Margaret Austin Smith, a graduate student in the Sociology Department at the University of Maryland, shares reflections from a classroom activity in the undergraduate Introduction to Sociology course she teaches. Her own research focuses on the social space of the classroom and students’ classroom experiences. 


When Harrisburg University in Harrisburg, PA attempted a week-long social media “blackout” in September 2010, national news media swarmed the campus. A “smartly dressed correspondent from NPR stalk[ed] the staircase,”  the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, and as soon as the Chronicle itself spirited away some students for an exclusive interview, a reporter from the Associated Press came barging in. “Oh no—not another one,” one student cried out. Another, weary, explained with a sigh that he had just finished begging off the BBC. 

In the end, the Chronicle headlined the outage as more of a “brownout” than a “blackout,” and NPR corroborated that conclusion with sound bites from students describing increased text messaging and some tenacious hacking. Even Jimmy Fallon jumped in on the analysis in his late-night comedy show, quipping: “Check this out: A college in Pennsylvania is blocking computer access to social-networking sites for an entire week, and then requiring the students to write an essay about the experience. Yep. The essay will be called, ‘We all have smart phones, dumb-ass.’” Nevertheless, campus officials declared the experiment a success with in-house surveys revealing that 33% of the private university’s 822 students reported feeling less stressed during the week of the outage and 21% stating they’d spent more time doing homework. These were happy fringe benefits, however, as the primary objective of the project had been somewhat more metaphysical—encouraging students to “push, prod, question and generally explore social media.” Or, as one speaker invited to campus during the week of the ban put it, to encourage dialogue around the question of:

"Why are we posting on Facebook? Why are we sharing, why are we disclosing in this way and for what purpose? Many people are already in the habit of, 'I have to go post on Facebook, I have to go see what’s happening, I have to update my status.' Why? You don’t have to…"

Last year I asked my Introductory Sociology students to approach this discussion from a different starting point—starting with how they actually used social media—and how they were using it to make and share meaning in their daily lives. For 24-hours, students recorded their social media interactions in written logs, describing what they did (texting, updating a status, sending a message, posting a photo, commenting on a photo, “liking” a comment, replying to a comment, tweeting, re-tweeting, and so on) and the context in which the action took place (home, dorm room, living room, classroom [alas!]), and reflecting briefly on what they felt about the interaction at the time (for example: “I hate that picture of me, so I untagged it”). I compiled the logs into a “data package” that they could read and reflect on before coming together in groups to discuss what they saw as emerging themes—meanings that they seemed to share about how they and their classmates were using social media in their daily lives. 

What follows—with many thanks to my students!—is one approach to that oft-repeated wail of “WHY! Why are students posting/ tweeting/ texting status updating?” But social media use doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in a social context. Structures, disciplinary practices, cultural understandings, and interpersonal relationships shape interactions in any context. For these students, the classroom stood out as one particular context that created a need for social media use. In my own research, I argue that this is because power relationships shaping the classroom have informed students’ understandings of the classroom as a private place, a place where individuals need to “take in” information, but don’t necessarily get to connect to their own experiences, interests, and concerns while they are there. This social environment facilitates a sense of boredom among students.

Social media use during class was one of the most commonly observed themes from the data I collected (over 20,000 words of logs—and approximately 30 groups of students!). In the examples cited below, this theme is presented and described by students Christi G., Ellen N., Clare B., and Robby B. Particularly, these students point to the connection between their use of social media and boredom in the classroom.

Often times, people get bored during class, but there are many different reasons for this. One of the more common reasons is because the professor lectures in a very quiet and monotone voice, which puts people to sleep. Another cause of boredom is general lack of interest in the class, such as someone taking a core elective that they aren’t actually interested in. Social media is sometimes seen as the answer to boredom in class, but could also be the problem. Social media is seen as a good answer to boredom, because it can be a small time commitment or an activity for the whole class period. People can talk with their friends rather than listening to lectures. Lectures are isolating because you sit and try to write everything down, and social media lets people connect with other people. Also, in large lecture halls, there is probably someone nearby on Facebook doing something potentially distracting. The person on Facebook is probably using it because they are bored with the class and looking for something to do. Another reason for being on Facebook during class would be that there’s some kind of very exciting event or conversation taking place that you want to take part in. 

Example 1: 
11:42am – Trying to focus in Econ but I can’t. Text other roommate telling her how boring econ is 

Example 2:
12:15pm – Hopped on Facebook because I was bored in class. 

Example 3: 
12:00pm – I was in biology class. This class just gets boring almost every day, so I pulled out my cell phone to check if someone texted me. No text message, so I initiated a text conversation with a guy friend.

Example 4: 
BBMing [Blackberry Messaging] my friend “Chris” because I am bored in [the library].

Example 5: 
10:00 AM- playing wordmole on my blackberry during a very boring STAT [statistics] class.

Example 6: 
12:15 am: Hopped on Facebook because I was bored in class.

12:30 am: Checked my Twitter for any mentions and @ replies from the Party tweets I put up earlier on the weekend.

12:43 am: Mentioned my roommate in a tweet that fried him up for putting up so many tweets in like 5 min. when u needs to be studying. I put it up on twitter and facebook so that everyone else would notice and fry up my roommate also.

12:45 am: My roommate replied back to be asking where am I at because Twitter can be used as a person to person communication medium. 

12:48 am: I reply back with a [Tweet] “at class bored” because no one uses direct messages in college. 

Example 7: 
10:00 am class starts and I wish I had my laptop to keep me entertained

Example 8:
2:24 pm I hear my phone buzz but am doing a group project and don’t want to be rude so I ignore it

2:40 pm class is almost over and another member of the group checked his phone so I check mine. My cousin, A, texted me about her college visit to Ohio State and how she is jealous of our warm weather since it’s not as nice there. I have another text from C saying she fell asleep outside where I left her but is feeling better

Example 9:
8:01 PM- Bored in Physics class so I end up playing games on my phone 

Example 10:
1:02pm: I texted my boyfriend during class because it was extremely boring and I needed something to occupy my brain. (Don’t worry…it wasn’t SOCY!) We texted for the rest of class and I don’t remember anything from lecture. 

In short, when students examine their uses of social media sociologically, they reflect on their own identities, the social contexts in which those identities have developed, and the interactions that take place in those contexts. Through their reflections and dialogues via social media, they construct, share, and evaluate knowledge. These processes become particularly visible via social media. But when students reflect on their lived realities in their school work, sometimes they can become visible in the classroom too.

Margaret Austin Smith

Commercials are a useful way of teaching abstract sociological concepts (Irby and Chepp 2010). As alluded to in a previous blog post on this site, instructors can systematically and consciously include commercials into their teaching. Using the commercials archived on The Sociological Cinema, this can be done in the summer when instructors are constructing and restructuring syllabi. Well in advance of the start of the semester, instructors can identify appropriate and powerful commercials useful for sociological critique and analysis.

In a recent article in the Journal of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Irby and Chepp (2010:101) note that “using commercials in the classroom can potentially prompt students to become more media literate outside of the classroom setting.” I suggest two ways to facilitate the transformation of students into critical media viewers. First, instructors can begin by regularly showing commercials in the classroom so that students can become familiar with the exercise of critiquing commercials. Instructors can explain a new sociological concept to students and then use a commercial as a way of showing a visual example of a potentially abstract concept. Essentially, in this first step the instructor connects the commercial to the concept for the students. Second, and perhaps the most effective way to produce critical media viewers is to couple regular commercial viewing in the classroom with the opportunity for students themselves to analyze commercials through a sociological lens. Halfway through the semester as students become accustomed to seeing the application of concepts to commercials, students—rather than the instructor—can become the analyst. This can happen in a variety of ways. If in-class quizzes are a part of classroom assessment, the instructor can show a commercial and ask students to apply the commercial to a sociological concept learned over the past class period or week(s). If an instructor usually incorporates minute responses or short in-class assignments into course evaluation, commercials analysis can be used for these assignments.  

In the second step, the analysis of commercials by students acts as an assignment and an assessment tool. The benefits of using commercials as an assignment or assessment measure are many. For example, it evaluates students’ knowledge of the application of sociological concepts to experiences in their current day-to-day life. This benefits instructors because it allows the instructor to evaluate student learning. Two, if students regularly critique commercials in the classroom, it likely increases the potential for them to become media literate outside of the classroom as they get in the habit of being media conscious. Last, using the analysis of commercials as an assignment might bolster student learning because popular culture appears to quickly and effectively gain student interest and engage students.  

Thanks to The Sociological Cinema, sociology instructors now have a free archive that houses commercials, which are tagged by their sociological theme. This easily allows instructors to find commercials that they want to use for assignments and assessment. I encourage instructors to not only show commercials in their classroom but to also include the analysis of commercials as an assessment measure.

Amy Irby

As teachers, we’ve all seen how student interest lights up the moment we introduce elements of pop culture into the sociology classroom. It’s a magical moment, really, as though an invisible fairy has fluttered through the classroom sprinkling unexpecting students with sociological fairy dust. Suddenly, student eyes become deglazed, spines stretch toward the ceiling, chins raise, hands spring into the air, and all at once, everyone has a point-of-view that absolutely must be heard. 

This seemingly magical anecdotal experience is supported by the scholarship on teaching and learning, as much literature has been written on the pedagogical effectiveness of using popular cultural mediums to teach abstract sociological concepts. The benefits of film, in particular, have occupied much scholarly attention. While films and other mediums are useful, commercial advertisements are often an overlooked and underutilized pop cultural medium that can effectively convey sociological concepts and insights.

In an article I published last year with Amy Irby, we highlight three clear advantages of using commercials in the sociology classroom; namely, they are time efficient (often lasting only 30 seconds), current and accessible (available almost immediately online), and serve as a unique platform for sociological analysis. You can find a link here to our full article "Overcoming Constraints: Using Commercials in the Classroom."

Yet in that article, we also outline some limitations of using commercials, with one being that “there is not a centralized catalogue system that houses commercials and tags them by sociological themes” (Irby and Chepp 2010). Increasingly, The Sociological Cinema is becoming a resource that can fill this void.

There are several ways to identify commercials that have been archived on The Sociological Cinema, but here are two suggestions: (1) type the keyword “commercial” into the search box or, (2) click on the marketing/brands tag on the right sidebar of the "Videos" page. Also, remember that if you have your own suggestions for good commercials that work well in the classroom, you can contribute them to The Sociological Cinema by clicking here.

In addition to archiving commercials by sociological themes, a previous blog post on The Sociological Cinema points to commercials as a useful empirical site for sociological analysis; numerous other blog posts focus on various elements of pop culture and the sociology classroom. 

So, as the school year comes to a close and you begin thinking about how to innovate and improve your course for next semester, you might consider using commercial clips in your next classroom experience. Thanks to sites like The Sociological Cinema, they are significantly easier to get your hands on than fairy dust.

***TEASER ALERT: Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post that offers in-class activities and assessment strategies that instructors can use to teach students commercial analysis and media literacy! 

Valerie Chepp

Academics love The Wire. Well, almost everyone loves the Wire, but academics really love the Wire because they can use it as an amazing teaching tool. For example, William Julius Wilson has used the Wire to teach urban inequality at Harvard; it is used in sociology at York University; students watch it to learn social anthropology at Duke and in other social science courses. Academic books have been written about the Wire and conferences have debated the significance of the show. A variety of instructors in other disciplines have also built their courses around the Wire (click here for syllabi in an ethics , a communications, and a criminal justice course). We have a clip from The Wire on our site, and we hope to add more soon.

So, I have been thinking about how to restructure my sociology class on social problems around The Wire. And besides, I think my students are getting annoyed that I talk about it all the time and it’s time to really start assigning full seasons for class. But while some non-sociologists have posted their syllabi online, I have not found many syllabi or other resources for teaching The Wire in sociology classes. Have you used it to teach sociology? What worked and what didn’t work for you? If you wouldn’t mind sharing your ideas, please comment with links to resources or send me an email (pdean <at> socy.umd.edu). Cheers to the best show of all time!

Paul Dean

 

When we think about experiential learning, what types of experiences come to mind? I suspect that, for many of us, we immediately think about sending students out beyond the classroom walls and reflecting upon particular experiences using course readings.  Perhaps we ask them to engage in a campus, service learning, or civic engagement project.  In our assignments, we might require students, following Kolb’s theory of experiential learning, to make connections between concrete experiences, observation and reflection, abstract concepts, and to apply their acquired knowledge to new situations (Kolb and Fry 1975; Kolb 1984).  But can we achieve experiential learning inside the classroom?  More abstractly, what constitutes an “experience”?

While we often take what constitutes an experience for granted, Peter Jarvis et al (2004) explore this concept more explicitly. They argued that, at a philosophical level, experience must be viewed existentially as a subjective encounter with the world outside of us, and interpreted through previous knowledge and discourse; this interpretation process is socially constructed.  In the context of experiential learning (and teaching), experience “usually implies that individuals have, or are given, in the teaching and learning process a direct or simulated encounter with the external world. One of the major strengths of this approach … is that the whole person does the experiencing rather than just the individual’s mind or body. By the whole person, we mean the cognitive, the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual; that is, the individual’s knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, beliefs, emotions, and senses. We learn from all these dimensions of the person in episodic experience” (Jarvis et al 2004: 55). While such experience might be primary (such as with service learning or civic engagement), it can also be secondary, where it is mediated through technology and not the immediate social context. Jarvis et al note that video functions as a secondary form of experiential learning. 

If you pause for a moment and consider some of your favorite films, think about what characteristics made those films so powerful? In The Power of Film, UCLA film instructor Howard Suber argues “feelings … lie at the heart of all memorable popular films.  When the feelings of the filmmakers, feelings of the characters, and feelings of the audience come together, there is the opportunity for greatness” (Suber 2006: 162).  At the heart of this “greatness,” I believe, is an experience: through an audiovisual encounter, our senses of sight and hearing are aroused, interacting with cognitive and affective capacities, to construct a potentially transformative experience.  In Jarvis’ words, a powerful film can engage the “whole person.” I found this same sentiment in a similarly titled book (The Power of Movies) by philosopher Colin McGinn, who seeks to show “how screen and mind interact.” McGinn (2005: 14) explores the “perceptual, cognitive, and affective” dimensions of film reception, and argues “movies engage our psychological faculties in profound and unique ways ... they serve to condense much of significance into a relatively brief and isolated experience” (emphasis added). Following this work, I see film as engaging the affective, cognitive, emotional, and even spiritual levels of the viewer, bringing them outside of their normal, routine modes of thought, thus constituting new experiences for the viewer.

Let’s briefly take a look at an example from the best television show of all time, The Wire (if you live under a rock and don’t know about the Wire, lift up the rock, and go watch it. Now. Seriously, stop reading, and go watch it. I’m not joking. You’ll thank me later).  The show follows the lives of Baltimore street gangs, the police that continuously try to convict them, and the local institutions that shape their struggles. Characters who might normally incite disgust among a general audience—active gang members—are seen as human and shaped by their disadvantaged social circumstances. Through unparalleled storytelling and pitch-perfect dialogue, the viewer develops empathy—and fondness—for the characters (especially Omar!), and begins to understand their situations in light of the inner-city poverty, police ineffectiveness, corrupt local governments, broken families, dysfunctional educational system, and the distortions of local media, that shape their lives, and keeps them in a vicious cycle of poverty and crime.  The characters’ stories stimulate viewers at affective, cognitive, and emotional levels, in some ways feeling a secondary experience of poverty, crime, and the myriad of institutions governing the characters’ lives.  As such, clips from the show (such as this clip) can serve as the basis of experiential learning, further reflected upon and connected to abstract concepts through course readings, discussions, and assignments.

Of course, not all films or videos will engage the “whole person.” For example, compared to many news clips or presentations, The Wire or Michael Moore’s Sicko (see this clip) are much more likely to serve purposes of experiential learning. However each type of video clip has its own uses, and it seems that the trick is to find the clip most effective to meet your teaching goals, in any particular class. But if you aim to draw upon experiential learning in your own teaching, you may not need to look any further than the video clips available on this site and elsewhere!

References

1. Jarvis, Peter, John Holford, and Colin Griffin. 2004. The Theory and Practice of Learning, 2e.  Taylor & Francis.
2. Kolb, David. 1984. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development.
3. Kolb, David and Roger Fry. 1975 ”Toward an Applied Theory of Experiential Learning,” in C. Cooper (ed.) Theories of Group Process. John Wiley.
4. McGinn, Colin. 2005. The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact. Pantheon Books.
5. Suber, Howard. 2006. The Power of Film. Michael Wiese Productions.

Paul Dean