Mehmet Practicum Blog

Horning: Reading

The author introduces the "think-aloud procedure" as one way to help students understand the nature of the reading process, but fails to go into it indepth.  I assume this is a procedure designed for in-class work.  What methods could make this procedure more effective?  In my view, it is very important to make think aloud for students a socially engaged process, and therefore use the classroom as a space where ideas and opinions are shared and debated around poignant readings.  I think the teacher as a facilitator can lay some ground rules, such as having students defend their opinions and ideas by referencing text from the articles.  Making reading more of an obvious social process will also help with the motivation problem referred to by Horning.

 
   

Lovejoy and democratic discourse

Lovejoy is talking about an essential feature of doing sociology.  Ethnographic writing for example tries to bring out how people interact in a particular setting.  A big part of that is capturing how they communicate.  The ethnographic genre requires the writer to represent that form of communication, interpret it, and explain the social factors behind it.  Sociology is really about being able to pool different forms of language together.  This article only reminds me that I have to expose my students to different forms of language and get them to be able to develop ideas and opinions around them.   

Criteria for Grading Writing Assignment

Use the elements of a personal history that we identified in Berger’s own life account (as well as my own) in drafting your autobiography on how you developed your career/intellectual interests and how you came to study at QCC.

We identified the following elements of a personal history:

--How the social background (economic, cultural, educational, geographic etc.) of your family determined how you related to one another at home

--How you were labeled (e.g., “good student,” “problem child,” an ethnic identity, etc.) and how this affected your outlook and actions

--Your experiences in social settings such as school, neighborhood, church, work, etc., and how they affected how you saw yourself and the world

--Opportunities given (or not given) to you in different settings that altered your interests, perspectives, and path in life

--The people you met, what brought you together (including chance meetings), and how they altered your life

--How social and political developments (economic downturns, changes in job market, war, new public policies, etc.) or movements (anti-war, pro-war, pro-life, pro-choice, labor, etc.) altered your interests and life-path

--How chance events (natural disaster, fire, etc.) altered your direction in life

Your autobiography should have at least some of the above elements and link them to form a coherent personal history, similar to the ones we read.

Your personal history should be at least three pages long, typed, using 12 point font, in Times New Roman style with one inch margins.  In addition, your work should be proofread and corrected for stylistic matters (i.e., grammar) and spell-checked.

Reading and Writing Assignment

Assignment 1

We just read and talked about C. Wright Mill’s discussion of “the sociological imagination,” of which he writes,

The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within this period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. (p. 5)

Mills further adds, “The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and its relations between the two in society” (p. 6).

Using Mill’s concept of the sociological imagination, and having read the sociologist Bennet M. Berger’s personal history, write your own autobiography in which you discuss your own social formation. 

In writing your autobiography, discuss, as Berger did, how you developed your values, perspectives, interests, the opportunities you had or lost, and the different actions you took (or did not take) as a product of your varied social interactions growing up.  Pay close attention to how you got exposed to new ideas, how you felt around people in different social settings and why (e.g., neighborhood, school, work, etc.), how you got labeled or came to identify with a label (e.g., good student, problem child, practical, ethnic identity, etc.), how circumstances may have changed over time and why (e.g., you or your family’s economic situation, conditions at school or work, etc.), and how and why you came to QCC to continue your education.

Goals in Assigning Reading and Writing

My revised statement of teaching philosophy (posted under the date of the first draft) points to how I look to utilize readings and writing in my class.  One thing is clear, my approach focuses almost exclusively on goals within the discipline, and not so much to general goals, such as developing "critical thinking skills," that some of the examples that we read specifically focused on. 

Open Admission

Reitano points to the important struggles that the ending of open admissions at CUNY has induced.  Clearly, faculty have to be careful and wary of an overly narrow approach to education.  The ACT is a good case in point.  While the Baruch tutorial shows what I believe to be some valuable aspects of the exam as to how to build an argument, it also presents writing as something overly formulaic and assumes that there are only two positions to any issue.  As teachers I think we need to make a conscious effort to reemphasize to students that knowledge and writing can take on a diversity of modes, and that it is important to be able to see and relate this diversity to one another.

Teaching Statement

Statement of Teaching Philosophy for Sociology

My fundamental goal for my students is to demystify social and historical processes.  Only once this is begun can we begin to teach theories of social science and apply methodologies to test them.  Two personal experiences explain how I came up with this view. 

The first, a friend said to me one day, as I walked with her in our NYC suburban neighborhood, “When blacks move into a neighborhood housing prices fall.  How does the market know?”  The second, on a Saturday morning, 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.”  It occurred to me that both my friend and Thomas Friedman talked about social and historical processes in supernatural terms, which I believe points to a pervasive problem in popular attitudes—the seeming segmentation and detachment of personal life experiences from larger societal events. 

But with this problem I see an opportunity to refocus the teaching of sociology on the core theoretical question in the social sciences, the relationship between human agency and structure.  In dealing with the grand question, I breakdown my teaching process into parts, each with an objective.  Latter parts and objectives build on the previous ones.  My first objective is to have students reorient and begin to develop an analytical approach to all forms of social interaction.  Through the use of brief stories, vignettes, and anecdotes from various sources, including fiction and popular media, I hope to have students think about and ask questions about what determines the nature of social relations and how they change over time.  A substantive exercise in this regard is to have students reflect on their own life histories and write an autobiography about how they have gotten to where they are and the values and perspectives they have developed.

            My second objective, then, is to introduce the major theories of social science that provide the conceptual frameworks for explaining social phenomena.  I try to provide relatively short but pointed readings so that they can delve into the content without being overwhelmed.  While reading about the major theories, I encourage students to note their reflections in a journal by using these theories to (re)analyze the social interactions we have seen in the vignettes and in their autobiography.  These reflections and questions also form the basis for class discussion.

            My third objective is to have students test those theories through a combination of primary source materials (through historical journals, firsthand accounts, newspaper accounts), and by having students go out into communities and do some of their own interviewing and participant observations at different social sites.  They may also use simple statistical data.  From the data they have gathered, I ask them to compare their findings with some of the theory that we have discussed.

            The purpose of the three objectives is to eventually have students come up with their own findings working as sociologists.  The first objective is to cognitively orient them towards refocusing on the nature of social interactions and have them begin to ask the appropriate questions.  The second objective is to introduce the major theories of social science, the conceptual frameworks by which the students can look back and reevaluate the social interactions they have seen as part of the first objective.  The third objective is to have them test those theories by actively obtaining data.  This is what sociologists do after all.                 

Inventing the University

Of interest to me in “Inventing the University” was its honesty about how students are felt to feel like outsiders in the academic conventions of the university.  My experience as an undergraduate, as an adjunct instructor, and as a writing fellow is that much of the writing that students are expected to “do is test-taking, report or summary—work that places them outside the official discourse of the academic community, where they are expected to admire and report on what we do, rather than inside that discourse, where they can do its work and participate in a common enterprise.” I certainly was guilty of following this pattern as an adjunct. 

            But why is the honesty here something to admire?  Any power relationship, in this case teacher-student relationship, is based on mystification.  The more mysterious a position of power is in terms of how it is attained, the more intoxicating it is for the person who has attained it, and the more difficult it is to challenge that power.  Therefore, there are powerful reasons why faculty are less-likely to be self-reflective of the processes they engage in when doing their work.  Less self-reflection implies greater difficulty in translating those processes to students, who are then left feeling alienated.

            It seems to me that much of the pedagogical discourse still fails to present exactly what the academic conventions are, as reflected in the Peter Stearns article—particularly in his discussion on the humanities and teaching of sacred facts.  Real reform then comes with an open discussion about how knowledge is produced in any discipline, along with the serious constraints and limitations of the discipline in producing knowledge, and with systematic ways that can help students engage that process.

Syllabus: MAD 303

Looking at this syllabus I get the sense that a future teacher will learn some important techniques that will help them professionally such as organization, presentation, software use, and creating a teaching e-portfolio.  For that reason, the student will clearly see this course as essential in career development.  The heavy focus on technique, however, with the constant reminders of what one should do and not do does not invoke excitement for the student.  Further, the use of jargon such "high stakes writing" for graded assignments can certainly scare the student.      

Stearn's General Education

Peter Stearn, in his “General Education Revisited, Again,” while doing a good job laying out the debates that revolve around general education (GE), ultimately takes the narrow administrator’s viewpoint in that he effectively fails to deal with the more philosophical aspects and purposes of education: What do we think we know? How did we come to know that?  How is what we know constantly being challenged? And what new knowledge is coming to the fore? 

Consider Stearn’s discussion (pp. 3-4) on the tension between those who push for humanities to be a core area where important intellectual traditions are housed (i.e., the memorization of sacred facts) and those who see the humanities as a collection of disciplines that need to adjust to changing social realities (i.e., offering the option of taking several different courses within humanities).  The problem with Stearn is that while acknowledging that the debate falls exclusively on the humanities and not on the sciences, he fails to see a fundamental misconception inherent in this focus on the humanities, that knowledge in the humanities is static unlike the sciences.  He, then, inadvertently, reinforces a “false dichotomy” (although he claims to be trying to do away with dichotomies) between the sciences and the humanities.  Yes, there are facts (e.g.

Columbus

set sail for the new world in 1492) in the humanities, as there are in the sciences (e.g., a certain element has certain properties) but the purpose of academic work in the humanities is to interpret and constantly reinterpret how those facts came to be and their impact on humanity.  Therefore knowledge in the humanities, as in the sciences, is constantly evolving.  Is this not the essence in any academic discipline?  If so, then there is no such thing as a hallowed fact. 

Maybe it is because of his political sensibilities as an administrator that Stearn does not dare touch the matter of “sacred knowledge.”  But I see a deeper problem.  Stearn makes several references to “basic skills” that GE should provide students.  But he never explains what they are for.  Are they for helping students take part in the knowledge creation process?  If so, what role do “advanced skills,” by implication, play in that process?  Stearn should make these clear.