This teaching note presents an assignment in which students write an op-ed on a course-related issue and submit it to a newspaper. I argue that an op-ed assignment dovetails with pedagogical goals around democratic citizenship and public sociology. I explain the project's objectives, instructions, and timeline. I present evidence from three…

This article is a reflective analysis of an assignment in which undergraduate students developed dystopian, postapocalyptic, fantasy, and fictional short story parables to illustrate their understanding of sociological theory. In a social theory course, students were assigned a final paper in which they designed a short story that integrated…

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…

While prior research has illustrated the strengths of collaborative teaching between sociology and English, less has examined the potential of cross-listed courses, instead largely focusing on how to bring writing instruction into the sociology classroom. Similarly, other work has explored the possible uses of literary examples "within"…

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…

The instruction of classical sociological theory at Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY) underwent significant transformation to make it more activity-based and better aligned with departmental learning goals. The article focuses on the effectiveness of an "edited book" project that came of this endeavor, where…

The U.S. K-12 public education system is fundamentally unequal. What efforts can facilitate students to become deeply immersed in the realities of the system and to embody the need for social change? This article investigates scaffolded, semester-long writing assignments to demonstrate patterns in the three tenets of critical community-engaged…

We argue that the literature on critical thinking in sociology has conflated two different skill sets: critical sociological thinking and higher-level thinking. To begin to examine how sociologists weigh and cultivate these skill sets, we interviewed 20 sociology instructors and conducted a content analysis of 26 assignments. We found that while…

President Obama's America's College Promise proposal has brought renewed attention to community colleges' capacity to connect the college and career aspirations of today's undergraduates. Despite this capacity, however, community colleges have historically offered students two distinct educational pathways: a liberal education transfer-oriented…

This paper presents an analysis of my experiences with a teaching activity that engages students in publishing in Wikipedia on issues relating to globalization. It begins with a short overview of some of the current debates revolving around teaching globalization, which lay ground for the assignment. I discuss how this teaching tool fits with a…

We have created a new teaching tool--process memos--to improve student writing. Process memos are guided reflections submitted with scaffolded assignments that facilitate a written dialogue between students and instructors about the process of writing. Within these memos, students critically assess available teaching tools, discuss their writing…

In this study, we test the effect of in-class student peer review on student learning outcomes using a quasiexperimental design. We provide an assessment of peer review in a quantitative research methods course, which is a traditionally difficult and technical course. Data were collected from 170 students enrolled in four sections of a…

This paper explores dynamics of students' critical consciousness development in the context of a thematically organized service-learning sociology course titled Health, Illness, and Community. The integrated components of the course were designed to cultivate critical consciousness by framing the study of health in terms of social justice issues…

Nationwide, academic sociologists at all types of higher education institutions face the challenge of working to improve students' writing skills. In this article, we describe a collective effort by a group of faculty members in one undergraduate sociology program to implement several effective writing-improvement strategies. We advocate…

This article isolates and observes the impact of peer readership on low-stakes reflective writing assignments in two large Introduction to Sociology classes. Through a comparative content analysis of over 2,000 private reflective journal entries and semipublic reflective blog posts, I find that both practices produce distinct forms of reflection.…