Abstract
This study examines narratives about rewarding and difficult teaching experiences of former students from our graduate teaching program. We interviewed former students from 13 classes from 2004 to 2022 and had a 42 percent response rate. These sociology teachers work across a variety of public and private universities and community colleges and tenure track and contingent contracts. Despite varying positions in the teaching profession, they all uniformly report empathy for their students and not only a commitment to excellence in instruction but also deep commitment to students’ well-being. Their difficult experiences were routinely met with a straightforward effort to learn from mistakes and improve their teaching to benefit students. We interpret these findings in light of higher education as a “greedy institution” that needs empathetic skilled teachers. We recommend future research explore whether mid-career teachers and scholars feel mentored and supported for their dedicated teaching work.
Introduction
This article grew out of our effort to harness a transitional moment in our teaching program by conducting a survey of our former graduate students to take stock of their professional lives since leaving our graduate program and assist us with an informal internal academic program review. Our graduate program has a three-credit teaching seminar that we use to prepare our graduate students for their first instructor-on-record experiences, help them learn teaching skills, and foster a teaching community to take into their future employment. The first author taught this graduate seminar 13 times over the past 19 years between 2004 and 2022, and now the second author has taken up the role. This moment of transition in leadership provided an opportunity to assess our former students’ career paths and set graduate teaching training priorities moving forward. This exploratory narrative study invited them to describe a rewarding and difficult experience as a teacher and explain how those experiences informed their teaching philosophy. We expected their stories might provide insights about ways we might change our program to meet changing graduate student training demands and highlight strengths that we want to retain. We think a survey of our former students is important precisely because they teach in a changing academic environment. This study presents their major narrative themes and concludes with recommendations for graduate student teacher training.
Some Critical Challenges Facing Higher Education
Research indicates that faculty are motivated by enjoyment of their students and the intellectual stimulation of teaching more than their pay and benefit packages (Dewey, Pautz, and Diede 2024), but now, their dedication serves a more competitive challenging academic environment. A critical example is the seismic shift from mostly secure tenure-track appointments to insecure appointments. Now, fully 68 percent of faculty are contingent laborers with less security in pay, benefits, and contract terms (Colby 2023). An AAUP (2021) study further found a rapid growth of graduate students as teaching labor and that women and underrepresented faculty were disproportionately contingent faculty. We have also witnessed a substantial growth in a corporate neoliberal university model with an expansion of administrative tiers and a focus on hyper-productivity in grantsmanship and (sometimes questionable) publication practices (Ginsberg 2011; Macfarlane 2021). Furthermore, higher education has been marked by long-term sustained austerity cuts (Penn 2022). The pandemic also provided an opportunity for further encroachment on faculty governance, autonomy, and freedom. In a few short years, we saw many university boards and administrators use financial exigency (without declaring outright force majeure) to weaken faculty governance and eliminate tenured positions and departments (AAUP 2021). Finally, recently we saw outright legislative and public attacks on academic freedom and course content (Buggs 2024).
Faculty surveys routinely show the effects of these changes and the compounding effects of the pandemic. Most recently, faculty report that the pandemic greatly increased care and service burdens (Docka-Filipek et al. 2023). These service burdens were disproportionately borne by women and faculty of color, who already carried heavier caretaking burdens for their institutions and students (Elliott and Blithe 2021; Rideau 2021). Many faculty report feeling “moral injury” because the pandemic inhibited their ability to maintain their usual academic productivity because of an immediate need to engage in radical empathy for students (Chin and Clubbs 2022). In fact, a recent survey of faculty found that 87 percent felt that students’ mental health worsened during the course of the pandemic, and 80 percent reported having conversations with students about wellness and mental health (Lipson 2021). Not surprisingly, compassion fatigue is a significant problem for faculty (McNaughton-Cassill, Lopez, and Cassill 2023). A Healthy Minds Network study of faculty across four-year and community colleges found that the majority of faculty report burnout (64 percent) and that their jobs are taking a toll on their mental health (58 percent), even as job satisfaction and felt competence remain high (Vyletel et al. 2023). Critically, faculty burnout strongly is associated with student uncivil and disruptive behaviors and sense of academic entitlement (Jiang, Tripp, and Hong 2017). However, research indicates that faculty are less likely to experience burnout if they work within supportive institutions (Padilla et al. 2023; Padilla and Thompson 2016). These sets of structural changes in academia, negative effects of the pandemic, and changing student needs for mental health support create an entirely new academic environment for our former graduate students.
Graduate Student Teacher Training Aspirations
We draw on research to highlight what we expect our training to provide students as they prepare for positions that require teaching duties. In this section, we focus on a set of skills that require great mental and emotional sharpness and technical acumen. These skills develop and are maintained with attentive practice. We then focus especially on the skill of care. We believe that part of our teacher training should focus on how to cultivate socioemotional competence or empathetic perspective-taking in teachers to provide better outcomes and experiences for students. The skill of care or caretaking is one that deserves emphasized attention in higher education and teacher training.
The mental and emotional strength and deep skill base needed for effective teaching are considerable. First, teachers must not only have substantive expertise, but they must also know how to teach metacognitive skills and awareness in their students and create courses and course sequences that move students along Bloom’s taxonomy, ultimately to a level of independent creativity (Estefan 2024; Messineo 2018). Second, they must navigate keeping up with technological advances and innovative teaching techniques to foster the radical potential harnessed in Mills’s sociological imagination (see Dandaneau 2009; Palmer 2023); teach quantitative literacy, data analysis, and computer skills (Johnson and Gleit 2022); and provide students with facts about the nature of stratification and inequality in society (Estefan, Selbin, and Macdonald 2023; Gardner and McKinzie 2020; Persell, Pfeiffer, and Syed 2008). Third, they must engage in mentoring diverse populations of students to facilitate a sense of belonging and radical inclusivity, guide students’ self-exploration of life purpose, and provide major and career development and vocational training (Greenwood 2013; Opsal, Windsong, and Pedroni 2023). Fourth, they must attend with clarity and emotional acuity to their classroom climates and worldviews of their students, particularly during moments of community trauma and polarized topics (Martinez-Cola et al. 2018; Stout, Earnhart and Nagi 2020). Last but certainly not least, effective teachers must be ever alert to how their own and their students’ diverse identities affect learning and equitable practices and how those with marginalized identities experience invisible barriers within higher education (Oehmen et al. 2023; Pittman 2010; Stough-Hunter and Lekies 2023; Tingle, Phillips, and Hall 2024). These are wide-ranging holistic skills that take a lifetime to master and maintain. We want to see whether and how our former students reference these challenging demands as they offer their singular stories.
The five multifaceted skills in this list each emphasize some ability to balance cognitive and emotional strengths. The list underscores that the profession expects teachers to be skilled at their curricula; skilled at relevant technological, methodological, and substantive advances; and skilled at perspective-taking and community-building. In our program, we strive to prepare graduate students for a rapidly changing teaching environment in terms of technology, research, and social justice issues and sea changes in the diversity of student populations on campus who require specific forms of care to foster inclusive belonging. Thus, we next focus expressly on care or empathy as a grounding quality for successful teachers.
We define empathy broadly as a socioemotional quality that contains many facets, including cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand another’s perspective; emotional empathy, which is the ability to feel or mirror another’s emotional state; and compassionate empathy, the impulse to help and support others. Empathy should serve teachers well as a socioemotional competence skill. Care for students should aid an instructor’s mindset to problem solve, remain open and flexible, and craft lessons attuned to students’ abilities. Some research indicates that teacher empathy does not result in greater emotional support for students or better instructional outcomes (Aldrup, Carstensen, and Klusmann 2022). However, a body of research suggests that teachers’ socioemotional competence and care has a host of benefits. Empathy inspires greater cognitive learning in students (McGuire 2015). Teachers with higher cognitive empathy handle student problems better, have closer relationships with their students, and are less prone to burnout (Wink, LaRusso, and Smith 2021). Research further indicates that students report that care is the signal marker of a good teacher who can effectively inspire “students’ engagement with subject matter, enthusiasm for learning and aspirations for the future” (Anderson et al. 2020:1). In fact, sociologists often consider empathy a cornerstone of the sociological imagination and a necessary feature of faculty-student relationships and class activities to facilitate students’ perspective-taking, especially toward marginalized groups (Ghidina 2019; Rockwell et al. 2019). Faculty perceive empathy as expressed through a set of practices that help teachers connect with students in meaningful ways that affirm students’ life experiences and challenges (Wynn et al. 2023; Wynn, Ziff, and Snyder 2024). This focal need to remain cognizant about the importance of empathy, compassion, and ethics of classroom care now include practical instruction about how to incorporate contemplative, meditative, and body-scanning practices into the classroom to nurture students and manage emotional and intellectual resistances to difficult course material (Hill 2014; Ross and Beardall 2022; Sadd 2018).
Of course, the pandemic heightened the urgency of teacher empathy as a tool for students’ success and learning. Research on empathetic teaching practices during COVID emphasized a stark need for care-infused pedagogies (Hess et al. 2022). Empathy was not only useful for connecting with students and engaging their learning but also linked to an ethic of care that required compassion for the way students’ lives were upended by the institutional, interactional, and personal changes left in the pandemic’s wake (Bartholomay 2022; Corbera et al. 2020).
The literature on graduate students and first-time-instructors’ teaching experiences also may inform viewpoints about the importance of addressing care as a part of graduate instruction. Research indicates that teaching is an emotion- and skill-demanding activity in which instructors’ expectations frequently are mismatched with the reality of students’ emotional needs (Meanwell and Kleiner 2014). Teaching well requires pedagogical skill and substantive expertise as well as a high degree of emotional intelligence and empathy.
Empathetic perspective-taking can be nurtured through training (Paulus and Meinken 2022). Unfortunately, many graduate students report feeling a lack of support, isolation, and mental health difficulties (Grady et al. 2014; Schwartz et al. 2022). For new instructors, teaching can be both anxiety- and burnout-provoking, although those emotional risks decrease as experience, perceived efficacy, and concrete institutional and mentoring support increase (Fives, Hamman, and Olivarez 2007; Innocente and Baker 2018; Pelton 2014; Smollin and Arluke 2014). Studies also demonstrate that efficacy and satisfaction with the rigorous demands of teaching are fostered by teaching communities and collaborations, mentoring, and investment in professional skill development.
While the majority of sociology programs still do not offer a teaching seminar (Blouin and Moss 2015), graduate students who participate in graduate teaching seminars regularly report ample benefits, such as learning skills, gaining confidence, and developing collegial exchange networks (Burton, Bamberry, and Harris-Boundy 2005; Folse 1991; Korinek, Howard, and Bridges 1999). First-time instructors also benefit greatly from faculty mentoring, co-instruction and collaboration opportunities, and practice teaching in teaching-infused substantive seminars (Finch and Fernández 2014; Trautner 2014; Walters and Misra 2013; Wurgler et al. 2014). Last, new instructors and graduate instructors benefit from participating in active teaching communities where professionals ethically share ideas and resources (Hunt, Mair, and Atkinson 2012). The ongoing benefits of professional development practices, mentoring, and teaching community membership may accrue substantially if undertaken as steady career pursuits. We expect to see traces of these practices, beliefs, and benefits among our mid-career former students.
This current project studies a generation of former graduate students distributed across 20 years of experience. They are colleagues who graduated from our program, which requires a graduate teaching seminar, a mentored instructor-on-record experience, and faculty- and graduate-student-led efforts to create an active teaching community. They are also part of the widescale changes in higher education that resulted in greater fragility of careers overall and demographic shifts in student populations on campus. Most recently, the COVID pandemic spurred a temporary increase in pressure on faculty and now longer-term consequences for changed working conditions and more difficult student relationships and interactions. This open-ended survey asked them questions about their rewarding and difficult experiences. They chose the stories they wanted to share. The study did not provide a prompted analysis of specific teaching topics, nor did it require a comprehensive life course autobiography. We asked for single stories freely chosen. Thus, this study represents a tapestry of voices from sociology teachers across a variety of academic settings that range from public and private universities, vocational and community colleges, tenure- and non-tenure-track positions, and contingent versus secure contracts. The guiding basic question of this study is what we can learn from how these rewarding and difficult experiences informed these educators’ teaching philosophies.
This study therefore provides an exploratory narrative survey of the former students in our graduate program to serve a three-part purpose. First, the project provides an informal academic program review that can guide us in recommendations for the continued health and relevance of our graduate teacher training. Second, the narratives shed light on the experiences of our former students as they navigate teaching in the challenging conditions facing higher education. Third, the study assesses whether and how our former students relate exemplary stories that connect their experiences with key skills involved in teaching. We explore how they discuss their teaching skills and their instructional goals as teachers and how they envision their care and dedication to students. Critically, we can see whether these teachers display specific patterns of commonly shared stressors or key teaching problems that affect their work lives as educators.
Data and Methods
Our sociology graduate program has a required teaching seminar that all students must complete before they can teach as instructors-on-record. We expect that all PhD students will serve as an instructor-on-record at least once during their graduate training. Thus, students who enroll as master’s-only candidates may elect out of this seminar, but all PhD candidates must take the course. Students are eligible for this course the summer after their first year. Many take the course, as they design their first courses for the fall semester in consultation with our department chair. We are a research-intensive program, so some students may only have research- or project-assistant experiences before taking this seminar, but most will experience some teaching assistant work before the seminar.
The course is wide-ranging and addresses teaching philosophies as well as practical pedagogy. Students must make an appointment for a conversation with a master teacher and share their meeting with the class. Most choose teachers from our faculty, but many have chosen elementary and high school teachers, coaches, and religious leaders over the years. They also must share news with the class from Academe or Chronicle of Higher Education to encourage thinking about teaching as a profession. They experience a number of low-stakes teaching opportunities, including conducting a brief lecture or lesson using an innovative technique and a mini-lesson about something they love to practice, both teaching and sharing vulnerability. They read intensively from teaching textbooks, Teaching Sociology, higher education journals, and documents from university teaching support centers. They also must prepare a teaching portfolio that they share for critique with the class. The portfolio includes a complete syllabus, three assignments, a five-page teaching biography akin to a sociological imagination paper, and their entries for a public journal kept for class. The content of the course covers professional identities, diverse student populations and cultures, teaching techniques, syllabus creation, assignment design, student development taxonomies, student problems, academic honesty, and other topics based on interest. One semester is never enough, but the course goal is to provide an inspiring setting to design their first course and model an ethic of commitment to lifelong learning about teaching.
We have a number of other supportive structures as well, including an assigned faculty teaching mentor for each graduate student instructor-on-record, a senior faculty member who meets regularly with all currently teaching instructors-on-record as part of a regular teaching support group, and a graduate-student-led yearly professional development workshop focused on teaching in which master teachers visit as guest scholars. In recent years, our graduate students have hosted the following teaching scholars: Sam Richards, Michelle Kozimor, Katherine Rowell, Jay Howard, and Oliver Rollins. Thus, our program built a scaffold of instructional support in which the seminar serves as a gatekeeping function to prepare independent instructors.
We chose to survey the 13 cohorts of former students who enrolled in this seminar between 2004 and 2022. These cohorts represent 112 individuals. We strove to find current email or Facebook addresses through internet searches and informal contacts with colleagues who mentored or are in contact with these former students. We found potential addresses for 95 of these 112. The 17 we were unable to locate were distributed evenly by gender across the cohorts from 2015 and before. We sent three survey contacts in two-week intervals from early November through early December 2023. We formally left the field two weeks after the third and final mailing. We had a final sample size of 40 for a response rate of 42 percent. The response rate including the 17 we could not locate is 36 percent.
Our study used a closed population of our former students, so the following is an accurate but abbreviated rendering of their employment histories to protect confidentiality. Of these 40, 7 reported that they had not taught since graduate school. These 7 were in research positions across academic, nonprofit, private, and government settings. Of the 33 who provided teaching perspectives, the vast majority were in academic posts in both tenure-track and non-tenure-track lines. These appointments included adjunct, lecturer, and visiting professor positions as well as positions ranging from assistant through full professorship. Nine were either graduate students, lecturers, or adjuncts; 2 were assistant professors; 15 attained associate status; and 1 was a full professor. Of the 33, 7 had served or were currently serving as a department chair or program director, and 1 was an academic administrator. Among these 33, 23 had worked at a single institution since graduation, 9 worked at multiple institutions, and 1 was undetermined. Nineteen of these 33 worked at only a public university, 7 worked at only a private university or college, and 6 had mixed employment histories with some combination of private, public, community, and technical college experiences.
Our survey also asked about their rewarding and difficult teaching experiences, advice they would provide to new sociology teachers, and views on sociology’s responsibilities to defend diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in light of political attacks. This current study explores their choices about the rewarding and difficult experiences that informed their teaching. The two questions asked, “Please share a story about a [rewarding/difficult] experience you had as a teacher and how that informed your teaching philosophy.” Careers are shaped by a multitude of unfolding diverse experiences, but this study takes a phenomenological approach by encouraging respondents to choose one story worth sharing (Overgaard and Zahavi 2009). Many referred to a world of stories, and several related multiple stories, but most elected at least one story for their study responses.
We thematically analyzed their stories using narrative analysis techniques (Riesman 2008). Because teachers often have disparate work experiences, narrative analysis is useful to see how they interpret their work contexts and career identities (Elbaz-Luwisch 2007). Czarniawska (2007) endorses narrative analysis as a productive way to uncover how storytellers perceive their organizations, work culture, and professions through a technique that elicits a reflective practice that invites respondents to focus on stories about change. Narrative analysis provides a way for autobiographical storytelling to identify the meanings people ascribe to their work identities and experiences. These autobiographical stories serve as a reflection exercise that engages people to interpret their past experiences for a present task in order to render a vision of a future self, purpose, or coda (Elliott 2005; Freeman 2007). Thus, we asked these simple open-ended storytelling questions to enquire about how they understood their teaching identities, the meanings they assigned to their work and interactions with students, and the exemplars they chose to depict pivotal rewarding and difficult experiences.
We collected all the respondents’ written responses to each individual question as a full narrative transcript. Thus, as we coded each collective transcript, it was possible to have multiple codes per individual respondent and multiple codes per excerpt. Often, these narrative excerpts did generate multiple codes as these teachers crafted written accounts of their personal perspectives on complex events that resolved over time. Of the 33 who claimed teaching identities, 6 responded to the employment history questions and staked out features of their teaching responsibilities but did not provide answers about their rewarding and difficult experiences. These 6 were mostly criminologists who may have felt inhibited by the opening question asking about advice for new sociology teachers—a potential error in our survey. Of the 27 who did provide stories, all were represented in our findings.
We used grounded theoretical coding methods (Strauss and Corbin 2008). We used a reflexive thematic analysis approach rather than a coding reliability thematic analysis approach because we did not have preconceived expectations about what themes might emerge from this exploratory study (Delve and Limpaecher 2024). We engaged in rounds of independent coding and met regularly after each increasingly more selective round. This flexible approach permitted us the gains of pursuing our own insights and interpretations as we coded, discovering points of divergence and convergence in our coding schemes when we met, and pursuing freedom in how we each viewed nuance, depth, and richness in these narratives. This reflexive approach allowed us to individually and then together reflect on which narratives and excerpts were especially central or salient to emergent themes and to collaborate on producing a set of themes that had high validity with the stories’ narratives.
We used a Taguette software app as an electronic means to conduct easy, flexible line-by-line and excerpt coding. After our initial independent open coding, we met to review our separate open code schemes. For each of us, the initial process generated large numbers of codes with twice as many codes for the rewarding question as compared to the difficult question. Some codes were unique to the coder and represented a small number of excerpts. However, we had immediate agreement about core codes, such as openness with students and skill development, but found that we often used different code words for these same themes. However, even in this open coding phase, we had agreement about critical, frequently discussed themes concerning openness to students; helping students in diverse ways; teaching skills with innovative methods; addressing student limiting beliefs, life, and mental health problems; managing conflict in the classroom; and setting healthy boundaries. Within these major themes, our next rounds of selective and axial coding developed further refinements within each theme. For example, we jointly coded that the major theme of helping students had specific sub-themes of types of help with career decisions, major counseling, research opportunities, and material support with problems. This rigorous iterative reflexive process ended up representing all respondents’ narratives in a valid coherent set of themes.
In sum, we found agreement that some themes were more prominent than others. Table 1 provides a coder average of the number of times particular codes were marked across excerpts as a rough way to capture the relative salience of each theme. Openness to helping students (n = 28) and managing conflicts (n = 21) were the most discussed themes from their rewarding and difficult experiences, respectively. Aside from openness to students, four other rewarding themes arose from their narratives: teaching sociological skills (n = 16), helping students’ lives by caring for the whole person (n = 16), fostering a learning mindset (n = 10), and helping with major and career choices (n = 7). Aside from managing conflict, a second, lesser mentioned difficult experience narrative centered on efforts meeting student needs (n = 11). Last, a few clear themes about managing professional identities were discussed by a small minority of respondents: forging healthy boundaries (n = 5) and sharing vulnerability (n = 2).
Quantified Summary of Narrative Themes.
Note. The sample consists of 40 total respondents, of which 33 were actively teaching. Of the 33, 27 offered rewarding and difficult experience narratives. Narrative excerpts are presented for all 27 respondents with only a few respondents reflected multiple times. These numbers reflect averages based on both coders’ analyses. Openness to students was mentioned almost universally and multiple times by a few respondents, and thus the average of 28 is higher than the sample size of 27.
Results
These stories are rich with the details of the lives of active engaged teachers. They share accounts of striving to connect and empathize with students. They relate their strenuous efforts to spark students’ sociological imaginations and model through action the meaning of public sociology. They discuss the powerful ways mentoring can open possibilities for students. They even share multiple stories about the concrete benefits of various innovative teaching techniques, including Race Card Project and concept mapping lessons, undergraduate independent research mentoring, low-stakes reflection-paper and high-stakes formal-paper writing assignments, and peer-to-peer teaching, to name a few. Their stories illuminate the thoughts of scholars who care about how ground-level painstaking work can nurture students’ educational successes and well-being. In this first section, we focus on the fulfillment they derive from connecting with and helping students in diverse, often unanticipated ways. In the second section, we explore the challenges they chose as critical stories about their careers and how those difficult experiences informed their teaching philosophies. Altogether, this study will demonstrate that these cohorts of sociology teachers who span a generation of our teaching program feel driven by a need to use their fulsome capacities to help their students and to learn from their readily admitted difficulties.
In each of the following two major sections about the rewards and challenges of teaching, we present their findings in their order of prominence as coded accounts. We mention one caveat, however. The desire to be open and connected with students was the most commonly expressed type of narrative in their accounts. Openness and connection were ubiquitous themes. Openness was always tied with a particular story about another coded theme, such as helping students with skill development, resolving conflicts, and so on. Thus, the following will detail the relative prominence of each of their other themes, but we note that openness was a prominent code within these themes as well.
Rewarding Experiences: “He Did Need Something from Me That Day.”
A dominant theme in their stories was the powerful meaning they derived from helping students. In both rewarding and difficult scenarios, their stories showcased the gratitude they felt for their abilities to help students. Their help was prolific, flexible, and often proffered during student crises. These educators found deep satisfaction helping students achieve their educational and career dreams, attain skill proficiency, dismantle education barriers, and very often, overcome serious life problems. Four major themes arose among their rewarding experiences.
Teaching sociological skills
Of course, these sociologists take pride in grounding their teaching in skill development. An associate professor saw their responsibility as helping students develop empathy by “seeing the world differently, being able to put themselves in other people’s shoes, realizing that just because something doesn’t impact them (like social policy), they should still consider how it impacts others, becom[e] a better consumer of information, and . . . value . . . research for their everyday lives.” Another noted how “their most rewarding teaching experiences have been ‘a-ha’ moments when something finally ‘clicks’ for students . . . [and] lets them appreciate social dynamics more fully and honestly.” An associate professor discussed how service learning was a required component of many of their courses, “Students go into the community and learn in a hands-on approach. This experience has led to my philosophy highlighting the lived experience of those we are studying and working with to create a more holistic learning environment.” One discussed their most rewarding experience as helping a struggling student with statistics.
One student struggled calculating rates and statistical principles. They were intimidated by the prospect of having to do math and felt as though they would never grasp the concepts. However, after helping them practice through examples, they were able to successfully make the calculations covered throughout the semester. I believe this benefited the student beyond the course or even the field of Sociology, as they became less intimidated by working with numbers and more likely to use quantitative analyses to understand and make decisions in other aspects of their life.
These sociologists are serious about activating practical tangible transferable skills as a core of their teaching. This assistant professor summarized this perspective: I view my own role in the classroom as not just a conveyer of information (although this is certainly part of teaching a substantive course, no doubt)–but also as a guide to help students navigate a world of technology, misinformation, critical thinking, and practical skill development. . . . A real marker of success, to me, is when students are able to see things in the “real world” and come into class and say “Hey Prof, I saw this and thought of our class!”
These sociologists see teaching the sociological imagination as not just widening the liberal (and liberating) lens of college students’ worldviews but also anchoring that expanded agentic worldview to data literacy, analytic, and research skills.
Helping students’ lives by caring for the whole person
These sociologists also felt a strong obligation to help students with their lives as students who are navigating their transitions to adulthood and sometimes draining life problems. Many spoke of the need to simply be present with students and to meet students’ needs for guidance and safe spaces when contemporary events break through classroom walls. A department chair said, “A rewarding teaching experience is when a student told me that I actually took the time to know them, not only in class but office hours. Additionally, they expressed that they have learned how to be appreciative of other people’s opinions.” This teacher also said that they felt vigilant about their “constant biases” and that their teaching philosophy is “totally dedicated to learning along with my students.” Another colleague emphasized how knowing and caring for students and acknowledging current events benefits their education.
I care about my students as more than just people who I am trying to instruct, but as complete persons who have lives broader than the university, but that which also inform their lives as students. This has informed my teaching philosophy in that I am no longer afraid to steer away from a predetermined lesson plan to talk about current events with students, whether this be things that are occurring nationally, locally, or even on our own campus. If possible, I try to connect these events to the material that we’re learning; but even if I cannot, I think it’s still important to take a pause from the learning of whatever the course content may be to check in with students and how they’re doing. When students know their professors truly care about them as people, they put forward more effort and learn more as a result.
This sociologist presents the teacher as educator, therapist, public sociologist, and friend. A senior lecturer also emphasized how writing sociology assignments supervised by a caring teacher inspires “Oh, wow!” moments for students and “helps them to see how sociology is relevant to EVERYONE, not just sociology majors.”
These educators also saw their work as limited and flawed but still necessary to help students with critical life problems. For example, one teacher reflected on a time when a student expressed racist views. They talked about this student’s willingness to engage and said, “[H]e was open to learning and by the end of the semester, his views changed. He wasn’t fully anti-racist, but he had made significant progress on his new anti-racist journey.” This teacher had a useful view about their part in this student’s education: Even for the students who appear to not develop a sociological imagination in the least bit by the end of the semester, I imagine myself planting seeds that may sprout in them later on, as they have more experiences to reflect on. I also think about how much my thinking has changed since I was in college. This perspective helps me be gracious to the students who may be resistant to the sociological perspective.
Several teachers believed in the unknowable long-term value of their care for students.
This final rewarding story from an assistant professor highlights the sometimes happenstance but critical nature of the concrete help teachers can provide.
A few years ago, I had a student in class who had transferred to our “flagship campus” from a regional school. He grew up in a rough community with high crime but had been wildly successful in high school. He was enrolled in a large introductory lecture (about 215 students) but had grabbed my attention somehow. About halfway through the semester he came up to me before class and told me he was going to withdraw from the university and go home because his family was in crisis and needed his help. I later learned his brother had been killed and he was the rock his family always leaned on. In that moment, I was so fortunate that he had come to me and shared this. And I was equally fortunate that universities have so many wonderful resources for students in these situations. I was able to connect him with resources (emergency funds, incompletes, student advocates to help him reach out to professors–all with one email from me). I didn’t think much of it. But a few years later as he was graduating, he awarded me a pin from his honor society and introduced me to his mom and family. It turned out I had played an important role for him, larger than I imagined. I was later able to help him choose a master’s program. And now he has a great job in DC–so great he can’t honestly tell me what he does (likely cybersecurity of some type). This experience showed me that not all students need the same things from you each day–he didn’t need my subject matter expertise–but he did need something from me that day. It also helped me realize that students in large lectures can still connect with professors–and I likewise need to ensure I am allowing space for connections to happen.
This young educator’s goal to connect with students already enlarged their awareness about the presence of this student in the large lecture. This teacher then effectively activated much-needed resources for a young man with significant trauma and a potentially derailing life problem. They later mentored him through his choices about graduate work and a career. This sociologist acknowledges the unanticipated immediate ways teachers can help students and the powerful need to make space for connections to nurture the possibilities for assistance.
Fostering a learning mindset
Many of these teachers felt a responsibility to help students dismantle negative mindsets that were barriers to academic success. A community college faculty member said, Many students are anxious, have problems with self-regulation, and hold limiting beliefs about their abilities. My focus is turning toward authentic connection . . . letting them know they are not alone, showing them how to zoom out and see the big picture in life, helping them see the proof from their own life about their abilities to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals, and helping them build the confidence to know that they already have everything they need to do it.
This teacher felt strongly that assisting students with mindful practices is a key part of connecting with students and their well-being. Another teacher shared a story about meeting regularly one-on-one to help a struggling student who was concerned about not graduating. They said that this ordeal “reinforced my teaching philosophy of shame negation in and outside the classroom. Struggling at something is fundamentally human, and it is our job as instructors to remind them that it’s ok to struggle, and it’s ok to feel shame, but not let that shame consume and control you.” Another teacher related meeting with a student to discuss academic misconduct after the student plagiarized an extra credit assignment. The teacher said, This student was experiencing a lot of doubt and shame about what he did and failed to do so far in the course and wanted to change. This experience again forced me to remember the importance of addressing shame of failure, and how best to move past it, and how to center the importance of learning/intellectual growth that is paramount to education.
Their stories routinely discussed not just mental health issues, such as depression or anxiety, but also debilitating attitudes that left students ill-equipped for the demands of college classrooms.
Helping with major and career choices
A core satisfaction was helping students with their major and career choices. An assistant professor said, It’s really rewarding to see students hit milestones, like graduation or achieving their goals with a job or internship. This informs my teaching philosophy because it puts everything back in perspective. It reminds me that my students (at least my traditional students, who I typically have) are 18-year-olds, at the start of their careers. They’re young and still figuring things out. They just need grace.
An associate professor’s introductory class helped a student choose sociology as a major. They said, This student’s dream is to go back to her home country and work in government to better the lives of her people. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree. This emboldened me to continue to spark the dreams of students and to create an environment where students can explore who they want to become or what passions they want to pursue.
One professor helped a psychology student with the structure of her thesis, and the student emailed “We earned 97%!” Of this story, they said, “I view teaching and advising as one and the same. Any student that takes my class (or walks through my office door) becomes an unofficial advisee and I will help them with anything they need, not just content that is covered in my area.” Another associate professor said, Right after graduation, one of my students got a job requiring her to conduct a survey for a major city. She told me how confident she felt taking up the job, knowing that she had notes from my class. Her experience reinforced the importance of data literacy in my courses.
These interviews were copious with stories about helping students to achieve major or career goals.
Several scholars told stories of yeoman-like efforts to help students overcome writing and quantitative literacy deficits, low confidence, or other barriers to achieve seemingly insurmountable goals. For example, an associate professor explained how she feels that teaching writing benefits her students and the wider community of employers: I incorporate many writing assignments in my courses. It is always gratifying to see students take the feedback they receive on assignments and use that to get better. I had one student in particular who had transferred in from a community college and was struggling to meet the expectations in a four-year university program. We both celebrated the enormous progress she had made over the course of the semester. She was subsequently accepted into a MSW program and is incredibly successful in her chosen career. As time-consuming as those writing assignments are to grade, I consistently resist the impulse to eliminate them. We routinely hear from our community partners that communications skills, both oral and written, are vital, yet are often lacking among new hires. To that end, writing assignments are always integrated into all of my syllabi.
This sociologist sees their role as creating young professionals with effective communication skills who can excel in their education and employment pursuits. They are mindful about how they prepare students for a marketplace that needs writers and speakers.
Last, another associate professor shared a story of expending considerable time and effort to support a student’s educational pursuits: I’ve supervised a student . . . on their independent research project for about a year now. I formerly had this student in class and she was also interested in healthcare [sic]. She devised her own study, collected data, analyzed her data and wrote an entire paper on her topic. I served as her mentor, providing advice throughout. Just a few weeks ago, I took her to a regional conference to present her work. This was her first academic conference. She nailed her presentation, and even fielded a tough, unfriendly question from an audience member. I was so proud of this student. After the conference, the student thanked me profusely for encouraging her to present and showing up on a Saturday to support her work. I meant it when I told her I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
This same scholar reported that they have had “countless rewarding experiences in my teaching time,” so they would just pick a recent one. Thus, this vignette was pulled from their vast stock of student stories as a recent example and not as an exemplar or benchmark. This scholar was not the only one to relate stories of long-term dedicated faithful commitment to the development of their students. These engaged, passionate interviews present scholars who thrive on helping students with their practical dreams.
Difficult Experiences: “Be Knowledgeable, Flexible, Adaptable, Kind”
As we turn to their difficult stories, we again see that these teachers draw on an array of experiences. They mentioned navigating accessibility and accommodations; meeting students’ needs during a pandemic and in a postpandemic environment; instances of teaching failures, such as when teacher assistants shared answer keys with students without permission; and sometimes heated conversations about divisive topics. They discussed both challenges affecting academia generally and difficulties tied to topics at the center of sociology. As we coded their responses, a subterranean theme linked both their rewarding and difficult experiences. They may feel exhilaration, ambivalence, or regret about how they addressed mundane or difficult experiences, but they are driven by an impulse to help and care for their students with an “all hands on deck” mentality. They want to help with any personal, classroom, and institutional education problems that arise. Most striking, these difficult stories present clear narratives about the concrete problem, their response, and reflection about how to adapt or improve as a teacher in light of that difficult experience. They all provide a coda that they offer as a professional lesson. Four major themes emerged, with two far more prominent in the narratives. These former students provided narratives about managing conflict in the classroom far more often than the next most common theme of helping meet diverse student needs for accommodations and accessibility. Last, two narratives about professional identities focused on forging healthy boundaries and sharing vulnerability appeared as minor themes. We present these latter themes because although mentioned by only a small minority of our former students, they represent two narratives that merit professional consideration about how to protect and nurture oneself as a teacher.
Managing conflict in and out of the classroom
While divisive, sensitive, and politically charged topics are not unique to sociology, sociology classes provide some students with their first experiences addressing the topics academically. Educators often cited charged topics covered in class as a source of conflict and challenge. At times, conflict arose between the instructor and their students.
I had a student who was really struggling with trauma experiences take a class that covered difficult material. While I had been very clear at the beginning of the semester that there were difficult topics that we would be covering, this person still took the class and was very upset with me. I reminded them that the syllabus was very clear about the specific topics and readings we were covering and they still wanted to stay in the class.
This situation continued to be a source of struggle and stress for the educator, the student, and the rest of the class. However, this experience pushed the educator to reconstruct the way they set up the course from the very beginning.
This experience has really changed the beginning of semesters for me. I focus on setting up the course and explaining how sociology covers a variety of topics that can be seen as controversial or triggering. I [am] very specific about setting up the respectful tone for the class community and explaining what my response will be to behavior that disrupts the learning environment.
This challenge also helped them to connect with their network of teaching colleagues, “as they were invaluable in their support on how to manage this daily battle.”
Discussing topics at the heart of sociology also resulted in conflict among students, as described by this following teacher.
Sociologists often teach difficult and controversial topics, which can lead to conflicts in the classroom. I have had many students get into debates and arguments over the years. However, I had two students who got into an argument in my Intro to Sociology course that was particularly heated. It [led] to name calling and one student storming out.
The instructor used this situation as a catalyst to reflect on and adapt their classroom.
After dealing with the administrative issues, I reflected on what happened and how I could have handled it differently. I only have one rule in my classroom now and that is that we all have to show respect and reverence for each other (including myself). Day one of the semester we discuss what that looks like in relation to how to respond and talk to each other, deal with disagreements, and the overall classroom environment. To me, feeling comfortable and safe in the classroom is important in my teaching philosophy. This is something that I did take away from the Teaching Sociology course and bell hooks’s writings on teaching.
Individual students also challenged their teachers as they rejected foundations of sociological thought and critical thinking. One educator described a student whose class disruptions were impacting their classmates.
Early in my career I had one student who was very disruptive in class, constantly scoffing at the course content. . . . I handled him rather softly at first, but it didn’t work. I had to get more and more direct and stern throughout the semester. His disruptive comments derailed a lot of class discussions, really taking away from his classmates’ learning experience.
As a result of this experience, this sociologist was more intentional about prefacing and scaffolding class discussions.
After that semester, I started each semester with more fully explaining that sociology is NOT about opinions, but it is a social science. I put very direct and clear language about this in my syllabi too. Laying down that foundation early on in the semester set the stage for the rest of the semester. Then, throughout the semester, when covering topics that I know some students will have strong opinions about, I remind them that what we know about the topic (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) is based on rigorous research, not opinions. I also assign journal articles throughout the semester, which helps students remember that the class isn’t just my personal opinions.
Another educator echoed the need to adapt strategies for dealing with student conflict in the classroom when covering important but divisive topics.
In an inequality class, I had a student . . . who just fought everything I or anyone else in the class said. [I]t made it very uncomfortable because he did it in a way that wasn’t always respectful and in return, the other students would gang up on him and not be respectful back . . . I had a conversation with him outside of class about disagreeing in a respectful way and using evidence to support his points. And on a day he wasn’t there, I had a conversation with the rest of class about how they needed to be respectful of his differing opinion. The conversations got better after that and he started to come around and see that some of the things he thought were incorrect (based on research).
Once again, this teacher’s challenging experience provided an opportunity to adapt their teaching practices and philosophy.
In the end, he had a good experience even being clearly outnumbered in perspective. It informed my teaching philosophy in that I always tried to create an inclusive environment–and I know how to do that well for marginalized groups, but I didn’t always know how to do that for people who have differing political perspectives.
In these stories about student resistance and sometimes defiant challenge, we see our former students freely share their difficulties and learn from these conflicts. In one key instance, a teacher learned a plain lesson about how to rework how they handled writing assignments because of student resistance. The educator offered, A student waited a whole semester to let me know how they disagreed with everything that I taught them that semester. They used their final paper, a literature review, to articulate that goal. Every single citation was a Bible verse. I decided never again to assign a final paper without multiple drafts.
We include this last story to show the many ways student resistance and conflict can occur in overt and covert practices.
Meeting diverse student needs
First, several teachers said that providing equitable education for diverse students posed challenges. One teacher related the following experience.
I have had students with varying preferred learning styles (visual, auditory, “learn by doing”) and also varying differences in “ability” (e.g., documented differences in learning, auditory/visual disorders, mental health concerns, etc.). This necessitates a large amount of flexibility on my end as an instructor.
They detailed their work learning to create accessible course materials without singling out students, maintaining communication with students, and working with accessibility services on campus. They concluded by reflecting on how these challenges helped them grow as a teacher by saying, “I feel humbled to have the opportunity to continue to learn and grow and feel quite strongly that all students have a right to the same educational experience. It is my job to make that a reality to the best of my ability.”
Other educators described work to help recent cohorts of students as a salient challenge. The educator who earlier reported that their teaching history was filled with countless rewarding experiences noted changes over time in students’ academic readiness and met these challenges with strategies designed to help students succeed. They discussed what they perceived as a critical problem for higher education: It is really difficult to watch students who have not been equipped for college struggle so much. Because of this, I have adapted my teaching philosophy. I now check in more frequently with students inside/outside of class. I offer grace periods for deadlines. I allow students to make up assignments. In sum, I am attempting lots of new strategies to try to facilitate the success of students with unique experiences. This is an uphill battle that all universities are currently confronting or will confront in the near future.
A few felt that the pandemic damaged students’ motivation. One teacher said, “I’ve definitely noticed a change in students since the pandemic. Students seem less engaged.” These teachers talked about the Sisyphean work entailed in creating class assignments and activities that would inspire students out of torpor or apathy.
Finally, these teachers felt challenged to address stressors in students’ lives that harmed their academic performance. One educator responded with compassion and flexibility to a student who was having trouble balancing school and military obligations.
A student kept coming late or would not come to class. I had a meeting with the student and found out the person was in the military and would be too tired for class so would come late or not show up. After having a better understanding of the situation, I told the student to still attend class (even if she sleeps) and try to follow the notes posted online. If she needed help she could also see me. Her grades improved.
Another teacher found that the difficult work of helping students who have had traumatic experiences has impacted their teaching in positive ways.
It reminds me that our students have many different roles and realistically, sometimes, my class isn’t the most important thing. It reminds me to give grace and not to make a policy or rule aimed at the few students that may take advantage because the majority won’t. They just need a little grace.
This sociologist underscored that working with students who have experienced trauma has shaped their teaching philosophy: “Recently, I have had two students have family members who were victims of gun violence. My teaching philosophy has become even more about compassion and care for the whole student in and out of the classroom.” A teacher discussed the need to make safe space in the classroom to allow students to share and process trauma. One teacher shared the challenges in a family course where “students share difficult and horrible stories about family experiences.” The teacher articulated their mindful teaching philosophy “to use these teachable moments to give students the time they need to share and grieve.” Here is yet another example about how a student’s trauma strongly shaped this department chair’s philosophy: On following up with a student whose engagement and participation dropped drastically, I learned a young man had been living out of his car and been food insecure for six weeks. I continue to hold some of the highest expectations for student work and mastery in my department. However, I am now considerably softer in presenting these expectations and explaining the why. Rather than assuming my disengaged students simply don’t care . . . I make a conscious decision to assume that difficult life circumstances rather than simple disinterest contribute to failure. I am not so naive to believe this to always be the case . . . but by assuming the best of my students, I respond in ways that are supportive for those who might truly need it. Those who are simply disengaged will fail either way . . . it allows me to enjoy my job a great deal more.
This extended quote indicates that teachers craft philosophies that balance generous care as well as distancing hope when they help students in the immediate, urgent present with their problems. Helping students with their lives as citizens and as real embodied people requires emotional maturity, resilience, and self-reflection. Thus, when faced with the unanticipated challenges addressing diverse student needs, these educators adapted their classrooms, teaching philosophies, and interactions with students in ways that were rooted in compassion and care.
Forging healthy boundaries
While having a strong desire to help students, a few teachers recognize a need to set boundaries for themselves and students. This educator detailed both the challenge and importance of setting boundaries.
Professors need boundaries: we need to conserve and protect our energy to be the best we can be for the greatest number of students. My most difficult experience was learning to set boundaries while still being empathetic. It was difficult to release the sense of responsibility for others’ failures and let go of excessive worrying about them. Initially, it made me feel like I was being indifferent. However, as I practiced it more, I came to realize that I could provide better support when I maintained some emotional distance.
They elaborated by describing responses to a range of student behaviors, including lack of attendance and disruptive behavior in the classroom: “One of the biggest challenges is learning not to lean into your emotions (anger, outrage, disappointment) and allow that individual to drive the narrative of how I conduct my course and my classroom.” Boundaries also helped instructors to not take student failures personally. For this teacher, a challenge was assigning their first F to a student who did not submit work, even after being contacted multiple times.
I took it personally, I thought I did something wrong. But this made me realize that it’s not necessarily about me, there will always be some students who will fail due to not turning in crucial assignments. Sometimes this is a result of external factors (mental health, family, financial, etc.), other times, it’s just because the student doesn’t care. My role is to provide a classroom structure that encourages engagement and reflection in hopes that it’ll capture the interest of most of the students.
Earlier, we found that this teacher was the one willing to give great time and talent to a student to help them design a primary data collection and prepare it for a regional conference presentation. Clearly, they value a commitment to helping students. That said, this educator sees the importance of balance between supporting students and encouraging autonomy.
Sharing vulnerability with students
Last, a few teachers mentioned career difficulties about how to share their own vulnerabilities with students. One teacher told an extended story about how they thought a course “was going great, and the classroom dynamics were positive and engaged.” However, the evaluations indicated strong criticism from a core group that this teacher located in reactions to their own disability. As they related the problem, The criticisms were actually about whatever is happening on my face when my invisible disability (neurodiverse) caused me to pause as my brain reoriented itself from my prepared content to questions that were perhaps about content from several minutes earlier in the classroom, or that were making a drastic departure from what was happening in the moment. Essentially, as I “switched my mental track back a few tracks,” my face was giving blank looks or distorting, unbeknownst to me.
The teacher decided to manage this problem by directly addressing their neurodivergence early in each semester. The teacher’s philosophy began to orient their difference as a source of strength to help students learn tolerance and inclusivity for others and open the door for connections with students experiencing their own vulnerabilities.
I realized I needed to be more proactive in preparing my students for what those pauses or looks might mean. This was in a mental health course, and when we would cover developmental disorders, I would disclose and share a bit of my story. But I realized I needed to model the vulnerability and promote empathy from the very beginning, to benefit the class overall and students’ learning. Now at the beginning of all my courses, that vulnerability and explanations of how my neurodiversity may manifest itself while we are together are given. I believe we are asking our students to be vulnerable with us, so we need to do that ourselves. It’s important to me to proactively demonstrate what we are hoping our students leave our social justice-based degree program with. This vulnerability has also opened the door for many more students to talk to me and trust me with their own vulnerable selves, which is one of the highlights of my work.
This teacher did not shut down or respond defensively to the criticism. Instead, they learned from their evaluations, adapted how they talked about their own neurodiversity, and came to believe honesty and trust offered a two-part benefit to their students.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Our foremost finding was that empathy or socioemotional competence saturated these interviews. These teachers did not seem overwhelmed by pressures from student emotional or mental health needs. We find no evidence of any significant burnout or self-protective cynicism. Only one mentioned faculty burnout, but only as preventive advice to pursue teaching goals and passions without caving to distractions. Instead, their narratives reflected an active muscular form of empathy. Moreover, they often discussed empathy or socioemotional competence as a “skill” they wanted to teach their students. Some did note the increasing fragility of students since the pandemic (Bartholomay 2022; Corbera et al. 2020; Lipson 2021). However, many referred to careers long marked by empathy (Wink et al. 2021), not just deployed as part of pandemic exigencies. These teachers strongly supported research that indicates that students recognize and respond to care (Anderson et al. 2020). Their narratives indicated that they aspire to the qualities a recent survey of a pandemic cohort shows that undergraduates value: They want connection with their students, flexibility to meet their needs, and a nonauthoritarian egalitarian student-teacher relationship (Senter 2024).
Their stories reflect professionals well grounded in American Sociological Association teaching standards for twenty-first-century instruction in the major. First, they discussed concerns about student development from a taxonomic perspective (Messineo 2018). Second, they conducted classrooms focused on data literacy, quantitative skills, critical perspectives, and public sociology (Johnson and Gleit 2022; Palmer 2023). Third, they espoused a need to maintain their expertise by keeping up with technological, methodological, and substantive advances (Kozimor-King and Chin 2018). These were their professional academic commitments as teachers. Their goals for student well-being were as numerous. First, they cared about inclusivity and belonging and wanted to attend to both student diversity in populations and student diversity in learning needs (Oehmen et al. 2023; Opsal et al. 2023). For example, their stories expressed active engagement with marginalized students, military students, and students new to higher education, such as first-generation and working-class students. They troubleshot ways to awaken all students to a work ethic about nurturing inclusivity. Second, they attended to classroom climate and were especially ready to acknowledge how personal or collective crisis or trauma disrupt education (Tingle et al. 2024). Last, they talked openly about the basic, ever-present need to be alert to their own biases and to be willing to learn from mistakes. Their narratives represent well-rounded, ambitious, thriving, and striving teachers.
A critical dimension of their narratives is the clear evidence that they care about their students as people with lives beyond the classroom. These educators do want their students to have success as sociology majors or in other academic pursuits and work to help them enter graduate school or earn good jobs. However, they are also aware that their students are individuals with their own hopes and dreams, own talents and liabilities, and own fair share of gifts and problems. Throughout these stories, our former students reflected on their respect for their students’ lives and their hopes to help them become more fulfilled, self-actualized, and generous community-minded humans. They spoke consistently with a common voice that values the fullness of the meaning of a liberal education.
We began this study by referencing changes in higher education and the additional strains of the pandemic. However, our former students were curiously silent about structural inequities in higher education facing faculty professionally (Colby 2023). This silence may be an artifact of selection bias, with those more disaffected by problems in academia less likely to participate in the survey. Alternatively, our questions directly asked them about rewarding and difficult experiences in their daily work with their students. They clearly focused in good faith on their efforts to develop students, teach them skills, and share their passion about the sociological imagination. Our survey was equipped for their stories about their teaching but not their perspectives about administrative, structural, and large social societal pressures on college classrooms (Macfarlane 2021; Penn 2022).
This study has three limitations. First, these stories probably have some level of social desirability bias. Our former students were invited in unprompted ways to offer experiences of their choosing and framing. That said, numerous stories raised issues about teaching failures and disappointments, so we have a range of positive and negative experiences. Second, we are concerned about selection effects and nonresponse bias. We do not know how much of our nonresponse results from faulty contact information or true nonresponse. We cannot know whether the nonrespondents are more likely to have left academic teaching posts or have had more negative teaching experiences and more burnout. Third, social desirability aside, we do not know how much response bias affects these stories. We cannot know whether these stories are chosen accidentally because of potential recall errors or recency effects, chosen as exemplars, or chosen as representative of their teaching philosophies. Nevertheless, we see the dominant themes of commitment to helping students and learning from mistakes.
This study is a healthy reminder that sociologists do live and teach public sociology and the sociological imagination and appreciate the vital need for active DEI efforts. They take seriously their obligation to be engaged, dedicated, ever-learning professionals who bring skills and care to students and want generativity for their students’ lives. As one associate professor said, I know they aren’t going to remember every key term or definition or fact that they learn in my class 5 years from now, but they are going to remember to ask different questions about the world around them, think about others, consume information in a different way, and be better humans.
Thus, we need more research on whether and how mid-career teachers feel supported in their various roles and how they are adapting to wide-scale changes in higher education. In these interviews, we saw a few tantalizing glimmers of support. Several stories mentioned a dean, chairs, and colleagues who supported teachers as they addressed their own teaching mistakes or students’ cheating or disruptive behavior. However, these narratives were stories about support during crisis. We need more research on opportunities sociology teachers have for participating in professional teaching communities that foster mentorship.
Why does a simple descriptive study of a generation’s worth of sociology teachers from one specific graduate program matter? After all, we mostly find that despite painful experiences, teachers report rich careers focused on helping students flourish. This study makes two contributions. First, a survey of our program is useful for our plans to redesign our teaching seminar in a postpandemic, neoliberal environment. We need to provide more instruction and support for the emotional labor carried by teachers along with a repertoire of techniques, lessons, grading rubrics, and knowledge about the scholarship of teaching and learning. Their collective voices of “helping students” across varied academic and life domains clearly means teaching is not a simple endeavor. We suspect much can be learned by simply giving space for teacher narratives. In fact, our findings underscore that teachers will face failures and losses over their careers but need not feel despair or isolation. These teachers freely shared their difficulties and lessons they learned. They praised the power of teaching communities and professional support to address teaching problems.
Second, in McLeskey and Obernesser’s (2024:49) literature review of the disproportionate emotional labor undertaken by graduate student and contingent instructors, they said, If roughly three-quarters of faculty are contingent but continue to teach, especially at more than one institution at the same time, then this reveals something crucial: faculty continue to show up for students, and students are their priority. . . . University administrators do not necessarily understand the motivations of faculty who continue to perform admirably despite precarious working conditions, despite, in many cases, being reliant on them as the foundations of their instructional workforce.
We find much the same in our study. Here, we find teachers across the spectrum of insecure and secure positions. Their commitment to quality education and great empathy emanates from their stories. These findings are important because they call upon us to care about their working conditions in a more competitive, resource-deprived, postpandemic educational landscape.
We close with one recommendation for graduate programs and four for our own teaching program. We encourage sociology graduate programs to develop routine internal review procedures to monitor their students’ progress upon graduation or to share their insights in Teaching Sociology if they already do such reviews. We often see our most professionally active and better-resourced former students at conferences and meetings and keep in contact with those who become collaborators or friends, but we advise doing better about routine cohort follow-ups. What are they doing with their careers? How are they creatively using their sociology degrees within sociology and sister disciplines or across other professions? How do they perceive the professional state of sociology and changes in higher education generally? Of course, most important, what would these routine surveys indicate about how teaching programs in particular should change or grow?
We conducted an admittedly rough exploratory review here but found four threads to strengthen our own program. Our internal recommendations revolve around enhancing opportunities to develop compassion and caretaking skills. First, we need to expand discussion and training on the flexibility, adaptability, and openness required to be ready for care and compassion in their jobs. Second, we need to more closely apprise students of the real organizational and student differences in expectations of teachers by gender identity, race/ethnicity, and class. The burden and time demands are indeed heavier for faculty of color and women, for instance (Rideau 2021). We certainly need to widen our teaching support group conversations to invite free discussion of these issues among our diverse instructors-on-record. Third, we need to think about how to teach mindful awareness about changing student populations. Universities are rightly concerned about “the demographic cliff” of fewer 18- to 22-year-old students and the potential shifts in student body diversity caused by recent Supreme Court decisions. We need to teach upcoming professionals to be committed to helping grow their own universities and colleges and expand enrollment and retention efforts for underrepresented students. Last, we very much need to develop early career support for our graduate students. We encourage them to value teaching communities but leave them to individually sort out their new careers. Our program should create stronger mentoring bonds as students enter their research and teaching responsibilities.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.