Tag Archives: public sociology

A story of teaching sociology to a young child

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At a few points, I’ve thought about how sociology could be taught to young children. One way would be to include it the social studies curriculum but another would be to have kids accompany their parents to college classes in sociology:

Fourteen years ago, Karen Bilodeau was an unusual student at Bates College. She was 33 years old and often took her preschooler, Emma, with her to classes or to meetings with professors…

All that made an impression on Emma, a senior at Edward Little High School. With a goal of becoming a doctor helping underprivileged children, this fall she’ll go to college on the campus she walked as a child…

Between the ages of 3 and 6, Emma remembers going to professor Emily Kane’s sociology classes. “I remember her doing a lot of projects. Kane examined gender equality in ‘The Little House on the Prairie.’ I remember that being fascinating,” Emma said…

When it was time for Emma’s college search, she longed to go out of state. During an overnight visit to Oberlin in Ohio, she said she changed her mind, preferring to be near her younger siblings and longing for Bates.

At age 17, like she did at age 4, Emma sat in on Professor Kane’s sociology class. “It was very much like, ‘This is what I want to be doing the next four years,'” she said.

Emma plans to study sociology and African-American studies. Her adopted siblings are African-American. She also plans to take science classes to help her continue to medical school.

“I really want to help underprivileged kids as a pediatrician or surgeon” in Haiti or Africa, she said.

A nice story. I’ve wondered how much introducing younger kids to sociology might help boost the discipline’s profile before students enter college as sociology is one of few disciplines that new college students don’t know much about. Or, perhaps this would help imprint sociology on the nation’s consciousness in a way that it isn’t now. This reminds me of Jane Elliot’s famous “blue eyes, brown eyes” experiment in a third-grade classroom. As Elliot has showed, this experience was formative in the lives of her small-town Iowa students. Perhaps the route to public sociology should begin with children rather than adults?

 

Sociologist Claude Fischer to begin new column shedding sociological light on popular debates

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Sociologist Claude Fischer will soon begin a new column in the Boston Review that “will take on the fashionable ideas about American social life reported in the mainstream media and expose them to scientific scrutiny.” Here is why Fischer says the public needs the sociological perspective applied to popular debates:

DJ: The “culture of poverty” debate has been reignited recently by Charles Murray, whose cultural analysis, you write, is “not serious.” He is one among many “thought leaders” to gain a wide audience for unserious views. How much blame do you think academic experts bear for ceding the public sphere to these modern-day sophists?

CF: “Sophist” (defined—I had to look it up—as one skilled in devious argumentation) is not quite the term I would use. While Murray’s particular argument about the origins of white, working-class culture cannot be taken seriously, much of what he has argued, in The Bell Curve, for example, is serious, even if, as colleagues and I have argued (in Inequality by Design), it is wrong. On the broader point: Yes, mainstream social scientists have been under-represented in public debates (not economists, however; they seem omnipresent). For many years, I have pressed my colleagues to tell more of what we know to the wider public. In the early 2000s, I was the founding editor of Contexts, a magazine of the American Sociological Association for general readers, a sort of poor man’s Social Scientific American. For various reasons, it did not find a place on airport magazine racks and, although it thrives (see contexts.org), the magazine mostly reaches sociologists and our students. Among the reasons we sociologists have been largely absent in the public dialogue include chronically abysmal writing, too-frequent PC-ness, and not trying enough. But the failure is also on the media’s side—for example, the taste for the sensational (see above), a short attention span, and a desperation for content. (In the latter regard, social science findings are rarely discovered by journalists; they are usually delivered by publicists and often large p.r. campaigns—see Murray, above.) Both sides share some responsibility for the vacuum.

DJ: Do you think American ignorance of sociological facts is akin to our ignorance of scientific facts, or is there something more to the story?

CF: Of course, most Americans are too busy to recall much of the science—or the history, for that matter—that they learned in school (many were too busy during school to learn it, too). While we academics put a weirdly high value on knowing bookish facts, social scientific knowledge is consequential for both society and individuals—say, understanding how schools’ organizational structures might affect learning. Social science in particular has some properties that make public awareness especially difficult. For one, people generally think they already know all that stuff. After all, they live in society; they don’t need to be told about it by some egghead. Such confidence, by the way, is one reason why people often respond to a piece of social science research by saying it is obvious—after hearing what the finding is. (Pick one: money makes people happier; money doesn’t make people happier. Either way the research comes out, many will say the result is obvious. Duncan Watts also discusses this phenomenon in his new book, Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer.) Second, people tend to believe comfortable facts. This is true in the natural sciences, too. (My Berkeley colleague, Robb Willer, has found that people are more likely to dismiss global warming as real if they are first told that it would cost a lot to mitigate it.) This shaping of empirical belief is multiplied in the social sciences. For example, the well-off are especially likely to believe that good fortune has nothing to do with success; it is all the result of talent and effort.

I’m looking forward to a good defense of sociology as well as insights into American life and culture.

Sociology article helps lead to getting diversity information on NYC financial firms?

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Earlier this week, two major financial firms said they would release data on the gender and race of their employees:

There is no requirement that Corporate America disclose its diversity data, but Monday two major companies – Goldman Sachs and MetLife — announced they’d be giving up the long-held secret…

The information is available and has been since 1964, because under the Civil Rights Act of that year, companies with 100 workers or more have had to report the data on race and gender annually to the U.S. Department of Labor. The problem has been, they were not under any requirement to release that data to the public, or even to local governments such as New York…

And there’s a lot of inequality, especially in the higher ranks at companies where the lack of diversity is greatest.

When I saw this, I was disappointed we didn’t get any information willing these companies were to start releasing this data or whether they were feeling enough public or government pressure. And then the article had a quote from the author of a recent sociology article on the topic that was published in a top journal and I wondered if this article made any difference…

Liu’s push for disclosure is a good first step on the road to more diversity, said Emilio J. Castilla, professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and author of  an article titled “Bringing Managers Back In: Managerial Influences on Workplace Inequality,” published in the American Sociological Review late last year.

“But this might not be enough,” he stressed. “They’re increasing transparency, showing some percentages, but I’d think about accountability. Are there organizational procedures in place to make sure these efforts result in the outcomes they want?”

I’m probably too hopeful here that an article in a sociology journal was influential but it couldn’t hurt…right?

British economics writer: economics has failed but are the sociologists ready to step up?

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This is an interesting viewpoint: “Mainstream economic models have been discredited. But why aren’t political scientists and sociologists offering an alternative view?” Here is some of the discussion about how sociology has failed to seize this opportunity:

Perhaps you have more faith in the sociologists. Take a peek at the website for the British Sociological Association. Scroll through thepress-released research, and you will not come across anything that deals with the banking crash. Instead in April 2010, amid the biggest sociological event in decades, the BSA put out a notice titled: “Older bodybuilders can change young people’s view of the over-60s, research says.”

Or why not do the experiment I tried this weekend: go to three of the main academic journals in sociology, where the most noteworthy research is collected, and search the abstracts for the terms “finance” or “economy” or “markets” since the start of the last decade.

Comb through the results for articles dealing with the financial crisis in even the most tangential sense. I found nine in the American Sociological Review, three in Sociology (“the UK’s premier sociology journal”), and one in the British Journal of Sociology. Look at those numbers, and remember that the BSA has 2,500 members – yet this is the best they could do…

It wasn’t always like this. One way of characterising what has happened in America and Britain over the past three decades is that people at the top have skimmed off increasing amounts of the money made by their corporations and societies. That’s a phenomenon well covered by earlier generations of sociologists, whether it’s Marx with his study of primitive accumulation, or the American C Wright Mills and his classic The Power Elite, or France’s Pierre Bourdieu…

Nor is there much encouragement to engage with public life. Because that’s what’s really missing from the other social sciences. When an entire discipline does what the sociologists did at their conference last week and devotes as much time to discussing the holistic massage industry (“using a Foucauldian lens”) as to analysing financiers, they’re never going to challenge the dominance of mainstream economics. And it’s hard to believe they really want to.

Ouch.

I can imagine some sociologists might argue that the world is much bigger than markets and economics. They would not be wrong. At this same time, this critique could be viewed as a call to action: does sociology offer a compelling alternative way to view the world? How can we account for both economic and social life?

I will say that there does appear to be growing interest in economic sociology. This may not be reflected in these particular journals but more sociologists are looking at the social and cultural dimensions of economics. As noted, this was a key concern of a number of foundational sociologists, observers who noticed that industrialization was changing the social world. I wonder how many sociologists would view studying the economic realm as something “dirty” (too many ties to capitalism, too messy, too close to economics, etc.) or “uninteresting” (not what really motivates them to research, teach, and engage in public life).

In response to criticism, sociologist argues academics need to explain better what they do

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A recent Washington Post op-ed suggested college faculty do not work hard enough:

An executive who works a 40-hour week for 50 weeks puts in a minimum of 2,000 hours yearly. But faculty members teaching 12 to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks spend only 360 to 450 hours per year in the classroom. Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation, their workload is still only 36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals. Yet they receive the same compensation.

If the higher education community were to adjust its schedules and semester structure so that teaching faculty clocked a 40-hour week (roughly 20 hours of class time and equal time spent on grading, preparation and related duties) for 11 months, the enhanced efficiency could be the equivalent of a dramatic budget increase. Many colleges would not need tuition raises or adjustments to public budget priorities in the near future. The vacancies created by attrition would be filled by the existing faculty’s expanded teaching loads — from 12 to 15 hours a week to 20, and from 30 weeks to 48; increasing teachers’ overall classroom impact by 113 percent to 167 percent.

Critics may argue that teaching faculty members require long hours for preparation, grading and advising. Therefore they would have us believe that despite teaching only 12 to 15 hours a week, their workloads do approximate those of other upper-middle-class professionals. While time outside of class can vary substantially by discipline and by the academic cycle (for instance, more papers and tests to grade at the end of a semester), the notion that faculty in teaching institutions work a 40-hour week is a myth. And whatever the weekly hours may be, there is still the 30-week academic year, which leaves almost 22 weeks for vacation or additional employment.

One article about the subsequent conversation regarding the op-ed quotes sociologist Jerry Jacobs talking about how academics do not explain their jobs to the public well:

Faculty-baiting might exist because people have certain perceptions of how college professors operate, some experts said. “I do not think we do a good job of explaining what we do,” said Jerry Jacobs, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Jacobs, who has researched faculty life, said that students often graduate from research universities without a clear understanding of what a professor’s job entails. “Meanwhile people see that the costs of college are going up and to them, faculty at colleges don’t seem to work 40 hours a week like high school teachers do,” he said.

In a 2004 article in the Sociological Forum, Jacobs found that full-time faculty members spend an average of just above 50 hours a week working. The data for his analysis came from the 1998 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty by the U.S. Department of Education and the faculty sample included 819 colleges and universities. “As a point of comparison, the average work week for men in the U. S. labor force is 43 hours per week and 37 for women. About one-quarter of men work in the labor force work over 50 hours per week (26.5 percent), along with one in ten women (11.3 percent),” Jacobs said. Many academics, of course, report working far more than 50 hours a week — and for adjuncts, the pay is a fraction of the figures cited by Levy, and many work without health or retirement benefits, or any job security.

It may be a job with some more flexibility than other jobs but there is certainly plenty of work for academics invested in their classrooms, research, and schools.

So what would Jacobs say academics should do? How can we explain to the public what academic life is like?

One option is to tie our roles to helping prepare students for jobs. However, this downplays aspects that aren’t as clearly vocational.

Another option: be more clear with students about what we do and how we do it. Instead of making our jobs like “black boxes” that are mysterious and capricious, explain what we are doing as we go along. Why should our students learn about a particular topic? Why do we grade the way we do? What do we do when we put together a research paper? I’ve tried some of these strategies and while students don’t seem overjoyed, some do appear to appreciate hearing the process behind it.

A third option would be to more clearly relate our teaching and research to everyday life, whether this is in the classroom or the community. While public sociology might be a sort of trendy term, it could help show people why what we do matters. We don’t just sit around and write for ten other academics; in our research we are hoping to draw attention to particular issues, influence public policy, help people who care about the topics, and interact with others who are also interested.

Fourth, we could defend the classroom experience. It is not easy to effectively impart knowledge and wisdom to other and to lead discussions. These days, it might be cheaper to do more online learning but something is missing, the community and atmosphere that can come from being in a classroom where both the instructor and students are engaged. This sort of criticism also is often leveled at teachers: “anyone could teach these lessons.” I don’t think everyone could.

Three and a half shelves of sociology books at Barnes & Noble

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While browsing at a local Barnes & Noble store, I again noted something of interest: they have three and a half shelves of sociology books.

This is fairly common as sociology is lumped in with sections like Cultural Studies and Criminology. Just across the aisle to the left was fifteen shelves of Current Affairs and just behind this was at least 15 shelves of History.

I’m not surprised by this: sociology in the public’s eye has a low profile. If you look closely at the books in the sociology section, you can find a number on sociological topics that are not written by sociologists such as Nickel and Dimed, There Are No Children Here, The Social Animal, Triumph of the City, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. So there is really less than three shelves of books by sociologists. This is the case even with several books on the shelf that have received recent attention such as Going Solo and The Cosmopolitan Canopy. Along with anthropology, I can’t think of any of the big academic disciplines from which you could find fewer books at your average chain bookstore.

Is this simply indicative of the small number of people who go into a Barnes & Noble and purchase sociology titles or does it illustrate the broader profile of sociology in American life?

Dancing sociology in Quebec

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I once searched YouTube for a statistics dance to show my statistics class and stumbled upon an admission’s video full of statistics based dances from a high school senior hopeful to get into Tufts. Somehow, I think her performance would be a little different than a new show in Quebec that is meant to interpret the scientific work of a political scientist/sociologist:

The acclaimed Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie (CLC) presents the world premiere of Les cheminements de l’influence (Pathways of Influence), a striking solo dance work created and performed by CLC co-Artistic Director Laurence Lemieux as a tribute to her father, eminent political scientist and sociologist Vincent Lemieux. With original music by Gordon Monahan, this new work runs February 15 – 25, 2012, the first official work to be presented at CLC’s new home, the Citadel,a new centre for contemporary dance.

Vincent Lemieux is Quebec’s foremost political scientist and sociologist, a visionary who unifies the practical and theoretical. According to The National Post, “some regard Mr. Lemieux as Quebec’s Nostradamus.” His daughter, Laurence Lemieux, is one of Canada’s most acclaimed dancers and a creator whose choreography – frequently danced by her husband (and CLC Co-Artistic Director) Bill Coleman and, most recently, their two children – is deeply personal yet beloved by audiences, and is often selected for “Top 10” lists by publications such as The Globe & Mail and Toronto’s NOW Magazine.

Her new piece is a graceful tribute to her father. Jumping from page to stage, she embodies his groundbreaking work with daring physicality and passion, contrasting the immediateness of the dancer’s body with a grand visual scale.

“I hope,” Lemieux says, “to retrace in dance some of the pathways he has travelled in his wide-ranging studies, to capture something of the spirit of his methodology – its scientific precision as well as its remarkable artistry. He researches ‘the Quebec people;’ my research takes me into the memories and passions of this one, particular Quebecois person.”

I can’t even imagine what this might look like…but I would be curious to see how an academic career translates into dance.

It might be a stretch but this reminds me of various tidbits I’ve seen here and there about expanding sociological analysis beyond the typical article or book paradigms. Video/documentaries is a very possible option but what about other forms of expression? Photography? Art? Dance? Music? Interactive websites? I imagine there are some really creative sociologists who could put something fascinating together. Why not have ASA allow some space for this and move beyond posters (which are often written documents tacked to a poster)?

Errors in sociology textbooks for fifth-graders in Macedonia?

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As part of a story about the larger “textbook trauma” in Macedonia, there was this interesting tidbit:

Widespread mistakes in Macedonian textbooks came to light last year when journalists wrote about an error-riddled sociology text for fifth-graders. The scandal resulted in the recall of that book and a massive, ongoing review of all of the country’s textbooks. Corrections and new books have still not been released, and in the meantime teachers and parents are essentially on their own to police the existing books…

In the case of the sociology textbook that started the controversy, the government spent 1 million denars ($22,000) to withdraw and replace a reported 15,400 copies. Among its shortcomings: listing popular entertainers alongside venerated names as lights of Macedonian culture; two visual depictions of the prophet Muhammad; no listing of Catholicism among the country’s faiths; contradictory estimates on the percentage of the population that is Muslim; and mistaken depictions of the flags of Macedonia and Kosovo.

The Education Ministry has sued the book’s panel of reviewers for the cost of pulping and replacing it.

The sociology book that took its place states, mistakenly, that Greece has a coastline along the Adriatic Sea.

The fact that textbooks contain errors is not surprising: sociologist James Louwen pointed some key American examples in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. But these errors seem quite problematic for an area of the world where there is a (tenuous?) blend of cultures and countries.

What is more interesting to me is that fifth-graders in Macedonia have sociology textbooks. Perhaps these books are similar to geography or history books but having sociology in the schools at younger ages sounds great. Students should learn about their own culture and society as well as think about how it differs from other societies. Perhaps they don’t need sociological theory at that point (Weber and Durkheim for fifth-graders?) but this could be a good start.

ASA pushing for better sociology Wikipedia entries

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This news came out earlier this week in the American Sociological Association’s Footnotes: the ASA is hoping sociologists and sociology students will help improve Wikipedia pages pertaining to sociology.

In an essay on the association’s online newsletter (scheduled to be included in the next edition of its print newsletter), Wright this week announced the Sociology in Wikipedia Initiative: a formal call to sociologists to help improve and expand Wikipedia entries that might benefit from their expertise and consider assigning their students to do the same.

“Wikipedia has become an important global public good,” Wright writes in the essay. “Since it is a reference source for sociologically relevant ideas and knowledge that is widely used by both the general public and students, it is important that the quality of sociology entries be as high as possible. This will only happen if sociologists themselves contribute to this public good.”

Not only might Wikipedia benefit from contributions by students steeped in academic research methods, but the exercise might help students learn how to read the crowd-sourced encyclopedia in the proper context, said Wright.

“What better way to get students to understand that it’s actual people like them who have written this stuff, than for them to write this stuff?” he said.

Is this “public sociology” at work? I don’t mind this call as it would help ensure that Wikipedia has accurate and in-depth sociology information rather than just a bare bones outline. Actually, I’ve thought the sociology Wikipedia entries weren’t that bad already, particularly compared to other disciplines. For example, the statistics pages on Wikipedia are technically correct but it is very difficult for a layperson to understand what is going on.

But how many sociology faculty will spend much time with this since there aren’t many professional incentives? Even publishing in online journals as opposed to more traditional print journals is not well-regarded so what’s the point of helping improve Wikipedia entries? This may seem like a move toward embracing technology and toward a younger generation of sociologists but the discipline has a long way to go.

At least a few leaders of major academic groups are admitting that they use Wikipedia as a source. Not too long, admitting this would not have been good for one’s status. How far away are we from Wikipedia being an acceptable source?

What are the first three things you learn in high school sociology?

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To start an article about the darker side of social networking, an Esquire writer suggests that there are three things that one learns first in a high school sociology class:

The first three things you learn in high-school sociology are:

A. Sociology is the study of people in groups.
B. The more people in a group, the more powerful the group.
C. The more people in a group, the worse the decision-making abilities (or collective intelligence) of the group will become.

There are few places better equipped to learn that lesson firsthand than high school. Or the Internet. But for all the praise dumped upon social networks after they (sorta) helped Egyptians shape their country’s destiny, we’re still missing something. There’s still an aspect of Twitter just as dark as the “dangerous element” that put Lara Logan in harm’s way recently: The Mob Mentality.

I generally agree with A, particularly in order to differentiate sociology from psychology. But B and C would not be what I would jump to on Day 1. Actually, this would be an interesting question to ask sociologists: if you had three statements in which to start an intro level course, what would you say? How would you want to frame the rest of your course?

And it would be interesting to know how many high schools currently offer classes in sociology. I know that sociologists would like to see this more in high schools as many students come to college with little or no knowledge what sociology is. The American Sociological Association has a site with some resources regarding teaching sociology in high school. Having more of these classes would also promote public sociology.