Abstract
Over 40 percent of today’s college students are enrolled at community colleges. While the institutions of community colleges have been gaining national attention given this growing statistic, we do not engage in large scale conversations about teaching practices that best benefit our local populations. This paper looks at the risks and rewards of incorporating students’ everyday life experiences into the classroom in an introduction to sociology course. This course is developed in an urban setting giving students tools both to see the world as sociologists and to critically analyze persistent inequalities in society. These goals are accomplished through challenging classroom conversations and culminate in a project where students collect data through their lived experience and analyze it as sociologists. While this style of teaching provides unique and often unexpected challenges, it creates a strong active learning environment in the classroom, confronts important social problems, and holds potential for consciousness raising and social change in the local community.
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Notes
Data from Kingsborough Course Catalog, 2012-2013 (http://www.kbcc.cuny.edu/sub-registration/Documents/2012-2013Catalog.pdf)
Cited from personal communication with Dr. Susan Farrell, chair of Behavioral Sciences department, 2/6/13
Enrollment for this course is capped at 43, in the Fall of 2012 two sections were capped at 46
In my history of assigning this, only two students have submitted papers that had to be returned ungraded. One entered the subway without paying a fare. The other urinated on a subway train.
I am grateful to Amanda Gengler for her original assignment which I have adapted (very minorly) here.
Stop and Frisk data come from New York Civil Liberties Union (http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data), 2012.
Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin, 7/19/2013
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin
A biracial man
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Better, A. Learning from Experience: Integrating Students’ Everyday Lives into the Urban Community College Sociology Classroom. Am Soc 44, 385–395 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-013-9192-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-013-9192-7