In the past 15-20 years, contemplative practices, designed to cultivate present-moment awareness, have become more common in K-12 educational settings with some growth in higher education contexts seeking to reorient around teaching the "whole student". In response to calls that have also emerged in higher education to advance social…

In the past 15-20 years, contemplative practices, designed to cultivate present-moment awareness, have become more common in K-12 educational settings with some growth in higher education contexts seeking to reorient around teaching the "whole student". In response to calls that have also emerged in higher education to advance social…

A public service announcement is a form of public, free-space messaging in which an individual proposes an idea with the aim to influence the public's attitude toward an exciting potential (Slater 2006). In this article, the author describes implementing this method across a wide variety of undergraduate content disciplines, including psychology,…

In this paper, the author explores some of the issues associated with teaching about compulsory heterosexuality and schooling in an undergraduate sociology programme. Using a novel approach to gathering data, the article analyses the stories students submitted about themselves or others who were counter normative in terms of gender and sexuality…

The American Sociological Association identified 12 major recommendations for the undergraduate major, which include 11 learning goals articulated in the sociological literacy framework. In total, these recommendations identified upward of 70 different curricular elements that optimal sociology programs should consider satisfying. This article…

This study explores the promise of student success in undergraduate education that exceeds its standard definition and measurement as retention and graduation rates. The research paradox framing this dissertation is: "In what ways can universities support conceptions of undergraduate student success that escape measurement?" This paradox…

This article uses analysis of 72 syllabi to investigate portrayals of Black urban communities in undergraduate Urban and Community Sociology courses taught in colleges and universities in the United States. The authors conducted keyword analyses of the syllabi and content analyses of the assigned readings. Although professors' course descriptions…

Not only does teaching about gender and sexuality diversity lead to some very interesting and often emotionally evocative, pedagogical exchanges; it can also create challenging issues for teachers and students alike. This article focuses on what happens when a module that addresses compulsory heterosexuality and schooling is broached in an…

The past 50 years have witnessed a growing presence of critical theory within different social science academic departments across the western world. The joint existence of a theory committed to exposing and criticizing various inequalities of the social order within academic institutions based on traditional hierarchies and prestigious…

Undergraduate capstone courses in sociology are designed to integrate students' knowledge in the discipline and to culminate the classroom experience with field application. Are capstones achieving these goals in a durable way? Although the short-term outcomes of capstone courses have been researched, fewer studies have documented the long-term…

Methods textbooks play a role in socializing a new generation of researchers about ethical research. How do undergraduate social research methods textbooks portray harm, its prevalence, and ways to mitigate harm to participants? We conducted a content analysis of ethics chapters in the 18 highest-selling undergraduate textbooks used in sociology…

This paper reflects on a teaching problem highlighted as part of a second-year undergraduate module in sociology, taught at a UK based institution of higher education. The specific teaching problem -- that of student learning as encountered and revealed in seminars -- was nested within other issues; some of which related to the characteristics of…

This article examines the intersection of service-learning with complex systems theory. It is based on a research project we undertook to explore whether complex systems theory might be useful for better understanding the dynamics of service-learning practice and thus for assisting in the design, running, and evaluation of service-learning…

Despite being a decade into the 21st century, sociological theory continues to be taught at the undergraduate and graduate level in nearly every program in the United States as if it were still 1970. 40 years ago, it made sense to dichotomize theory into two courses--"classical" and "contemporary"--because the latter of the two…

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…