Teaching Sociology

The scholarly literature on teaching sociology contains relatively little about improving courses from one semester to the next. In this article, I describe a method for continual teaching improvement that is based on writing, the well-established practice of teacher reflection, and classical sociological principles. This method was developed through the analysis of nine semesters of autoethnographic data that I collected in the form of daily reflective notes. The benefits of this sociologically informed reflective practice include grounding evaluations of individual class periods and entire courses in empirical data, becoming more efficient with course preparation, providing one with a stronger sense of mastery as a teacher, and developing as a sociologist by using the classroom as a key site for engaging in praxis. This practice can help teachers refine individual courses, improve as an instructor in an overall sense and more deeply connect sociology to the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Sociologists and scholars of composition have long argued that in order to get students to improve the quality of what they write, they need to change how they write. Here, the authors assess whether students’ participation in writing-intensive first-year seminars leads to changes in their writing process. Data collected via pretest and posttest interviews of 34 students show that writing-intensive seminars help first-year students become better planners and revisers yet have little effect on the ways that they prewrite and draft. Additionally, students in their first semester of college demonstrate higher order writing processes at the beginning of their seminar than their second-semester counterparts and show more improvement over the course of the semester as well. We analyze the conditions that foster these patterns and suggest that increasing quantitative course requirements (i.e., page counts) may hamper students’ ability to adopt qualitatively better writing strategies.

In this article, we examine common practices and attitudes surrounding writing pedagogy in the sociology classroom based on an analysis of interviews with 19 sociologists at seven institutions in the Northeast. Our discussion is centered on two distinct approaches to writing that faculty identified: writing as cognitive development and writing as skill development. We observe that when they teach writing, sociologists shift their attention back and forth between these two essential features of good writing. Our analysis contextualizes writing as a form of distributed cognition (Salomon 1993), because it is taught and learned across multiple experiences in the academy. In conclusion, we suggest that a greater attentiveness to the underlying cognitive features of writing will broaden opportunities for campus-wide dialogue about writing across the disciplines and enhance our students’ ability to transfer and build upon their writing experiences across courses.

We analyzed undergraduate sociology course syllabi to determine how prevalent writing is, the types of writing used, and whether assignment of writing and specific types of writing vary by type of course goals, gender of instructor, institutional type, or type of course. Almost all courses represented in these syllabi incorporate writing, with traditional (transactional) writing being the most common. Writing is more likely in courses that seek to enhance students’ critical thinking; transactional writing is used in courses stating critical thinking and sociological imagination/thinking as goals; and expressive writing is used more often in courses specifying critical thinking as a goal. Female instructors incorporate more writing, especially expressive types, than their male counterparts. Implications for disciplinary writing practices are discussed.

Following American Sociological Association’s recommendations for a cumulative curriculum in sociology, sociology faculty at Pacific Lutheran University created cumulative writing competencies to integrate writing into the curriculum on a department level. In this article, I explore the rationale for this programmatic approach to writing, describe the process by which we developed cumulative writing competencies in our major, discuss implementation, and describe our plans for assessment. The writing competencies emphasize that good writing is about more than good grammar; it also requires clear and complex thinking. This model of writing instruction offers students an opportunity to develop their writing skills in a sequential, intentional, discipline-specific way.

This article builds on the concept of “writing as thinking” by describing an in-class, cumulative, peer-writing exercise that helps foster reflexivity. Reflexivity is understood as a process of seeing and a process of being. To be reflexive means that we are fully conscious of the lenses through which we view the world. It suggests that we understand both our situationality and our positionality. In this sense, reflexivity is an essential component of the sociological imagination. Three themes of reflexivity commonly arise from this exercise: developing reflexivity, reinforcing reflexivity, and resisting reflexivity. These themes are discussed and illustrated with full-length excerpts of students’ work.

Journal writing is pedagogically appropriate for increasing reflexivity and conscious awareness of one’s environment. The journal assignment discussed in this article promotes recognition of the impact of race, gender, and social class on students’ everyday lives. In pre- and posttest surveys of students engaged in this assignment, students report statistically significant increases in awareness after journaling. These increases in awareness are found for students enrolled in introductory courses at two very different universities (one a private Catholic midsized university in the Midwest and the other a large state university in the Southeast). Students’ qualitative responses further substantiate the effectiveness of this assignment in meeting course objectives. To facilitate use of this assignment by others, we identify a set of best practices to help ensure high-quality journals and discuss challenges and benefits of this assignment, including getting to know one’s students.

Growth in large courses, particularly in public higher education institutions, poses a number of critical challenges within the context of dramatic increases in Internet use in the larger society. Now students find it easy to copy others’ work without citation, extension, or application of critical thinking skills. If not appropriately addressed, such plagiarism threatens the very authenticity of the educational experience, with such concerns as quality and effectiveness of instruction seeming almost irrelevant. This research focuses on the design of writing assignments to detect and prevent plagiarism. Three types of writing assignments were examined using the “Turnitin” detection system to gauge potential plagiarism. The conclusion is that faculty can design assignments to mitigate plagiarism.

Both “theory” and “writing” engender a great deal of anxiety for the typical undergraduate sociology major. Writing-intensive theory courses increase this feeling exponentially. Active learning approaches to teaching theory are often advocated as a way to combat these fears, but few studies have tested whether these innovations effectively reduce student anxiety. This article describes and evaluates the Film Analysis Papers writing assignment designed to reduce student anxiety in an undergraduate theory course. I present data from a questionnaire that asked students to assess the effect of writing about film on theory anxiety. Findings show that the film assignment reduced anxiety about writing theoretically and improved student confidence in their ability to theorize. This study is unique in that it isolates the effect of active learning approaches on theory anxiety in order to understand whether anxiety mediates the relationship between active learning and learning outcomes in theory classes.