Teaching Statement
I have three primary objectives as a teacher of sociology. The first is to demystify social and historical processes[1]; the second is to teach the practice of sociology; and the third is to focus on the historical and theoretical foundations of sociology.
Speaking from personal experience,[2] I have recognized that popular conceptions often attribute supernatural and distant qualities to social forces. Therefore, in order to help students to begin thinking sociologically, we begin my class building connections between the social/historical and the personal, focusing on how the former structures the latter. Through extensive class discussion of C. Wright Mills, Durkheim, and Goffman, and with the aid of life histories, vignettes, anecdotes from various sources, including fiction and popular media, we ask questions about what determines the nature of social relations and how they change over time. As we read and discuss, the students write short reaction pieces in class, applying the concepts of the authors above to the events in their own lives. These short pieces are then brought together to help the students develop and write their own personal histories in which they discuss how they developed their values, perspectives, and interests as a function of the social interactions they have had in life.
We then move on to focus on the practice of sociology as a science. We look at case studies such as Durkheim’s Suicide in order to examine the relationship between the different parts of the research process.[3] In class we discuss the hypotheses that Durkheim developed, how he may have developed them, the data that he collected, and the way he organized them. We then analyze the data together and see if they confirm or reject the hypotheses. After having evaluated the hypotheses, we reformulate the theory that Durkheim started with. Further, we re-explore Durkheim’s data to see if they point to further questions to be studied in future research. The students also get the chance to look at current statistics on suicide rate in which they in small groups discuss possible research questions and variables of focus. The group then shares their research ideas with the rest of the class. I also use my own work to provide another example of the research process. Students are given the opportunity to analyze a social science research article on their own, evaluating how the author(s) structured his/her study.
In justifying my third teaching objective, I think it is essential to link history with the theoretical foundations of sociology. Comte, Marx, Spencer, Weber, and ideas such as race and positivism, simply do not make much sense without understanding the historical context from which they emerged. This allows us a class to take a critical approach to the foundational concepts and theories of sociology as we discuss them. Students further employ this critical approach as they analyze the link between history and theory by writing a paper on the evolution of a concept, such as race, in the social sciences, or by studying the life and times of a particular theorist and how these influenced the formulation of his/her ideas.
My hope is that through my three primary teaching objectives, my students will have the necessary background to not only practice sociology, if they so wish, but to be able to evaluate other areas of knowledge and our changing world more effectively and productively.
[1] Which is the same as one of my primary objectives as a researcher, to fill in the black box of cause and effect.
[2] One day, a friend said to me as I walked with her in our NYC suburban neighborhood, “When blacks move into a neighborhood housing prices fall. How does the market know?” I also recall, while watching the PBS program Foreign Exchange, the political writer Thomas Friedman said that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was similar to the Palestinians in that they are hopelessly struggling against the “tide of history.”
[3]Specifically, I am referring to: the theoretical premise of a study, literature review, hypotheses, data collection methods, data organization methods, data analysis, hypotheses testing, and how all these come together to re-inform theory and further research.
