Students hold foundational assumptions that interact with information they are introduced to in college. By learning to identify, assess, and restructure these foundational ideas, students' ability to acquire topical knowledge improves. This article presents a format for teaching students how to evaluate their beliefs through four levels of…

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

A silence in the resurgence of scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois has been his work as an instructor. This article uses Du Bois's early teaching experiences and reflections on the "ugly" progress of schooling to ask: What should guide the pedagogy of sociology instructors when racial progress is so ugly? I sketch here a pedagogy inspired by…

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

Conversations surrounding decolonial humanistic sociology have been guided by a moral imperative--to advance a radical critique of society for the purpose of reducing inequality. Storytelling has been used by marginalized groups to advance decolonization. Exactly how can instructors use the power of storytelling and maps to facilitate the study of…

This Teaching Note examines the implementation of a full-semester course model for digital exchanges between students across countries. The model, Global Understanding, created and administered by East Carolina University, is a platform for humanistic pedagogy that dovetails seamlessly with sociological content, methods, and principles. Through an…

We investigate student listening compliance, preference for audio versus print content, and exam performance when professionally produced podcasts are assigned as "readings" and provided in both audio and print formats. Listening/reading compliance for the assigned podcasts was high compared with figures reported in previous research.…

We present a two-assignment series that developed students' sociological imaginations and that could be done in a face-to-face or online course. The series used the Sociological Images blog and students' own visual images (e.g., photographs) to meet course learning goals: (1) link sociological theories and concepts to social events/trends, (2)…

Sociology instructors have long used nontraditional texts such as literary fiction to demonstrate core course concepts, increase student engagement, and develop students' critical thinking in the classroom. In this article, I explore how written assignments structured around identifying core course concepts in a dystopian novel that connects to…

Current approaches to building inclusive classrooms for first-generation and working-class students tend to emphasize communicative strategies: receiving students with welcoming messages that acknowledge and value their life experience and promoting a growth mindset. These methods are important, but they do little to address structural sources of…

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

The COVID-19 pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated many enduring social inequalities in countries throughout the world. Sociology instructors are thus likely to incorporate content related to this relationship between the pandemic and inequalities in their courses. This article explores the potential of horror films, specifically the subgenre…

A common learning goal of law-related courses taught in sociology classrooms is for students to gain an understanding of the sociological approach to law. This approach emphasizes viewing law as a social process and studying law by analyzing both legal and nonlegal phenomena. A challenge to students' achievement of this learning goal is their…

The Alien Worlds project teaches ethnographic skills using the societies of dystopian, postapocalyptic, and science fiction texts as imagined field sites and targets for analysis. These exercises and assignments, which illustrate principles of qualitative fieldwork, were developed when COVID-19 precautions made it impossible to assign tasks that…