b) part-time faculty teach a considerable share of Intro. courses in both settings, and (c) graduate students do so at research/doctoral institutions. All of the aforementioned can be excellent sociologists, scholars, and teachers, and undoubtedly a good number are, but it is probably not a stretch to contend that proportionately these groups of instructors are less likely to be as well integrated into the profession as are many of their colleagues.
Recent Portraits of U.S. College students
Three recent, well-received, and, especially in the case of Arum and Roksa, widely read books have tried to shine a lens on American college students: Clydesdale’s (2007) The First Year Out, Nathan’s (2005) My Freshmen Year, and Arum and Roska’s (2011) Academically Adrift. Perhaps not surprisingly given my previous arguments, they focus much more on students in four-year institutions. Rebekah Nathan (2005) (the pen name of anthropologist Cathy Small) spent a year living in a dorm at Northern Arizona. Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roska (2011) are in the process of conducting an extensive longitudinal study of 2,322 students at four-year universities. They gave the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to these students during the fall of their freshmen year (2005) and again in spring 2007 and spring 2009, while also following the students beyond graduation into the job market (the book drew upon the first two years of data). Sociologist Tim Clydesdale’s (2007) book drew upon 125 depth interviews with 75 teenagers, a year of fieldwork at a New Jersey high school, a focus group of 12 college students, and a survey of 24 college teenagers (data were collected between 1995 and 2003). It is important to keep these sampling limitations in mind when evaluating what we learn from this research, but interestingly, the slight of two-year schools might actually wind up understating the conclusions that I draw.
These books should be essential reading for every college instructor and are much too rich and nuanced to do justice to in this brief article. Reading across them, however, gives us three general points about our current students: (1) the importance of time and daily life management, (2) the rather small part that academics plays in their lives, and (3) to use Clydesdale’s (2007:203) term, a good share of our students might be described as “practical credentialists.”
Time and Life Management
All three books make abundantly clear that students spend a considerable amount of time juggling their academic selves to conform to their personal lives. Perhaps most interesting in this regard was Nathan’s portrayal. Being a tenured faculty member, Nathan (2005)—probably similar to many of us—initially believed that time management referred to a set of practices that students should follow to make sure that they allowed enough time to study for tests, draft and rewrite papers, and so forth. I am as guilty in this understanding as Nathan (2005) was; for years I told my first-year students (and my two children as well) that their most important purchase was a planner (of course, this was long before technology has consigned these to the dustbin). In this, they should immediately write down the dates of all their exams and when papers were due; then, they could work back and know how to allocate the appropriate amount of time for everything. Needless to say, this is not what students understand by time and daily life management.
For students, the most important aspects of academic time management had to do with crafting a student-friendly schedule: courses that cluster together by both time and physical proximity, with hard courses balanced by easy ones. Far too often for our ears and perhaps our egos, a good course is one that fits a particular time slot in a location contiguous to the course right after it and the one right before it. This scheduling pattern then frees blocks of time for students to do what is often more central in their lives—working, hanging out with friends, and recreating. Nathan (2005) at first was taken aback by this, but by second semester she had “gone native” as she understood how important this is for students to be able to balance competing demands on their time.
Clydesdale (2007) also weighed in here, as he pointed out that “daily life management” is the main priority for the first-year students he studied. Away from the strictures of home life and high school, students have a lot to sort out for themselves, everything from financial management, personal relationships, educational requirements, and gratifications. Clydesdale concluded that by and large, teenagers do become competent in balancing these, but doing so leaves little time for much else for most teens.
The Small Role of Academics
Arum and Roska (2011) did a detailed analysis of how students spend their time, and the results are not pretty for faculty: The typical four-year college student spends approximately one-fourth of their time sleeping, half their time socializing and recreating, and just 16 percent of their time—a scant 27 hours per week—studying and going to classes (12–14 hours studying a week—a “good part-time job”). Lest one think that Arum and Roska’s (2011) data are outliers, a similar pattern has been found using the National Survey of Student Engagement (2005; cited in Clydesdale 2007:164). 5 According to student self-reports, two-thirds of our students spend less than 1 hour per week studying for each course, and even at the top universities, most students spend less than 32 hours per week both studying and in class. Putting this in some historical perspective, this is approximately half as much time as students spent studying 50 years ago (Babcock and Marks 2011). Given what appears to be a rather small investment of time, how is it that students remain in good academic standing? Clydesdale (2007:164–65) noted two factors: (1) rampant grade inflation and (b) “playing the game”—picking easy instructors, parroting back what they want to hear, and so on.
Let’s not be too quick to assign all the blame to students, as it appears that most are not challenged by their courses. Arum and Roska (2011) discovered that (a) 25 percent of students didn’t have a course that required either 40 pages of reading per week or 20 pages of writing and (b) 50 percent of students had taken five or fewer courses across all four years of college that required 20 pages of writing. As Nathan (2007:138) noted, students ask themselves three questions: Is this on the test/quiz; do I need to do the homework; will I be called on about this in class? If the answers to all are “no,” then it is likely that the reading will be skipped. Thus, without a strong indication from us that material will be used, most students do not prioritize reading assignments. Indeed, Clydesdale (2007:165) pointed out that students believe that college professors also “cheat” by not updating their courses, including using the same exams and assignments year after year, a practice that invites students to make little effort themselves.
Students as “Practical Credentialists”
Perhaps as indicated by the previous two points, Clydesdale (2007) found that most freshmen see college primarily as a way to improve their “life chances.” That very few want to be future members of the intelligentsia is not an indictment of them or of us. Since the beginning of their formal education, students are repeatedly peppered with the admonition that college is a necessary path to a good job; given this, it is not wonder that a careerist orientation is pervasive among U.S. college students. This should hardly be surprising to anyone who has ever gone to college, let alone taught there, but it is something that needs to be kept in mind when we design our courses and curricula. I can do no better than quote Clydesdale (2005:203):
Instead of focusing on what educators ought to cover, I suggest that we focus on what knowledge our graduates retain and what skills they actually use, and work backward to develop a student-centered curriculum that imparts knowledge worth retaining and skills worth developing.
Next, I turn to assessing how well our Introductory Sociology textbooks correspond to this portrayal of U.S. college students.
Textbooks
Anyone who has spent any time eavesdropping at sociology meetings is likely to come away with the impression that a good number of us would use a textbook in Intro. only at gunpoint, and even those who do use them think quite little of them. For those new to the field, grumbling about textbooks is a time-honored tradition (e.g., Baker 1988; Davis 1990; Schweingruber 2005; Wagenaar 1988) that might almost be considered a rite of passage. However, let me offer two points: The sales figures presented earlier suggest that a good number of Intro. courses use textbooks, and this is not the place to evaluate the quality of Intro. books. Although I have not penned one, my friends and colleagues who have written them note how much more difficult it is to do than it may appear.
Rather than evaluate the quality of these books, I would like to draw attention to a different sort of concern: the amount of material contained in comprehensive textbooks. 6 To illustrate this point, let us consider for a moment three of the most successful (all in double-digit editions) and most popular books: John Macionis’s Sociology (13th edition; 2012), Jim Henslin’s Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach (10th edition; 2012), and Rick Schaefer’s Sociology (12th edition; 2011). Perhaps reacting in part to those of us who want to make sure that particular topics, studies, or perspectives are covered, these books are quite long, varying from a low of Schaefer’s 640 pages to a high of Henslin’s 800 pages, organized into from 22 (Henslin and Schaefer) to 24 (Macionis) chapters. Greenwood and Howard (2011:41) claim that publishers want more inclusive texts partially to be able to appeal to the largest number of adopters, a claim with which sociology editors would probably not disagree. However, consider what really underlies this: We—sociology instructors—are reluctant to use a book if the text doesn’t cover something that we deem essential (this, of course, could be our own work ☺). Thus, to quote Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
The typical semester is 15 weeks long; take away 2 to 3 weeks of effective instructional time for exams, holidays, and housekeeping (first day of the semester, review days, etc.). This means that to use the whole book, an Intro. teacher would need to cover almost two chapters a week—approximately 60 to 70 pages of material. And remember that the typical comprehensive text is laden with facts, figures, concepts, theories, names, and so on. 7 In many respects, this type of book is not far from an annotated bibliography of thousands of studies, ranging from classical work that perhaps all college graduates should know to some research that I dare say most sociologists would not have come across unless they used that particular Intro. book (cf., Keith and Ender 2004a).
Thus, putting this altogether: The public face of sociology is Intro.; perhaps more often than we care to admit, Intro. is not likely to be taught by those heavily involved in professional sociology; 8 if a textbook is used, Intro. instructors may very well try to skim through an enormous range of material, much of which will be quickly forgotten if ever learned, and those who take Introduction to Sociology are likely to be most interested in how sociology might help them make sense of their own experiences.
Coming Full Circle: Teaching for Whom?
How do we begin developing a “student-centered curriculum that imparts knowledge worth retaining and skills worth developing” (Clydesdale 2007:203)? Although this is a collective project for us as a whole, let me offer a few suggestions, mainly in the spirit of further prompting the discussion.
Perhaps we can start with advice offered by Clydesdale (2007:203): “These new expectations should not begin with what educators want students to learn, but rather should begin with helping students identify their interests and then move to (1) engaging those interests to develop cognitive and communicative skills, (2) connecting those interests to existing bodies of knowledge, and (3) applying knowledge in practical and creative ways” (emphases in original). It seems that the first step is to become more student centered by trying to better understand our students.
As noted earlier, our students are primarily those who take Intro., and many of them take it in community colleges, from part-time instructors, graduate students, or others who are likely not to be ASA members. For most students, Intro. will be their only systematic encounter with our discipline. From the work of Nathan (2005), Clydesdale (2007), and Arum and Roksa (2011), we may be reasonably certain that a majority of our students are most interested in the ways in which what we teach speaks to their lives and the world around them; telling them that we need to cover material because this is something that they need for later sociology courses is probably not a very satisfying answer.
Clearly, the interests of our students vary widely from institution to institution and likely will change over time in response to a wide range of factors. 9 We implicitly recognize this, as general education, major requirements, and so on differ at times quite substantially across settings. However, at a more general level, I can draw on several bits of indirect evidence to provide some sense of the gap between what how our curriculum is organized and what students might be interested in. To begin with, we have done a reasonably good job of asking ourselves what should be included in our curriculum, and Wagenaar’s (2004) work is a good example. Take, for instance, his finding that the items that we rated lowest in both Intro. and the curriculum as a whole were related to applied sociology. I don’t doubt the veracity of this finding for a moment, as our field has generally looked down at applied work. Yet, if Clydesdale (2007) is right, this is exactly the opposite of what our students probably want! And remember, most of our exposure to students is in Intro.—students who are less likely to be future sociologists but who surely could benefit enormously from being able to apply sociology to their lives and the broader world around them. 10
Compare this to the findings of ASA Research and Development Department’s “Bachelor’s and Beyond” project. From this study, we learned that two-thirds or more of our bachelor degree holders believe that they use the following skills “all the time” (ASA Research and Development Department 2007): “working with people from other ethnic groups/cultures” (77.0 percent), “working with others in teams” (73.4 percent), “using computers to locate information” (72.3 percent), and “using leadership skills” (66.5 percent). Although the ASA report labels these as “sociological” skills, I would argue that they have less to do with sociological content and instead are more related to specific instructional practices that can be applied in a variety of disciplines. And, remember these responses come from those who graduated with a degree in sociology; imagine what all those who took Intro. as a general education requirement might say.
Given the careerist interests of most students, there is a final bit of evidence, not for what students need in Intro. or in any other sociology course, but rather what will help them get a good job after college. Perhaps the most cited source for what employers are seeking in recent college graduates comes from work done by the Association of America’s Colleges and Universities (AACU) in its Liberal Education and America’s Promise (commonly referred to as LEAP) project (see http://www.aacu.org.leap). The AACU has worked with hundreds of colleges and universities on various aspects of liberal arts education and has produced an impressive set of reports demonstrating the importance and centrality of the liberal arts. Particularly relevant to this article, however, are the series of surveys of employers and focus groups of business executives that the AACU sponsored from 2006 to 2009 that have provided interesting insights on what employers want from college graduates. In the most recent survey, conducted in October and November 2009, Hart Research Associates interviewed 302 employers of businesses who have at least 25 employees and who report that at least 25 percent of their recent hires have either an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. Table 3 reports the proportion of employers who indicated that colleges and universities should place more emphasis than they do on selected learning outcomes.
LEAP (Liberal Education and America’s Promise) Knowledge and Skills
Source: Hart Research Associates (2010).
This is an impressive list of knowledge and skills, and perhaps of no surprise to sociologists, overlaps almost completely with what is covered in a typical sociology undergraduate degree. 11 Consider, for example, those learning outcomes that at least 75 percent of employers would like to have emphasized more: written and oral communication, critical thinking, applying knowledge to real-world settings, analyzing and solving complex problems, and connecting actions to ethical decision making. There is little doubt that all these, if not already in Introductory Sociology and other sociology, could easily be—and probably should be—incorporated into them.
Perhaps because too much emphasis is placed on Introductory Sociology to be a comprehensive introduction to what is a wide-ranging and divergent discipline, an uneasy tension exists between pressures to cover more substantive material (e.g., what Intro. instructor among us doesn’t dread a colleague who teaches an upper-division course chiding us for not properly preparing our Intro. students for her or his course) and the needs/interest of our Intro. students (and, what I argue, Sociology, in the long run). We collectively have helped to create and sustain a system in which Intro. books and courses cover too much material and generally do so in ways that are quite at variance with recent portrayals of current student interests. I am tempted to argue that we should avoid using comprehensive textbooks, but given where and by whom Intro. is taught—and add in the transfer protocols now getting more and more pervasive—this suggestion may border on fantasy land. Given that textbooks (or their electronic equivalents) may be here to stay, how might they and Intro. be different and conform better both to the needs/interests of our students and to ways to better impart sociological understandings?
I can offer several thoughts. For Intro. books, building on Keith and Ender (2004b), imagine what our texts might look like if they contained only material that is in most textbooks. The logic is reasonably clear: If it is that important, everyone would surely cover it; if not, a student can live without it and suffer little lasting damage. 12
For the Intro. course, given that it is our public face and that most students never take another sociology course, what do we want students to retain about sociology? In answering this question, I am reminded of the classic comedy piece, the “Five Minute University” (done by “Fr. Guido Sarducci,” the fictional character portrayed by comedian Don Novello; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4). In this routine, Fr. Sarducci opines that the average college graduate retains so little knowledge five years later that college can be reduced to five minutes (e.g., five years later, what students remember from their economics course is “supply and demand”). Fortunately (or perhaps, unfortunately), Fr. Sarducci didn’t include sociology among his examples, but how might we answer his question. Realizing that most students will forget most of what we cover, what knowledge do we want them to retain? My quick answer: “context matters.” I am less concerned with the particular ways in which we help students understand this, other than to favor approaches that use the richness of sociology to help students better understand their own lives and experiences.
In conclusion, I started with the question—“teaching for whom?”—and although we typically see our teaching as being for our students, it may very well be that we are coming up short in this regard. I tried to show this in a number of indirect ways: (1) Our “students” are primarily those who take introductory sociology, and Intro., indeed, is our public face for most nonacademics; (2) given where U.S. college students matriculate, all too often, Intro. is likely being taught by someone not as well connected as we might like to our main professional organization; (3) comprehensive textbooks dominate the Intro. market and contain more information that can reasonably be covered in one semester; (4) college students are “practical credentialists” who spend relatively little time outside of the classroom on their studies; and (5) whether or not we as sociologists agree on what needs to be covered in Intro. and other courses, we have derived these understandings among ourselves, paying little attention to what skills and knowledge our students want and/or need. If Intro. really is our public face, we clearly need to spend a considerable amount of time in making sure that this is how we want to be seen.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented as the American Sociological Association Meetings (August 2011) as the address for the Hans Mauksch Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching from the Section on Teaching and Learning in Sociology. I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments.
Notes
Bio
References
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