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Reflective Cases - Out-of-Class Assignment
The Teaching Sociology Playbook is a practical guide of eight (8) modules crafted to create and share teaching resources.
Access Module 1 below or download the free eBook with the complete set of eight modules now:
Module 1, Part 2: Reflective Cases
Need to skip to other parts of Module 1?
- Part 1 - Where Do Good Teaching Ideas Come From?
- Part 2 - Reflective Cases: Out-of-Class Assignment
- Part 3 - Reflective Cases: In-Class Activity
- Part 4 - Overview of Modules 2 – 8 and Next Steps
Reflective Cases: Out-of-Class Assignment
Now that you have a good grasp of many potential sources of good ideas for teaching, we will describe in-depth reflections on our process of identifying and refining these ideas.
Seeing Sociology
Stephanie developed the Seeing Sociology assignment to address several practical problems related to contextual factors.
First, the assignment dealt with limited instructional support. For example, Stephanie did not have graders or teaching assistants, so everything that she assigned, she graded. A visual-based assignment promised to take less time to grade than a text-heavy assignment. Stephanie also had to consider the other demands on instructor time. She developed the assignment at a community college where she taught five courses every semester: two online and three in-person.
Further, she usually had three unique preps each semester (in addition to in-person and online sections of Introduction to Sociology). Her courses usually enrolled about 30 students. Each semester, she was responsible for the instruction of approximately 150 students, and she also advised 30–40 students. She had no research expectations, and service requirements were low (e.g., being a member of one campus committee).
When Greg and Stephanie first met, they talked about their teaching challenges. Greg shared that he was overwhelmed by the amount of grading he had to do after changing institutions. Greg went from one section of Introductory Sociology a semester (with approximately 25 students) to two sections a semester (with 40 students each). This increased enrollment made it challenging to keep up with grading and provide effective feedback on the four-page papers he typically assigned at multiple points throughout the semester. Stephanie shared the assignment with Greg because she had developed it to address this very challenge.
Second, Seeing Sociology addressed the unique context of online learning (i.e., modality). In online courses, students often do more graded written work through the discussion forum (in contrast, discussion question responses are more likely to be ungraded for in-person courses). If students were already doing some graded writing, more writing seemed unnecessary. Therefore, Seeing Sociology took the place of nondiscussion-based writing assignments but still challenged students to activate and use their sociological imagination by connecting course material and the real world, thus meeting the course’s learning objectives.
Third, Seeing Sociology addressed issues related to student preparedness and other student characteristics. Stephanie created the assignment around 2011 and was responsive to the shifts that were taking place in the broader culture around visual-based forms of communication and access to smartphone technology. When Stephanie began using the assignment, visual-based social media was still new. For example, Instagram and Pinterest started in 2010, and Snapchat came out in 2011. In 2012, 45 percent of Americans owned a smartphone, which increased to 56 percent in 2013 (Fox & Rainie, 2014). In other words, more students were getting smartphones or knew someone who had a smartphone. The smartphone was essential because cameras were now more accessible to students. She also knew that many of her students were part of the have-nots in the digital divide (see Gonzales et al., 2020). Therefore, she had a couple of spare digital cameras to lend out but never needed to lend them to students. Today, most students are very familiar with visual-based social media, and nearly all students have a smartphone. Therefore, students are technologically prepared for the assignment. Still, because most have grown up using social media, they are now challenged to use the conventions of social media and visuals in a new way.
Fourth, Seeing Sociology fit in the sociology curriculum because it had the potential to help students with their observational skills and could be used to introduce students to the subfield of visual sociology. Stephanie has only used the assignment in Introduction to Sociology. Still, it could be adapted to intermediate or upper-level courses and, more explicitly, target the development of observational data collection and analysis.
Over the years, the assignment underwent significant revisions. Stephanie published the initial instructions for this activity on TRAILS in 2013 and an updated version in 2017 (Medley-Rath, 2013; 2017; see also Medley-Rath, 2019). The 2017 version changed the assignment to a group assignment and included a method for sharing students’ work with the whole class. Stephanie shifted from an individual to a group assignment due to varying levels of student preparedness. Students in groups could correct students who misunderstood the assignment early.
Greg began using the assignment with the instructions Stephanie had published on TRAILS. He has since adapted the assignment to better fit his context. For instance, he found that sharing student work from previous classes is useful for students to get an idea of how the project works. Stephanie designed the assignment as a term-long project. Greg experimented with doing it only for the second two units of his class, with mixed results. Students seem to benefit from repetition and starting earlier in the semester. He also ran into the problem every semester of the “poetic caption.” While Greg wants students to be creative in how they express themselves, too often it became a trite expression like “The nature of life is change” over an image of graduation or “Under the skin, we are all the same” over a picture of arms of different skin tones. He revised the assignment to avoid these kinds of submissions in the future. He finds that having students use the list of sociological terms they get on their exam study guides helps reduce (but not eliminate) these types of submissions by pushing students back into active sociological thinking.
