Sociology

Students visited a variety of community institutions across the neighborhood and contributed pictures and observations to an online map of Dorchester. Goals: The primary goals of the activity were three-fold. First, the digital ethnographic map provided...

To learn about sampling techniques in social science research, students practice tackling a real-world research problem through discussing a hypothetical case. Goals: To enable students to understand the benefits and drawbacks of various sampling...

Students learn about Boston, urban life, and social change from guest lectures by local practitioners in the policy, business, and nonprofit sectors. Goals: Provide students insights into how individuals shape their urban environment by engaging them in...

Throughout the term students prepared three case studies in order to engage with information on the American legal system. Up to two of the case studies could be replaced by multimedia projects. The case studies were discussed in lectures and sections...

In Soc 43: Social Interaction, students design and act out interactional scenes to help them understand the concepts learned that week. Generally the students are divided into pairs or groups of three for these acting "games," which vary from week to week...

In this activity, Nicole Deterding used a case study in her Sociology of Education section to integrate and apply theories of different types of capital (human, social, and cultural) and to clarify student understanding. Prior to section, students had...

In her first sections of the semester, Nicole Deterding discusses with her students how to read a sociology article. For the first week, students are supposed to have done some reading. As a class, they put a concept map up of the argument on the board...

Students contrast a scholarly text with a popular news article and discuss the relationship between the arguments and the limitations of them. Goal: To critically assess weaknesses and limitations of popular arguments through the application of...

For Rachel Meyer's junior tutorial on Social Class, students read each other's research proposals before class and then participated in an in-class workshop to discuss each proposal. Before the workshop, the students circulated their research proposals to...

Students write a response paper on their experience viewing art online versus in the context of a museum. First, the students read Ways of Seeing, a book by John Berger, which makes a strong argument about the effects of the reproduction of art on society...