Sara Steen: 01/01/2004

Sociology 5615

Sociology 5615: Teaching Sociology, Spring 2005

Course objectives

To promote a high standard for college teaching.
To increase skills in a number of specific teaching activities (e.g., organizing content, lecturing, leading discussions, managing classroom dynamics, and evaluating).
To provide an opportunity for you to formulate personal values, approaches, and styles of classroom instruction that can grow and be refined over your teaching careers.
To help you to develop a course syllabus that you can use when you teach your own class as a GPTI.
To create a community in which teaching is actively discussed, and to promote the idea that teaching can be a collective enterprise.
To help you to develop a teaching portfolio that you can use when you go on the job market.

*Several of these objectives are adapted from Howard Aldrich’s teaching seminar syllabus (University of North Carolina sociology department).

Sociology 2031

Social Problems, Fall Semester 2004
The goal of this course is to prepare you to be a more educated and more active citizen. Throughout the term, we will talk about the relationship between individuals and communities using a sociological perspective. We will use what we learn about social problems to begin to think about possible solutions and to identify specific actions we as individual citizens can take to work toward these solutions.

Course syllabus
You can download the course syllabus here (MS Word document).
You can download the course syllabus here (PDF document).

Course assignments
You can download the reading questions for the semester here (MS Word document).
You can download the reading questions for the semester here (PDF document).

Sociology 4461

Critical Thinking: Consumerism in America, Fall Semester 2004

Course Description
This is a class about questioning. Together, we will take one aspect of American society—consumerism (which we will define as the acts of selling, purchasing, and consuming)—and ask questions about why consumerism has come to occupy such a central place in our culture, why we shop the way we do, and what the effects of our behavior are on local, national, and global levels.

Critical thinking requires us to question many of the things that go unnoticed in everyday life, and to challenge assumptions we may hold that influence the ways we move about in the world. Each of us will be asked to take different perspectives on issues than we are accustomed to—an uncomfortable but frequently enlightening exercise. I view this course as a collective effort, and as such, its success will depend as much on the effort and energy that you put into the work as on the materials that I prepare for class.

Course syllabus
You can download the course syllabus here (MS Word).

You can download the course syllabus here (PDF file).