Creating a positive classroom experience for students can be a challenge, especially when teaching a contested topic such as gender studies. Teaching and learning gender is teaching and learning against the grain, which can lead to feelings of comfort and discomfort among students. The objective is to capture different manifestations of…

Scholars of teaching and learning in sociology have argued that introductory courses should teach toward foundational learning goals instead of providing an exhaustive review of the discipline. Nevertheless, prior research has provided far more guidance on what instructors ought to teach than how they can cohesively support learning across the…

Previous scholarship has demonstrated the value of high-impact practices of community engagement, inquiry-based pedagogy, and collaborative learning for engagement and learning in sociology courses, especially undergraduate research methods and statistics. This article explores the changes made to an upper-division undergraduate course focused on…

Two common ways that instructors assess participation in sociology courses are recalling participation by memory or counting times spoken during class in real time. However, these common assessments rely on faulty assumptions that do not support their usage. This article reconceptualizes participation grading as an opportunity to motivate skill…

This teaching note describes my multiyear experience with interventions designed to enhance student engagement and learning through various teaching techniques, most notably active and collaborative learning through local case studies. While other aspects of this course had been successful, I was disappointed in the level of engagement--the…

The authors explore the challenges inherent in traversing the multiple boundaries between sociology and social work, and the academy and the community, by examining a service learning course on hunger and homelessness taught by two sociology professors and two social workers on the staff of a community service organization. The authors draw on…

This article describes an experiment in collaborative course design in a midlevel sociology course. Unlike most of the literature on collaborative teaching and learning, which often deals with collaboration among students, this article discusses collaboration between the instructor and students. The students in this course collaborated with the…

Increasingly, colleges and universities are relying on fully online classes to teach students. This article investigates how students evaluate online courses in comparison to more traditional face-to-face courses. Data come from undergraduate student evaluations of 118 sociology courses, and results of a series of hierarchical linear models…

In 2001, the governing council of the American Sociological Association (ASA) appointed Professor Caroline Persell of New York University to launch a task force with the goal of creating an advanced high school sociology curriculum that would also be a model for introductory sociology courses in colleges and universities. The principle goal of the…

This project was designed to assess whether a collaborative learning approach to teaching sociological theory would be a successful means of improving student engagement in learning theory and of increasing both the depth of students' understanding of theoretical arguments and concepts and the ability of students to theorize for themselves. A…

The demand for online courses is growing. This paper offers suggestions on how to teach online courses that promote student engagement and learning. We discuss the benefits and challenges of teaching online. We share research-based strategies for designing an online course and draw upon our experience of developing fully online sociology courses.…

A long-term experience with the complex organizations sociology course is recounted. Problems, challenges, and rewards are discussed. The course's organization and approach are described, including emphases, topics, reading materials, examinations, term projects, "capstone" articles, analysis of cases, and special topics. (Author/GEA)

Utopian societies can actually demonstrate some essential needs for community life. In this sociology course students read utopian literature and then investigated the lessons gleaned from their study of the utopian societies through experiential learning projects, e.g., participant observation of dorm life, leadership simulations, and utopian…

The course described in the paper is organized around a set of modules, each containing lectures, readings, a simulation game, films, and a research exercise. (Author/ND)

One way to enliven a research methods course in sociology is to require students to select journal articles over a 20- to 30-year period to show how research strategies have changed on a topic in which they have special interest. Teaching strategies are discussed. (Author/RM)