Toward Publicly Responsive Sociology Curricula

Strengths of Most Introductory Sociology Courses

Daniel Little (2012) espouses the benefits of majoring in sociology but also the ASA Task Force on Sociology and General Education delineated the many contributions sociology can make to general educational or core requirements in a liberal arts education (Keith et al. 2007). Some introductory courses may not need improvement in the issues discussed here, but even the “best” courses might benefit from some of the points mentioned in this paper. Introductory sociology courses are especially well suited for meeting both general education and program goals because they have characteristics that other sociology courses may not have. As mentioned above, first courses in sociology enjoy wide curricular exposure and are among the most widely taught sociology courses. Introductory courses also lend themselves to discussion of versatile topics and current events, including topics that can be adjusted to fit with issues most prominent in the media or student subcultures today. In introductory sociology, we can debunk many empirically unsupported or outdated ideas about the social world and teach the skill of debunking as described in Peter Berger’s (1963) Invitation to Sociology. We can broaden psychologistic perspectives with which students arrive in our classes and offer them sociological ones. Moreover, introductory sociology courses introduce students to a scholarly or scientific approach to verifying knowledge (scholarly epistemology) about the social world. Students often arrive at this course with the idea that knowledge is all “just a matter of opinion.” We can debunk this idea and teach them to think critically, assess evidence about their social world, and make better, informed choices with that knowledge in their own lives. Indeed, this course may be the first time students learn about using science to study social behavior and how to apply it to their own lives. Finally, the introductory course could be the first time many students read a scholarly journal article. I can find no really good, recent data about the extent to which we do these important tasks in our courses. It would be worthwhile for researchers in scholarship of teaching and learning literature (SoTL) to consider finding empirical answers to just exactly how many introductory students actually get opportunities to do the above. How many of our students actually learn these skills?

In introductory sociology, we have important ideas, topics, and skills to share. We can share the ideas of classic giants. For example, we can share with students Marx’s and Weber’s reciprocal ideas about the relationship between religion and the economy and/or the importance of social class in creating opportunity structures in society. We can elaborate on cultural diversity and pluralism and why it is important to study cultural differences objectively. We can share the sociological imagination and critical thinking skills as well as how to apply the scientific method (or other scholarly methods) to our study of society. We can also share empirical findings of the latest, best research on important topics.

Who Are Your Students, What Are Their Goals, and Where in the Community Do They Want to Work?

In First Contact, we ask instructors to consider the extent to which their first course is directed to the students who enroll in the course at your campus (Greenwood and Howard 2011). We suggest that instructors need to ask some important questions about their students before designing their courses. These questions include the following: (1) Who are your students? (2) What characteristics do your students bring to the course that will enhance or create barriers to learning? (3) What do your students want to learn about in this class and why? (4) What are your students’ academic and/or career aspirations? (5) How can they use sociology and the sociological imagination in their lives?

Students are the most important public we serve in this and all courses. Course design should consider student characteristics, such as their social class (i.e., Are they first-generation college students?), students needs (Do they need assistance with particular skills in their first year of college, such as study skills, writing skills, etc.?), and students’ questions about the social world. Such knowledge about students can guide the development of courses and curricula in a way that excites students about learning sociology because they will see its relevance to themselves and today’s world (Greenwood and Howard 2011). John Zipp (2012) further elaborated on these ideas in his 2010 Mauksch address.

In First Contact, we also dedicated another chapter to the second question: To what extent does this course fit with university mission and program goals? We suggest college instructors consider the context of their courses. It is ironic that so few sociologists do this. We suggest that instructors examine the extent to which courses are tied to the mission and program goals at their campuses. An introductory sociology instructor would benefit by asking, “What is the mission of my campus?” How does this course serve general education or core requirement goals on my campus? How does the course serve the learning goals of the sociology major? How does the course serve minors or other majors who enroll in this class?

Discovering the answers to these questions on one’s own campus will provide valuable information that allows instructors to design courses that better fit their communities and constituencies rather than courses that reflect individual ideas about what an introductory sociology course should include. It will also allow instructors to build in opportunities consciously and deliberately to provide students with reinforcing activities to learn and practice both general education and program related skills.

What Do You Want Students to Learn in This Course? What Content and Skills Should Be Included as Learning Objectives?

When I teach workshops about teaching introductory sociology to new instructors, questions I am frequently asked are: “What are the most important concepts and theories I should include in my course? Should I focus on content and coverage of material or fundamental skills or perhaps some combination of both?” These are the perennial questions of new instructors. That new instructors are cognizant of the lack of consensus about this important issue is telling. Perhaps all of us can benefit from our novice colleagues’ questions.

There is a plethora of literature on “coverage of content versus skill development” in SoTL. Many argue that seeking to cover all that is important in a course allows little time for students to practice, reflect, and apply what is learned (see Weimer [2002], for a good discussion of this issue). At the same time, if you focus only on skill development, students may miss opportunities to learn important bodies of empirical or theoretical knowledge, and they may not be prepared to move on to other courses that presume this prior knowledge. It is a dilemma met only by a balancing act. Whatever you wish students to accomplish in a course should be explicitly laid out as you design it. Moreover, these learning objectives should fit with your campus mission, program goals, and curricular goals. As such, devising learning goals and outcomes are key and primary initial activities in course design. Courses should be designed around learning goals and outcomes. Not to do so is to allow the cart to pull the horse. Moreover, students need to know what these outcomes are so that they can consciously know what they are supposed to be working toward achieving (Greenwood and Howard 2011).

As instructors, we should also address the question of how our courses demonstrate the utility of the discipline of sociology to students. McKinney (2008) suggests that we should seek direct connections with students’ experiences, as doing so is linked to students’ success. Related questions that we should strive to answer include ideas such as “Does this course help our students understanding of their own experiences and those of others?” This is especially important with regard to important sociological ideas, such as inequality and fairness, group influence on them and others, how students as individuals can affect the larger social context, and what effect race, class, gender, or sexual orientation may have in their lives as opportunities structures. Second, we need to ask, “Do our courses demonstrate sociology’s best research or contributions and show why sociological methods are important? Do we walk students through any one significant piece of research as model for good empirical research?” Our students today have increasingly become more dependent on secondary sources and can be surprisingly uninformed about how scholarship is done. We need to educate them about these methods, but we also need to give them opportunities to read and critique original research so they can see examples of good scholarship and how epistemologies can be different. These skills are invaluable to students graduating in today’s world, where they are exposed to so much information and data. They must learn the skills to determine which data can help them make the best informed choices.

Finally, it is also important to consider the question, “Can introductory courses be topical and provide the breath of coverage that students need to advance successfully to upper level courses?” Could your introductory course be retitled as Introduction to Marxism, Introduction to Symbolic Interaction, Introduction to Feminism, or Introduction to “put your favorite topic here”? While I have observed that most instructors try very hard to give equal and unbiased coverage to a range of theories and research in this course, I have also seen instructors who use the course as a platform for sharing more narrow views on theory and research. I believe that this approach does not serve students or the campus program’s course goals and/or learning objectives as well as it should unless such topics are tied directly to program goals. I argue that students need to be exposed to more than one theoretical view of social phenomena, and they will benefit by an equal-handed, relatively unbiased presentation of those various theories. We should not be indoctrinating students to our own special view of sociology but, rather, should be providing them with opportunities to learn about different views and how to critique those views.

With regard to coverage, I argue that we can teach students to apply sociology to topics and issues by contrasting sociological perspectives with those of other disciplines. What we have to offer students is a valuable product. It is different from social work, psychology, and so on, and we need to show students why a sociological perspective is valuable. Moreover, we need to find a balance between presenting our central concepts, theories, and best research and making it relevant to students’ lives without “watering down” our content. This can be done with homage to campus mission and program goals as well if we sit down with our colleagues and discuss what we want to do.

Finally with regard to coverage, we might consider to what extent the course prepares students for advanced courses in sociology. Is the first course sequenced developmentally to help prepare students for the next course? Or is this course, as it is referred to in ASA’s Liberal Learning document (McKinney et al. 2004), a ticket for a ride on the sociology Ferris wheel such that once completed, students can now take any course regardless of what was learned? We should seek to link our courses within our curriculum on our campuses in some developmental way. This should be especially true with regard to skill development but with content as well. We devalue our program, courses, and student learning when we are overly repetitious with regard to content or leave out important skills and concepts because we have not consensually defined our program goals and how our course will help students meet these goals. Curriculum development on your campus should be both a social process and one that builds consensus among faculty members about what you teach and what students should learn.

Clearly we must consider the extent to which majors and nonmajors may need different introductory experiences. Some colleges and universities have developed unique introductory courses for these two categories of students. One vision of the course for nonmajors might be a more applied course. Another example that can be seen on some larger campuses is a course that makes it possible to offer introductory courses that allow students to apply sociology to their own major, such as nursing or education. But far and away, most campuses use introductory sociology as the course that meets general education requirements as well as the prerequisite for other upper-level courses in sociology for our majors. It may be that we need to rethink this duality of roles for our introductory course. Can one course meet the needs of both sociology majors and everyone else? Perhaps we should consider designing different introductory sociology experiences for students majoring (or think they want to major) in sociology and one or more for those who will major in other fields. How can we better meet the needs of our students in this regard?

To design a course for nonmajors, faculty on your campus would need to have a discussion about fitting program goals (of all the programs involved, not just sociology) with broader sociological disciplinary goals. Different campuses might develop different learning outcomes and opportunities for students, yet each could provide students with opportunities to learn to use and apply sociology to their work and lives. We have so much to offer students in other majors, but we seem to be stuck in a teaching rut, teaching as if all of our students want to be sociologists. Yet we know better.

To What Extent Is There Alignment between Course Learning Objectives and Disciplinary Standards?

Our fourth question suggests we consider the extent to which there is alignment between learning objectives in this course with disciplinary standards in sociology. To answer this question, we must ask a corollary question: Are there disciplinary standards for content or skills to be taught in this course? Again, the Liberal Learning document provides us with learning goals for the major, but I am suggesting we might think about what disciplinary goals there are or should be for an introductory course in sociology (McKinney et al. 2004). I find no document that addresses these for the entire course or that shows a consensus among sociology professors about what we should be teaching in this course. I am not suggesting that we all should be teaching the same exact course with the same content or textbook. But I am suggesting we need to examine the extent to which there is a consensual core of concepts, theories, research, or skills that could guide our course design and implementation. Wagenaar’s (2004a, 2004b) research initiated a discussion about this issue in general. Perhaps we need to continue this discussion. Is there a consensual core shared by sociologists in the discipline, for introductory sociology?

There appears to be very little agreement in the discipline about our identity as scholars. Sociologists can be as different as astrophysicists are to engineers. Within the boundaries of sociology, we can find people who consider themselves humanists, empiricists, Marxists or structural functionalists, micro sociologists or macro sociologists, and on and on. Our diversity as a discipline is well demonstrated by the number of specialty sections within ASA. There are 55. Finding consensus on any one issue would difficult at best. Finding consensus on the topics to be covered in introductory sociology would be even more difficult. No doubt some group of sociologists will be offended because their views are misrepresented and/or some critical part of their view is omitted.

Some research findings suggest we agree on the importance of a few concepts, such as inequality, socialization, and the sociological imagination within our discipline (Keith and Ender 2004a, 2004b; Wagenaar 2004a, 2004b). But these same authors also suggest that the list of these consensual core concepts is small compared to what is not consensually agreed is central to our discipline. This raises a critical issue in that without a commonly identifiable core, our identity as a discipline is not clearly defined or unified. Moreover, it means that the answer to the question, “Is there a consensual core that should be taught in this course in sociology?” is muddy at best. I believe this lack of consensus leaves the door open for others (i.e., administrators, university boards, legislators, and other groups with loud voices) to do so. Who do we, as a discipline, want to make these decisions?

We might then seek consensus at least within our own department or on own campus. There are favorable examples of how colleagues do discuss and develop consensual learning objectives for each course. Some of this trend has been assessment driven, but, especially in larger departments, it can be difficult to get even our immediate colleagues to agree on some learning objectives for this course, but it is not impossible. Developing consensus requires that local colleagues meet regularly; discuss the central concepts, theories, and skills that students should be exposed to in introductory course; and arrive at some agreement about concepts, theories, and skills that should be shared components of all similar courses on a campus.

After many years of teaching, I can identify a “starter” list of concepts with which students should have some knowledge when they complete an introductory course. Many of these are in the standard textbooks. This starter list would need to be discussed for fit with campus mission, program goals, and course goals. This list would include concepts such as the sociological imagination; society and culture; social structure; socialization or mechanisms of social learning; inequality or stratification based on race, ethnicity, class, gender, age, or sexual orientation; and ethnocentrism and cultural pluralism. Core content should also include both theories and methods. Theories should be diverse and include both macro and micro ones, such as globalization theories, structural functionalism, symbolic interaction, conflict theory, and/or exchange theory, among others. Methods should include the three primary modes of observation—surveys, field research, and experiments, and the strengths and limitations of each—but also research ethics, the steps in the scientific investigative process, literature reviews with peer-referred journal articles, and how to read basic data tables. But my list is not the definitive one that could be universally used everywhere. It would need to be adapted and tethered to my colleagues’ “lists” and fit with our program goals and course learning objectives. This work must be done at the program level, but it behooves us as a discipline to continue our discussion of these concepts, theories, and skills at the discipline level as well.

As a part of this consensus-building process, faculty members might ask if their students receive a well-rounded picture of the discipline. Is this even possible, given our disciplinary diversity? Is it necessary? One might assume as I did above that we can simply turn to our textbooks for the answers. However, textbooks in the introductory market strive to include just about any topic a sociologist might consider worth including. This is a marketing strategy rather than a strategy directed by reflections about teaching and learning of our discipline. So we must also ask the following questions: Do our textbooks and readers serve our students and our discipline well? Do students read them? Are they reading e-books more so than print today? Are they using e-books differently than paper ones? I find limited empirical research findings that give us data to help answer these questions. Perhaps more research on this topic is needed.

To What Extent Is Assessment of Student Learning Integrated as an Important Tool for Evaluating What We Do and What Students Learn?

This fifth question asks us to consider to what extent we assess learning goals and to what extent we use that data to help student learn and improve our courses. Do we take those consensual goals and design ways of measuring successful learning? Assessment, today, in an age of accountability, has often been perceived as a burden placed upon us by administrators and governing bodies that impose on us to use quantitative metrics to define success. But the assessment movement is growing in academe and likely will not be going away soon. Assessment can be useful to faculty members because it forces us to collect data of our own design to guide our curricular decisions. Much has been published on this topic in the past 20 years, but I summarize briefly some of the central ideas for best practice in assessment. Assessment should be owned by the faculty group that designs the curriculum and teaches the courses (not individual faculty). Plans to assess student learning should be designed by the group. Data from assessment activities should be shared with all constituencies (faculty, students, and the public), and these publics should be allowed input into the discussion of their interpretations. Faculty members ultimately have the responsibility to use assessment findings for future curriculum development and to demonstrate improved learning or curricular design. Walvoord (2004) and Angelo, Ewell, and Lopez (2001) provide an overview of assessment and are worth reading.

Using these best practices of assessment, faculty can expect to create and continuously improve curriculum in sociology, and students can expect that faculty members are concerned about what they are learning and not learning and not merely what is being taught. No longer can we expect to be able to say, “Well, I covered that in my course and students should have learned it.” We now are expected to identify our goals, measure them, and demonstrate how and to what extent we know students have learned what we wanted. Ultimately, assessment can be a tool that helps us to improve learning and curricula.

What Role Does Introductory Sociology Play in Recruitment and Retention?

My sixth and final question asks instructors and faculty to share responsibility for keeping our major alive and enrollments strong. For without our “buy-in” regarding recruitment and retention, falling enrollment will be the demise of our courses, programs, and eventually, our discipline. Doom-and-gloom projections are not intended here, but it is realistic to understand that state legislators, administrators, and others who control college and university funding can and do cut programs and faculty lines in difficult budgetary times. As faculty, we are not trained to be “recruiters” of majors or to be concerned with retention of students to our college or university. But it is nonetheless in our purview to assist with these tasks by considering these outcomes in curriculum design. We should consider how our courses enhance course enrollments as well as draw and retain the numbers of majors and minors. This does not mean pandering to student whims, but it does mean knowing who your students are and what issues they have and helping them learn how to succeed rather than just expecting it. It means respecting students as adults, even though they do not all act as adults at all times and being considerate of their time constraints as parents, employees, and students in other courses. It means talking with students about careers in our field and helping them to see the application of sociology to their ability to make informed choices in their lives and doing it in a way such that students “get” that we are on their side. As such, I have more questions to ponder: Does the first course attract majors and minors to your program? To what extent does this course attract students from other majors to advanced courses in sociology? How could we better attract students to this course? How could we make this course more useful to students academically and in terms of career goals after graduation? Only faculty who know their students, their communities, and other constituencies can begin to develop meaningful plans for recruitment and retention. I have recently come to wonder why it is that so many in our field reject or shy away from applied sociology. Sociology has so much to offer. We must reconsider infusing our curricula with an eye toward helping students learn to use what they learn in our courses and to do so beyond the end of the semester.

Sociology is indeed a diverse discipline. Does this diversity help or hinder what we can offer our students? Our diversity can help our students to see variety of views, theories, and approaches to social knowledge, while at the same time, it hinders consensus building among faculty about core knowledge or methods in the introductory course. Too often, old ideological issues make consensual, curricular planning difficult at best.

Some might ask, do we really need consensus? There are many views here. Certainly the course needs to fit the social context and curricular goals. Therefore no two courses will be exactly the same. On the other hand, are there not some core concepts, theories, methods, and so on that we want anyone who thinks they understand what sociology is to have learned? We do need disciplinary standards for the introductory course in sociology that individual campuses and departments can adopt or adapt to their curriculum as we have for the major. And we certainly need consensus within our own faculty groups so that students get more than just an idiosyncratic view of our discipline. Yet, some faculty members define academic freedom as the freedom to teach sociology however and whatever. While academic freedom should be protected, we must also be socially responsible for what we teach. We must be responsible to our discipline, our programs, and our campus as well as our students and the communities we serve. If we do not step up to the challenge these issues present, then we open the door for others to do our work. Just recently in my state, lawmakers have made an attempt to intrude on this work of faculty. For example, they want all introductory sociology courses in public institutions to share a common syllabus. If we do not become more socially responsive to our publics, especially our students, with regard to our curriculum, I fear we will fail as a discipline to pass along what is important about sociology to the people in our communities and larger society who will benefit by knowing how to use sociological perspectives and understand and apply sociological data, theory, and concepts.