Students hold foundational assumptions that interact with information they are introduced to in college. By learning to identify, assess, and restructure these foundational ideas, students' ability to acquire topical knowledge improves. This article presents a format for teaching students how to evaluate their beliefs through four levels of…

Contemplative practices are becoming more common in educational environments for attending to whole-student learning, fostering empathy, and promoting social justice and socially just pedagogues. This conversation explores how holistic approaches facilitate and expand the parameters of sociological pedagogy to integrate humanist pedagogies and…

In this study we explore how incorporating an arts-based pedagogical approach, specifically, the use of film, art, and music, into a second-year sociological theory course enhances students' overall learning experiences. We report on data collected from a survey given to students enrolled in this course in 2020. Findings reveal that employing this…

This article explores the outcomes of using community-engaged learning in a sustainability-focused social sciences research course titled Methods of Social Research. The integrated components of the course were designed to teach students about the research process while addressing sustainability issues at Utah State University. Throughout the…

Sociology instructors have long used nontraditional texts such as literary fiction to demonstrate core course concepts, increase student engagement, and develop students' critical thinking in the classroom. In this article, I explore how written assignments structured around identifying core course concepts in a dystopian novel that connects to…

Sociology teachers often encounter students studying to be future health professionals; sociology content can assist students to increase their understanding of patients, the social context of health and illness, and the social determinants of health. Engaging these students in sociological thinking can be challenging because of their diverse…

Social inequality is a central theme in sociology study plans (both in research and education), but it is often one of the most difficult topics to teach. This article presents an innovative student-centered strategy for teaching social inequality that uses a survey to collect data on students' socioeconomic characteristics and perceptions of…

Sociology curricula often house a variety of "hot button" or contentious topics (e.g., race relations, crime and deviance, personal freedoms/choice, gender). While departments may be giving more attention to ensuring that these topics are included in their curriculum, here I argue that we also need to engage students in reflection about…

A common learning goal of law-related courses taught in sociology classrooms is for students to gain an understanding of the sociological approach to law. This approach emphasizes viewing law as a social process and studying law by analyzing both legal and nonlegal phenomena. A challenge to students' achievement of this learning goal is their…

Although there is a great deal of available material on using nontraditional resources for teaching sociology, the pedagogical uses of science fiction have not been examined for 20 years. This essay first asserts the need for an update based on changes in society and in science fiction over the past two decades. The paper then focuses on the uses…

International travel has long been considered a key pedagogical strategy for global learning. Yet very little is known about whether study-abroad experiences increase students' awareness of the impact of tourism as a global phenomenon. In this study, we assessed students' learning through a content analysis of their journals and final essays from…

This study adopted a case-study approach to examine how associate degree sociology graduates evaluate their learning in a Hong Kong community college. Through focus group interviews, the learning experiences of sociology graduates were examined, specifically paying attention to their identification of enhancements in learning. The results of this…

Sociology can be a highly emancipatory discipline, permitting students and researchers to identify and thus alter the structures that contour their lives. Nowhere has this been clearer to me than in teaching sociology to incarcerated students in state prisons. Drawing on nine semesters of teaching experience and a complement of semi-structured…

Colleges and universities face pressures from multiple stakeholders to attend to the labor market success of their graduates. In this article, we argue that it is in the best interests of sociology students and the discipline that sociology programs respond proactively to these pressures. We encourage sociology programs to design curricula that…

Service learning (SL) is growing in our universities and in Spain. However, still much action and research are needed with a gender perspective. This article aims to evaluate an SL project that consisted of workshops in schools on gender and technology. We evaluated the experience with a mixed-methods approach and a gender perspective. This…