Teaching

Courses (Click on links for syllabi):

Soc 540: Economic Sociology (Graduate) Soc 385: Introduction to Sociological Theory (Advanced Undergraduate
Soc/Mgmt 447: Organizations (Advanced Undergraduate) Soc 244: Sociology of Work: Work in the New Economy (Undergraduate)

Statement:

The primary goal in my teaching is to impart a sociological imagination. In his famous essay, Mills explains the sociological imagination as the ability to connect structures and history with the experiences of everyday life. In my undergraduate classes, I strive to help my students understand sociological theories and how they apply to the worlds in which they live, i.e., to see their personal troubles and those of people around them as they relate to societal issues. With graduate students, I believe my role is to facilitate analytical skills so they can better connect social structures and the everyday lives of groups they study in their own work. A strong sociological imagination advances students academic achievements and creates engaged, informed citizens. My courses stress critical thinking over lexical knowledge.

My undergraduate classes begin from the standpoint of sociological theory. Sociological theory provides the basic intellectual tools students need to make sense of their complex worlds. For example students in my Sociology of Work class learn how to navigate the new worlds of non-traditional work arrangements in which they will likely find themselves upon graduation. To impart this aspect of sociological imagination, I combine select theoretical and empirical readings, drawing them together with illustrative materials culled from newspapers, magazines, and experiences from everyday life. In my classes, students also learn to critically evaluate perspectives and assumptions about the way the world works. My Organizations course assembles students from sociology and management. In this course, management students often learn to question the profit-driven priorities of their discipline while sociology students often learn the limits of criticism. One successful exercise I use to teach critical thinking skills calls into question the assumption of the “rational” actor by auctioning a $10 bill in class. While a rational actor would not pay more than $10, the winning bid often reaches $60-$70. Discussion afterwards highlights the role of emotion, institutions, and the social structure of the classroom as influencing what counts as “rational.” In the end, both management and sociology students gain a greater understanding of how concepts like rationality are socially constructed yet play important roles in organizations, the economy, and the polity, lessons they celebrate with pizza bought with money raised from the auction.

Research experiences complement classroom learning to develop in students a healthy sociological imagination. Some students pursue their own research agendas under my guidance. For example, I worked with one student over two semesters to develop a research project on the role of information technologies in organizing leaderless social movements. The student continued the project beyond graduation and decided to pursue the topic in graduate school. Other students work with me on my research projects. Over the summer and fall of 2010, I hired three undergraduate students to collect preliminary data in farmers’ markets throughout Chicago for a project I was starting. Two students have chosen to continue working on the project voluntarily.

On the graduate level, I believe mentorship is about nurturing students into productive, thoughtful scholars. I serve formally on the dissertation, proposal, and thesis committees of nine graduate students. My goal is to help graduate students identify the basic sociological problems as they grapple with the complex empirical data in their research. I believe with my assistance, graduate students make innovative theoretical contributions to sociology by converting their theses into publishable papers. I am proud that two thesis projects I mentored have won Best Graduate Student Paper Awards from the Midwest Sociological Society. From these, one is forthcoming in a high-quality sociology journal and the other is currently being revised for publication. These efforts result in contributing to sociological discourse while shaping the careers of future generations of sociologists.

Beyond formal mentorship, I nurture graduate students’ intellectual development through critical engagement with theory. In the classroom, students in my graduate course on economic sociology gain the necessary introduction to theory to understand and discuss contemporary debates in the field. The course takes students through the classic texts in the “new” economic sociology like embeddedness and the social bases of markets to state of the art treatments, such as performativity and social studies of finance. This training provides the conceptual equipment to understand the economic meltdown, arguably the defining social problem of our time. It also contributes to their growth as scholars by offering an alternative socio-economic perspective for their empirical research. Such learning also extends beyond the classroom. For example, last summer, I organized and facilitated a reading group for several graduate students during which we met bi-weekly to discuss Harrison White’s Identity and Control. I plan to solicit several more students for another reading group this spring as well.