Authors: Adam Driscoll & Lisa Kruse, Department of Sociology, UW-La Crosse
Contact Point: Adam Driscoll- adriscoll@uwlax.edu
Discipline: Sociology
Submission Date: April 17th and 20th, 2015
Course Name: The Social World
Course Description: The Social World is an introduction to the discipline of sociology and what that discipline has to offer our understanding of the modern world. It is a 100-level General Education course (Self and Society), that seeks to help students think sociologically and critically about the nature of human behavior and the social world around them. The course is required of every sociology major and minor and should be their first introduction to the discipline. The course is typically taught in large sections (64 students), but this iteration was taught in an under-enrolled section of 15. The students ranged from freshmen to seniors and there was only one sociology major in the course. The lesson was designed to stretch over two class periods and to constitute one of four topic sections in the third and final unit of the course.
Abstract: Our lesson study was to develop a lesson that would help students learn more about the socially constructed elements of human sexuality and how those elements operate within our society. In previous versions of our introduction to sociology courses, we had struggled with this topic and found it one students had trouble with, both conceptually and ideologically. In particular, we wanted to achieve some “deep learning” where students grasped on an experiential level, the degree of sexuality based discrimination that exists in our society. The lesson we designed was to have two class periods devoted toward the topic: one in which we addressed the concepts and what sociology offers our understanding of human sexuality, and a second in which we stressed how human sexuality can operate as a dimension of inequality in our society. The second lesson revolved around a guided visualization exercise and a discussion about student reactions to it. As a whole, we found that the lesson worked quite well. Students responded well and seemed comfortable discussing the topic. Additionally, the students reported getting quite a bit out of the guided visualization exercise.