Abstract
It is a warm October afternoon in South Georgia as I write this. It is a bit difficult to realize that winter will soon be upon us when it is nearly 75 degrees outside. But I know that longer nights and shorter, cooler days are just around the corner. And with those changes come a new year, one full of intriguing pedagogical promise. For faculty, 2012’s presidential election creates significant opportunities to teach about sampling, the survey creation process, and how to analyze statistics. We will soon be awash in advertising and polls about the U.S. presidential election and many important state issues and can use these data in our teaching. While sociology has an enormous body of literature about how individuals and groups make political decisions and how advertising, religion identification, social class, educational attainment, and so on impact voting behavior, many of our sister social sciences have useful knowledge and insights as well. How much of this scholarship will we use in our teaching?
I have been thinking about how much of my own scholarship about social problems and the media pulls broadly from many disciplines. Yet most of my pedagogical research does not; it has stayed nearly entirely within the sociological literature, which in reality means nearly completely from the pages of Teaching Sociology. Diane Pike’s (2010) Hans O. Mauksch Address, “Teaching Sociology: Leader of the Pack? An Exploratory Study of Teaching Journals across Disciplines” really made an impact on me; I did not even know that some of those journals existed, let alone the quality pedagogical literature that I was missing by not reading them. My students have benefitted because I now regularly read this literature.
The editorial board and I have decided that we want to promote this kind of interdisciplinarity by encouraging authors to explore beyond the sociological literature. So don’t be surprised if I or reviewers ask authors to read widely in the scholarship of teaching and learning, not just in sociology. Look for the addition of this idea in the Guidelines for Submission soon.
I am excited to announce that later this year we plan on having a special edition of Teaching Sociology about the role of writing in sociology programs. See the call in this edition on page 91. If you have an idea and are not sure whether it might fit, please contact the guest editor, Suzanne Hudd (
It is also the time of year to say some goodbyes and some “welcome aboards.” The following members of the Editorial Board will have completed their term this past December: Peter L. Callero, Marisol Clark-Ibanez, Michael DeCesare, Anne Eisenberg, Chad Hanson, Mark Israel, Matthew Lee, Wendy Ng, Shireen Rajaram, Stephen Sweet, and Susan Takata. I want to thank each of them; since July 2009, the board became more of a working group, with most manuscripts having one board member as a reviewer. They all were willing to step up and review on a regular basis. I knew I could count on them for quick and thorough reviews. And I want to welcome these new Editorial Board members: Meghan Burke, Otis Grant, Katrina Hoop, Suzanne Hudd, Donna King, Robin Moreman, Chavella Pittman, and Sara O’Sullivan.
Please feel free to write me with your ideas about Teaching Sociology or if you have an idea for a manuscript. I am here to help you—I am always in search of interesting manuscript submissions.
Happy 2012,