What students need to know and do

Understand the nature of, and engage with, sociological questions. In first year these could be those about issues of importance to young people.

Student barriers to learning

First year students may not understand the types of questions sociologists ask and how these differ in their starting point from other approaches.  They also may not understand why these sorts of questions are important for society.

Our teaching strategies

Help students to understand the distinctness of the sociological imagination and to practice it:

• Engage students by starting with issues in their own lives;
• Analyse the life course sociologically and comparatively in terms of different stages of birth, childhood, young adulthood, etc, to death;
• Take a contemporary issue such as obesity (Egger & Swinburne, 2010), gay marriage, mental illness, or (for something lighter) the interest in vampires in popular culture. Apply and contrast different approaches to each topic, for example: common sense, economic, medical, psychological, political and sociological;
• Use Mills’ work on sociological imagination to help students understand the way sociological questions probe connections between private, individual issues and social issues (Mills, 2000 (1959));
• Ask students to look at a recent event or issue in the media and determine the questions they might ask as a sociologist studying the event or issue;
• Find intriguing and non-obvious patterns and events that can be explained or interpreted sociologically, such as Randall Collins” interpretation of social rituals (Collins, 1992).
• Show students how sociological questions have contributed to social policy questions and responses, using historical and contemporary examples from journals such as International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy and Australian Journal of Social Issues.

References

Collins, R. (1992).  Sociological insight, an introduction to non-obvious sociology, Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Egger, G. & Swinburne, B. (2010). Planet Obesity, Allen and Unwin: Crows Nest, Australia.
Mills, C. (2000). The sociological imagination.  Oxford University Press: New York.

What students need to know and do

Engage with and understand the way in which sociological theories, concepts and evidence are applied and used.

Student barriers to learning

Students find it hard to think abstractly about theories and concepts.

Our teaching strategies

Help students apply theoretical concepts and evidence to sociological questions by cumulative modelling, scaffolding and practising how this is done:

• Introduce theories and concepts gradually on the basis of concrete discussions about students’ own lives and the world (see TLO 2) and concurrently with the gradual introduction of research design and methods (see TLO 3);
• Analyse research reports/articles, deconstructing the ways in which theories and research methods are applied and how they are used together;
• Explore the kinds of research that use sociological theory.
• Take an example that is currently in the news and show how a sociologist would analyse the event, model how this would occur.  What different questions can be asked? How could these questions then be researched? What would constitute evidence? Who could use the results of these inquiries and why?
• Explore theoretical perspectives and concepts using a topical social issue, problem, event or policy issue:
• Using different broad theoretical paradigms
• Using questions and hypotheses at middle and operational levels
• Using research methods to explore questions /hypotheses at middle and operational levels.
• What sorts of evidence would be sought in each case?
• Explore how sociological research is used to inform policies and programs in a range of social arenas;
• Explore the kinds of careers or jobs that use sociological theory;
• As students become familiar with research design and methods, incorporate theories and concepts systematically in their practice of these.