Responding to Wobbly Classrooms through Scaffolded,Peer-Led,Small-Group Presentations of Personal Learning Goals: The Beyond the Book Tool

The Wobbliness of the Sexualities Classroom

The wobbliness of the sexualities classroom presents challenges that are likely shared with other sociology courses that implicate student activism, trauma, or identities. Syllabi must have enough flexibility to respond to potential events while providing enough structure to support student learning. As the instructor, I have to be more nimble so I can pivot course content or assessments to respond to new collective wants or needs without, of course, abandoning the syllabi’s structure that is wanted or needed by other students. And I have to be more prepared for anything—in a wobbly class, things just pop up and must be addressed directly lest the class tip over, which can manifest in ways I describe in the following.

Wobbliness can come from a student body that is new to or hostile to social constructionism and/or consistently pushes back against structural explanations (Preston 2011; Rust 1994). Students must sometimes be convinced that the topic deserves academic attention and is not lightweight fluff (Davis 2005). The identities of instructors—who are often queer and face the dilemma of coming out—can also affect student perceptions of the validity of class topics or shape their willingness to engage in discussions (Boren and McPherson 2018; Miller and Lucal 2009; Schippert 2006). There can also be a marked imbalance in class participation between “sexual extraverts, libertines, and those for whom sex evokes positive associations” versus those “who feel pain, shame, guilt, or anxiety about sex” (Davis 2005:20).

Sometimes this wobbliness comes from student activist commitments. This can take the form of a student who tried to insert abortion into all course discussions to the frustration of other students who were interested in other topics—including the readings at hand. Wobbliness can also come from sensitivity to peer traumas (see Brunzell et al. 2016; Jennings 2018), either in insisting on or objecting to course material. For example, it can take the form of calling out, whether directly in the classroom, or indirectly, through social media or gossip, as when a student called out another for using the offensive term transgendered in class, or when students commit racist microaggressions that the instructor must address (Donadey 2002). Such unaddressed microaggressions may cause more distress in a classroom that is expected to conform to feminist pedagogies (Maher and Tetreault 2001; Spencer 2015) and may thus feel, to students, like a safe space (Henry 1994; Ludlow 2004).

Other times, the wobbliness comes from trauma (Carello and Butler 2014; Jones 2020). Students bring a range of experiences to the classroom, including histories with sexual assault and violence associated with marginalized identities (Jennings 2018). For some, this trauma may be quite recent and raw; for others, a long buried experience may become awoken in the context of classroom discussions or materials. Rarely, this takes the form of students breaking down while speaking and/or suddenly leaving class, sometimes visibly upset. More commonly, it takes the form of extended and unexplained absences. Sometimes the trauma is secondary, as when students exert care for the perceived traumas of others, as when a student once tried to serve as a gatekeeper for course discussions by declaring that certain topics were potentially “triggering” to others and thus off limits.

Wobbliness also comes from college students’ own identities, which are often in a critical stage of development (Torres, Jones, and Renn 2009). Even the most intersectional curriculum cannot address the multiplicities of all identities or their multiple marginalizations (Grant and Zwier 2011; Nowakowski et al. 2016). In my experience, the lack of material addressing a student’s identity has caused as much pain and/or frustration as a cursory mention that ostensibly “included” it. Wobbliness here can take the form of disappointment and disengagement that are not expressed until the course evaluations at the end of the semester, such as the students who pushed me to include more material on gender identity or another who did not see her adoptee identity reflected in the course. Of course, wobbliness can also come from colleagues and administrators who object to or police the boundaries of courses on topics informed by identity, trauma, and activism (Bacon 2006).

As an instructor, I experience this wobbliness as a sense of heightened expectations from myself. I tinker more with this syllabus than others, and I reliably turn in my book orders last, and late, because of last-minute dithering. There is an excited tension in my stomach when I head into this class and not others. Wobbliness also comes from my queer identity and the tension between my commitments to my community and queer-theoretic, identity-refusing deconstructionism (Allen 2015; Wallace 1994). It also comes from being a white professor who talks about race (Donadey 2002) and a cis professor teaching about transgender issues (see also Nemi Neto 2018). In the frequent conversations with colleagues to report happenings or seek advice, I often receive responses like “this never happens in my classes” and “I’m glad I’m not teaching what you teach.” Some wobbliness can be good, then, in engaging us as instructors and bridging our political and activist commitments and in serving the breadth (and depths!) of our students. BtB reduces my wobbliness to a manageable level by explicitly sharing with students the responsibilities and rewards of learning by giving them structured control over part of the syllabus, as I describe in the following section.

Teaching Sexualities with Beyond the Book

BtB is a self-directed structured mini-course of four or five class sessions spread across the semester during which students pursue a topic (“personal learning goal”) of their choice through peer-reviewed research. It occurs in the context of a small group with whom they build trust and to whom they give verbal presentations that explicitly connect their chosen texts both to their articulated personal learning goals and the broader course’s learning goals. They develop oral communication skills through coteaching their peers and from whom they learn other peer-reviewed research on a topic of interest to each. BtB is organized in the following fashion.

At the end of the add/drop period, I group students into their BtB groups. First, I have students articulate a personal learning goal for what they want to learn about sexuality. I have done this both on paper and also on a Google Doc, which was useful because students could see each others’ interests. I then assign students to groups of no fewer than four and no more than six students on roughly similar themes. The next day in class, I have students meet in their groups and post the group themes and members, allowing them to switch to another group provided they do not leave their original group with fewer than four members or make the new group have more than six. There is much swapping and trading as students realize a new theme is more appealing, or as friends sit together, but at the end of 10 or so minutes, students are introduced to their BtB discussion groups that they will keep for the rest of the semester. Themes around which students’ interests have converged in the four times I have used BtB include religion, art, intersectional identities, disabilities, international comparisons, critical race perspectives, bisexuality and pansexuality, public health, public school sexual education, sexual assault prevention, hookup culture, Grindr and Tinder, transgender sexualities, and a category I improvised called “against normal sex,” which has grouped students interested in asexuality, demisexuality, aromanticism, autism, and pain during intercourse. Students have occasionally tried to guess if a group was a “leftover” or “potpourri” group; they have been unsuccessful so far, in part because I am committed to the themes I assign.

To scaffold the BtB activity, I provide a lesson approximately two weeks before the first BtB session that defines peer-reviewed research and helps student locate appropriate sources, including connecting them to research librarian appointments. I provide students with a list of potential sources and search engines (see Appendix A). In the 15-minute lesson, I discuss what peer review is, its goals, its limitations, its importance, and the time lag between research questions and publication. This last is important for students whose goal is to learn about a relatively new phenomenon or one that has received little research attention or whose literature went by a different name in the past (as gender nonbinary may have been called genderqueer or as bisexuality once stood in for pansexuality). We also talk about the relative marginality of sexualities research and the gatekeeping function of major journals and publishing houses.

In this same class session, I allow class time for BtB groups to discuss their selection process and help each other find suitable texts while I circulate and give suggestions. For this session, I encourage students to bring devices to search in class, such as tablets, smartphones, or laptops, including ones checked out from the library. If there are multiple monographs on the topic, I encourage the group to divide them up—students are free to pursue a single book over the course of the term or to pick and choose among texts. During this session, I emphasize the role of expertise developed outside the classroom, sharing it with others, and building trust with each other.

BtB sessions happen during one class period at the end of each major unit of class, which is about every three weeks, during which time we have either read articles on a theme or a monograph; a textbook unit would also work. For the BtB session, students are responsible for locating, reading, and presenting one peer-reviewed article or university press book chapter to their BtB group. Some students choose to curate what is effectively a mini-syllabus of four to five articles that address their personal learning goal. Others adopt a monograph on their topic, reading a chapter per BtB session.

For a BtB class session, there are no other assigned readings; the students’ homework for class is to prepare a memo from which to verbally present what they learned to their BtB group. Students submit this memo to the classroom management platform Blackboard before class, briefly addressing each of the following prompts:

These memos help students to organize their thoughts and integrate their individual learning with the shared learning in the course, and they provide accountability for preparing to give their verbal presentations. These memos and their BtB presentations are worth 40 percent of their grade for the class.

On BtB day, groups have the entire class period to coteach each other. As they move into their breakout groups, I ask them to share the responsibilities for being timekeeper and to keep presentations, including questions and discussion, to under 10 minutes per student. This frees me to float among groups and eavesdrop. They run these breakout groups very professionally, so I feel like a third wheel because they do not need me, and I also feel jealousy that I cannot learn all that they are learning. Students take these presentations very seriously and, by the end of the semester, are quite polished in their delivery of what sounds expository but is based on their summary memos, whose categories they have internalized. By the third session, BtB becomes a routine part of the class, but the first session requires some scaffolding.

For assessment, students receive full credit for submitting their BtB memo to Blackboard and attendance on the day of presentations. I skim through their memos, grading them on a plus-check-minus framework, writing one sentence of comments that is usually a validation of their learning or a suggestion for an article on their personal learning goal. Only rarely do I need to intervene because a student is not following directions and needs help with the memo format, such as in remembering to respond explicitly to each of the five prompts. If a student presents but has not submitted a memo but does present, I allow them to submit the memo late, which often means the student has been reading right up until the beginning of class. Attendance at BtB sessions is higher than average course sessions, as I discuss in the following, and as an experiential assignment, assessment requires less labor on my part than commenting on essays, for example.

BtB has a cumulative option for their final assessment for the class. One of their final paper options is to synthesize and summarize their BtB readings, addressing the same presentation prompts in written form of four to five pages (the other option is to revise and extend one of their other two papers). Students thus have the opportunity to demonstrate mastery over their self-directed cumulative learning while explicitly synthesizing it with shared course texts and discussions. The BtB tool emerged from a particular institutional context that may shape its adoption elsewhere, although it also responds to a variety of contemporary pedagogical best practices that are less context dependent.

Contextualizing BtB

I have taught at large and medium sized public universities but developed and deploy BtB at a selective small liberal arts college in a small town where there are limited opportunities for community-engaged learning. The course is cross-listed with the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Program, of which I am a past director, and attracts students from across the curriculum; there are routinely about 25 percent of students from STEM majors who are often interested in the medical professions and a similar proportion of students from the humanities who come to learn about Freud and Foucault. This is a primarily white institution, so students of color never make up more than 25 percent of the class, and each may be the only student of their community. Gender diversity is high; although there are always approximately four women students to every man, the class routinely encompasses ~20 percent gender nonbinary or transgender students. The course is capped at 35 students, but I often have a couple more. I find this too large for whole-class discussions, especially at the beginning of the semester, because students express fears of being “cancelled” or “called out” if they say the wrong thing and/or causing harm to others, even unintentionally (e.g., Ross 2019).

The student body identifies as intellectual and will read and comprehend academic monographs and journal articles with some scaffolding in lecture. BtB was designed to pair with course units organized around book-length monographs that we read together, but I have taught it in conjunction with thematic units composed of articles, both academic and journalistic. I think it is possible that BtB may be useful in contexts where students are resistant to reading, and it may be modified to include popular sources rather than peer-reviewed research; I present supporting evidence regarding student engagement in the following.

The student body also exhibits a high degree of knowledge about LGBTQ issues. On a 2019 campus-wide survey conducted by the Student Senate unrelated to my course, which achieved an approximately 50 percent response rate, some 40 percent of students identified as LGBTQ. ¹ This means that the heteronormativity that other instructors at other institutions frequently report (e.g., Miller and Lucal 2009) is not present here. LGBTQ students and those with LGBTQ friends and family members sometimes express less confidence during office hours over their knowledge, however, or a desire to have formal instruction in topics they have picked up on their own. Non-LGBTQ students also often report a desire to learn about issues that were new to them upon coming to college or to address other intersectional issues that are less frequently addressed. Students also sometimes expect the class to be an LGBTQ studies class and express frustration and/or surprise at the amount of time spent on heterosexuality.

The design of BtB responds to several effective pedagogical practices. It helps address the problem of the representativeness of course content that often erases the most and/or multiply marginalized students (Nowakowski et al. 2016). For students who wish to pursue their lived experiences, the exercise permits them to exercise their sociological imagination by connecting their personal troubles to public issues (Hoop 2009). Encouraging students to see the BtB sessions as skill building in verbal presentations, not merely as reportage, is in keeping with best practices (Gillis 2019). It also explicitly shares some of the responsibility of learning with the student rather than solely resting on the instructor. By allowing students to pick themes relevant to them, BtB thus incorporates practices that improve student learning, participation, and critical thinking skills (see review in Howard et al. 2014).

For students who are avoiding topics connected to trauma, BtB allows them to have some control over the curriculum while letting other activists pursue topics that can be triggering, sensitive, or provoke emotional reactions (Bach and Weinzimmer 2011; Murphy-Geiss 2008). For example, I regularly have BtB groups focused around sexual assault prevention or consent, which allows some students to pursue these topics while students who wish to avoid intensive discussions of these topics can choose their own personal learning goal that reflects their circumstances. BtB thus responds to trauma-informed pedagogy by allowing students the opportunity to develop “emotional safety” in their small groups (Carello and Butler 2014), in part because I make explicit that students need not disclose reasons for their selection of their personal learning goal. And by letting students have some control over their curriculum, it may alleviate any impressions that the instructor has a personal agenda in teaching a topic like sexualities (Miller and Lucal 2009).

BtB is also an example of team-based learning (TBL; Ochoa and Pershing 2011). As Huggins and Stamatel (2015:228) summarized its benefits, TBL is successful at:

TBL demonstrates positive classroom effects: Students report getting to know their peers and instructor more, and their perceptions of learning and satisfaction were greater (Huggins and Stamatel 2015). TBL, in the form of organized book clubs, has been shown to “foster greater student participation, a higher level of group intimacy, and a sense of student empowerment in their own learning” (Wyant and Bowen 2018:263). These are reflected in student evaluations, as I detail in the following section.

Like other TBL models, BtB sessions employ active learning and a flipped classroom, with students pursuing their BtB texts on their own, and “most of the class time is spent working on activities in stable, small groups” (Huggins and Stamatel 2015:228). This helps overcome student resistance to group work (Caulfield and Hodges Persell 2006; Monson 2019) and increases student accountability (Stein, Colyer, and Manning 2016).

In each of the four deployments of BtB, I have been prepared to intervene in the occasion that a group does not gel, that a group member does not pull his or her weight, or to address conflict in a BtB group. None of these fears have ever been realized. Upon reflection (at the prompting of an anonymous reviewer), I find this to be extraordinary. I think the lack of conflict in groups and the individual accountability students have demonstrated is an indication of the seriousness with which students take their learning, if they are allowed to assume some responsibility for it, and the important role of providing structure to scaffolding successful small-group discussion groups.

Indications of Success

I have used BtB in four iterations of the class over four academic years. Data presented here are from three college-administered SETs and one midterm SET that I administered myself; all were anonymous, and an Institutional Review Board exemption was obtained for permission to quote from them. On BtB’s first deployment, I conducted my own anonymous evaluation of it; approximately one-third of students responded affirmatively to the question I posed: “I am finding I am doing more work for BtB than I would normally for this class.” There were no indications, however, on the end-of-semester SETs that the course was too much work; it was rated a three out of five for the measures of pace, difficulty, and amount of coursework on the standardized SETs deployed by the college.

Students also demonstrated higher than average levels of attendance. Students who are absent can make up their BtB presentation by presenting to me in office hours. I have never had more than three absences total from BtB class sessions across an entire term, nor had the same student missed more than one session per term (until this streak was upended by the pandemic teaching semester of fall 2020). This is an attendance rate for BtB sessions of approximately 98 percent. For example, at one BtB session in which I administered a SET, all 36 of the registered students were present, an unusual occurrence before I used BtB. It may be that because BtB shares with other pedagogies a local norming effect, it may overcome traditional barriers to attendance (O’Sullivan et al. 2015).

A thematic analysis of qualitative comments on SETs suggests that students appreciated the ability to pursue an individualized topic. Student comments on this theme included:

On the four SETs involving BtB, there were no negative comments on the theme of pursuing an individual topic.

Another theme from SET comments was that BtB was a nice structural change to the lectures and full-class discussions, although it should be noted that I used small-group discussions other than BtB (these groups were later randomly assigned to provide variety from BtB teammates). Evidence that some students differentiated among them is provided by the comment, “I loved having set small groups and beyond the books,” but on other SETs, it is unclear which small groups to which students are referring. Others commented on the theme of groupwork being a positive experience:

Overall, approximately three-quarters of the comments related to the theme of small-group discussions were positive.

There were dissenting voices on this topic, it should be noted, which reveal as much about student understandings of learning as they do about the challenges posed by small groups. One student said of group discussions that they “can be good and productive but I find isn’t always as useful in terms of concrete learning,” while another speculated that “I would have learned more from [the professor] than my peers.” Others concurred: “Sometimes small groups eclipsed whole group discussion/getting information from the professor” and “This class has also opened up a bunch of questions that aren’t addressed in the course and that bugs me because I want answers.” None of these discussions of “small groups” cited BtB specifically, however; when mentioned by name, it only garnered positive comments. These critical comments about small groups suggest the need for increased scaffolding for my other discussion-based learning in this class, to which I have responded by creating handouts for each one with specific questions for students to discuss.

In a recent iteration of the course, I administered a midterm SET of my own design that solicited specific feedback for improving BtB (N = 36/36). On the general theme of how to improve BtB, student suggestions were either contradictory or requested more structure. On the subtheme of more structure, one student encouraged me to require that students write down what they will read for their next BtB because “it’s hard to motivate myself w/o accountability,” while another requested “more structure” for BtB. I took these suggestions and required the memos as described previously. Another asked that I send an email on the weekend before BtB “so I’m ready,” and another asked that I provide “a bit more enforcement of the time limitations per person.” I responded to these suggestions by counting down the class days to BtB sessions throughout the semester and reminding students before each BtB session to appoint timekeepers for presentations.

On the subthemes for which students as a group expressed contradictory desires, two students requested that I “maybe switch up the groups occasionally,” although three expressed appreciation for the “trust” they had developed. I reported this feedback to the class when it resumed after our fall break and reported which of their suggestions I would/could honor and which were contradictory to the majority of the classes’ wishes and my experience and intuition. Overall, however, these suggestions have continued to build structure into the BtB activity that allows them to function independently and with little on-the-day supervision.

Conclusion

Teaching sexualities at the college level poses challenges because classroom dynamics are often wobbly, responding to events at the campus, world, and individual levels. Students often come to class with implicit and sometimes subconscious wants and needs, informed by individual identities, traumas, or political commitments. As a student wrote on one of my SETs, “I think this course must be difficult to teach, as opinions on the subject not only vary but can be highly sensitive to people. I was impressed at the breadth of our discussion on difficult and complicated topics.” Other sociology courses that implicate identities, activisms, or traumas are also likely to be wobbly and thus may benefit from stabilizing strategies like BtB.

This wobbliness presents an opportunity to harness student desires and help learners develop research skills by explicitly identifying a personal learning goal for the class and connecting it to peer-reviewed research. Scaffolding this goal in small discussion groups helps build peer trust amid fears about cancel culture and allows students to develop oral presentation skills. Asking students to explicitly connect their BtB selection to their personal learning goal and the course learning goals helps develop their focus on learning outcomes, supporting institutional goals for assessment. Giving them the opportunity to demonstrate these connections on a final paper allows them to build a cumulative experience throughout the class that connects self-directed and course-directed learning. And Beyond the Book also assuages this instructor’s own wobbliness by explicitly sharing with students the responsibility—and rewards—of learning.

COVID-19 CODA

This article was drafted before COVID overturned our in-person classrooms and made remote and hybrid teaching the norm. I am teaching this class this fall 2020 semester, and the BtB activity has adapted well to a dedensified hybrid classroom in which only half of the students are in the classroom on any given session while the others are on the videoconferencing platform Zoom. Students meet for BtB in Zoom breakout rooms on designated days, and I circulate among them as I always did, virtually instead of physically. Students have normed their breakout rooms differently; in some, everyone has their cameras on; in others, nobody does; others were a mix. I let them decide what worked best for them. Compared to the other two classes I am teaching this semester, this class is going the best as measured by attendance and student engagement, both verbally and in the chat window, supporting the conclusions I drew earlier. Informally, students during office hours reported appreciating the ability to get to know, virtually but deeply, a small group of students. On this basis, I am deploying BtB in one of my upcoming spring classes in which I had not previously because wobbliness in pandemic now seems to be a general feature of hybrid online-offline education.