Sociologists are engaging in a long-overdue reckoning about the place of the traditional canon in social theory courses and pedagogy. Instructors are revising their syllabi to include a more diverse set of authors while "provincializing" classics that have long been taught as universal. We confront the question of how to teach contested…

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…

Activity theory is a relatively young methodology for researching higher education teaching practices. Beyond systemic analyse of workplace activities and their development, activity theory used in its full interventionist capacity can foster practitioners' transformative agency to initiate practice change. Nevertheless, this is not an easy…

In this paper we explore the difficulties engineering undergraduates encounter with tertiary mathematics. Results from our survey (N = 71) show that students in our sample face issues mostly related to the challenging nature of university mathematics, the absence of worked examples during lectures and the discontinuity of school and university…

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…

Purpose: This article responds to the topic of 'postcolonial social science education' by exploring strategies for decolonizing the social science 'archive'. Design/methodology/approach: The paper takes a decolonial-critical social science approach to explore the limit and test cases for decolonizing social science education, using two examples: a…

This article explores reality TV's value in teaching sociological concepts and theories for a better understanding contemporary society. Reality TV serves as a rich canvas for illustrating key tenets of major sociological theories such as structural functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. By analyzing reality TV through a…

With the growing number of online course opportunities in higher education, it is necessary to gain an understanding of the benefits of fostering social presence in those courses for adult learners. Ensuring that adult learners are provided with an online learning community that fosters social presence and promotes students' autonomy, competence,…

Queer theory taught at historically Black colleges and universities often meets with resistance from students. This article proposes a means by which to overcome this resistance. Deferring resistance involves encouraging students to approach queer theory texts in the same vein as they have approached texts earlier in the course. By building upon…

Home economics is a diverse helping field that includes the areas of child development and education, nutrition, cooking, and the dietetics profession. Historically, these fields have been the domain of heterosexual cisgender women, with research and discussions of queerness limited. In this article, using queer methodologies and a queer…

This note discusses a class activity that was developed for first-year bachelor students in sociology to understand homogamy theory. Taught in a "classical" deductive way, this theory proved to be difficult to remember and describe on the examination. Starting from inductive learning, and more specifically, (structured) inquiry-guided…

Against the backdrop of prevalent student attrition in engineering education, this study draws upon Margaret Archer's social realistic theory and offers a close-up analysis of how structural and cultural factors interplay to affect Chinese university engineering faculty members' perceptions of and agency in practicing 'scholarly teaching'.…

In this chapter, the authors share insights from a dialogue project focused on intersectionality within a residential life setting and discuss additional strategies for helping students understand intersectionality.

Queering art education aims to critically lay bare the embedded heteronormative demand in the education system and prepare preservice art teachers to advance social justice concerns in art curriculum equitably. Toward these goals, we present the results of a research project we developed for 29 preservice art teachers from an urban university that…

This study investigated the relationship between students' online learning anxiety (OLA) and academic self-efficacy (ASE) amid global challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis. Participants in this quantitative research included 718 tertiary education students from 28 countries who responded to a standardized questionnaire. Despite the crisis'…