Teaching Portfolio

Introduction

At Temple University, I have taught five distinct courses, some on multiple occasions. These courses are Introductory Sociology, American Ethnicity, the Development of Sociological Thought, Popular Culture, and Contemporary Social Theory. The introductory class is a large lecture course (100+) and included the supervision of a teaching assistant. American Ethnicity is a freshman-level small lecture course (30-50 studdents). Popular Culture, and Development of Sociological Thought are both seminars of about 30 students. Contemporary Social Theory is a graduate seminar with about 8-10 students.

In all of these courses I have demonstrated a commitment to teaching multiple voices and diverse perspectives. The authors represented in my assigned readings are always diverse in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, class background, disability status, and national identity. In the Summer of 2005, I participated in a teaching workshop at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs that resulted in the transformation of my popular culture class so that it now focuses much more deliberately and successfully on issues of inequality within popular culture. This approach has an obvious relationship with my scholarship.

I have also focused on teaching theory and methods in a way that demonstrates their mutual dependency. My introductory students are required to learn very basic methods of social research--including quantitative and qualitative analyses--and interpret their findings using basic theories. Students in my undergraduate and graduate courses learn a wide range of theoretical paradigms and are repeatedly asked to connect these perspectives to empirical findings and research design.

My syllabi and assignments have been included in course packets created by the American Sociological Association, including sets for the sociology of culture and for mass media. I have published teaching notes in The Southern Sociologist and Teaching Concerns, and I have a forthcoming text review for a theory reader that will appear in Teaching Sociology. I have given teaching-related presentations at meetings of the ASA and the ESS.

I work actively to improve my courses and to keep them up to date. I introduce new readings every semester and I always make changes in the course based on feedback from midterm and final evaluations. I transform evaluations into short summaries of which aspects of the course promote student learning, which aspects need improvement, and what creative suggestions students offer. I use this summary to revise the syllabus at the end of the semester, in anticipation of the next iteration of the class.

I view the mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students as an extension of teaching. In 2006 I worked with the AGEB-SBES program to mentor a student (Christina Jackson) and to fund and escort Christina and three other undergraduate students to Montreal for all of them to present their work at the meetings of the Association of Black Sociologists and to attend the meetings of the ASA. I have worked with several other students on their applications to graduate school. I have also advised graduate students and I serve on three dissertation committees.

Teaching Philosophy

Do Yoga and Don’t Be an Asshole
Spring 2005

Writing this statement was inspired by a conversation I had recently with an undergraduate who was preparing for a career in cooking instruction. “What advice do you have for an aspiring teacher?” he asked me. Given our very different fields, it was clearly important to think beyond the strictly sociological (“always teach theory and methods as one”), and even beyond the arts & sciences (“bravely embrace seemingly new traditions”). What could I tell this young person about teaching that would apply as well to him—a chef who teaches others how to cook—as it does to myself as a teacher of sociology?

“Do yoga,” I told him. We were sitting outside of our classroom, before an 8:40am class, having both arrived very early. I had just come from a 6:30am yoga class, and my gym bag was sitting next to my course materials. I took up yoga during my first year as a professor and have found it to be indispensable for classroom preparation. First of all, on days when I have an early class, going to yoga first means that I’m not starting my day by facing 50 undergraduates. Students are a generally amicable group, but each day presents new challenges for them and for me, and I don’t want to face these challenges straight out of bed. I need time to get centered. Yoga also prepares me for the physical demands of teaching. My muscles get stretched, my spine comes into alignment, my neck and shoulders relax and my breathing becomes deep and intentional. As a consequence, I am both calm and authoritative in the classroom. My posture is powerful and I have the energy I need to move about the classroom and engage all of my students. Finally, the closing postures of my yoga class prepare me spiritually for the day. “Experience the effect,” my yoga teacher says. “Visualize yourselves having a wonderful day. Think of one positive thing that will happen today and carry that with you.” I frequently imagine a classroom of engaged learners at that point (though my intentions are also directed at friends, lovers, family members, and world peace), and later I do my part to make this intention a reality.

“Do yoga.” My student seemed both amused and disappointed. “Anything else?” “Yes,” I replied. “Don’t be an asshole.” The philosophical principle of not being an asshole is more complicated than it sounds; which is to say that being an asshole comes scandalously easy. Given the power that teachers wield in their classrooms and in the lives of their students, the opportunities for assholery are ample.

At minimum, “don’t be an asshole” is a mantra. I repeat it in the back of my head during pedagogical moments (teaching, holding office hours, answering emails from students) and roll it to the front of my head at key times. “My paper is finished but the printer in the student lab is busted. Can I email it to you after class?” Well, I have a no late paper policy. And you, the student, are solely responsible for ensuring that you are able to complete and submit your assignments by the deadline. But then, don’t be an asshole. “Okay,” I say. “Make sure you send it by 4:30, so that I can print it before going home.” (I recognize that for some teachers, in some classes, and in some contexts, the above circumstance could have produced very different results without the teacher earning the label of asshole. But for me, for this course, and in this circumstance, not being an asshole meant recognizing that it was easy enough for me to print this short paper later in the day, and that my students have widely variant access to personal printers, and that sometimes the printers in the labs really do go haywire.) The mantra saves me from making justifiable but needlessly mean decisions that only serve to alienate students from the curriculum.

But “don’t be an asshole” is more than mere mantra. It’s also a pedagogical theory that implies a host of policies and practices, several of which I summarize below.

Om 1: Respect the Material
The curriculum is what draws the teacher and students together, whether the course is required or an elective. An instructor who seeks coolness by labeling portions of the material as bogus will only inspire students to treat the course as bogus. But this can be tempting for those of use who teach courses in which part or all of the subject matter is in fields where our expertise is limited. To combat this, we need to embrace the opportunity to gain new expertise. Conveniently, this puts us in the position of being students alongside of our students—learning a new area together. In my first semester of teaching, I was assigned two sections of a course on ethnicity, a subject I had never actually studied. Though daunting and difficult, I read several books to prepare myself and selected as the primary textbook a history of ethnicity in America. This allowed me to study the important historical components alongside my students, while my lectures provided the sociological elements with which I was more comfortable. The point is that the knowledge produced by a course can transform the lives of students by exposing them to new ideas and giving them new skills—and as such, that knowledge should never be degraded or belittled. When students say the readings are difficult, the concepts complex, the papers time-consuming, and the tests hard, the appropriate response is a hardy “Amen!”

Om 2: Hold High Expectations of the Students
Students may sign up for a course because they think it’s a gut, but proving them right produces neither good course evaluations nor engaged learning. Students are capable of reading at a high level, so long as they are set up to be good readers. (We do this by anticipating challenging vocabulary, making links across readings and lectures, and contextualizing the ideas.) Students are capable of high level discussions. When I pose an open-ended question and a student responds with a reply that misses the mark, I don’t pretend otherwise. I just say “Nope, that’s not what I’m looking for,” and I help him to see why. I also ask him to help me in posing the question better. Students are capable of writing high-level papers, although they will need some preparation for writing within the discipline—preparation that makes clear what standards the teacher is using. I grade papers more on argument than mechanics, but spelling, grammar and syntax are important both in their own right and for their capacity to clarify meaning. So I comment a lot on these word-level and sentence-level issues because I expect students to write excellent papers. These writing standards are explained on my syllabi and reinforced with in-class writing workshops. I consistently find that by using high standards for student writing, the quality of writing consistently improves across the semester (usually from a C average on the first paper to a B average on the last paper). When students are not challenged—when expectations are low—they tend to conclude that the teacher is an asshole. And I tend to agree.

Om 3: Everyone is an Intellectual.
This is a claim I borrow from several sources—Antonio Gramsci, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins. The premise is that humans are by nature intellectual creatures (a rare biological universal that I will concede). We all become experts at something, whether it’s academics, family life, sports, popular culture, auto mechanics, electronics, or any of a number of possibilities. As it happens, I am a sociological intellectual. Some of my students share this expertise with me—and I treat them all as amateur sociologists—others are experts at other things. But the classroom is filled to the brim with intellectuals and each member should be engaged as such.

Om 4: Respect Time and Money
Though class participants share huge reserves of intellect, we do not all have the same access to time and money. I try to acknowledge this with careful and responsible course planning. I won’t select a textbook if I don’t anticipate using at least 80% of the text. Textbooks are expensive, for reasons that I think are beyond the control of publishers. But out students should never pay that price needlessly. Required texts should be thoroughly incorporated into the curriculum and alternatives such as web postings should be used whenever possible and appropriate.

Respecting time demands a thoughtful consideration of the curriculum and assignments. I list on my syllabus—under the heading ‘Responsibilities of the Professor’—an expectation that I will provide fruitful information and skills. For my graduate students, this means that they will not write course papers, but instead will submit the first draft of a scholarly article. I then work with them in submitting these papers to conferences and preparing them for publication. As a midterm assignment, I ask them to submit either a publishable annotated bibliography or a lecture outline for use in an undergraduate course.

For my undergraduate students, respecting time means that each of my test questions is held accountable to a larger sense of the big picture. Before finalizing the test, I re-examine each question and ask myself “why does knowing this information matter?” If I cannot answer that question for a given item, it has to go.

Respecting students’ time also means attention to small details like showing up for class on time, never holding students after the scheduled end-time, making sure that I’m prepared, not abusing the opportunity to send emails, and confirming that classroom technology works (still a big struggle for me). But here’s a small detail that has become a big issue for me—I promise to return all papers within one week of receipt. I do this to respect student anxiety about their work and to capitalize on the opportunity for students to learn from returned assignments. Sometimes it is incredibly difficult, and I must admit that I have broken the promise. The first time I broke the promise, I baked a batch of chocolate-chip cookies, as a sort of apology (I also apologized verbally in class). The second time that I broke the promise, I gave my students a lengthier window for paper revisions. (As a policy, I don’t apologize in a way that compromises the material, say by giving an extra credit point or dropping a reading.) These apologetic concessions help to affirm to myself and my students that the basic principle—respecting time and returning assignments promptly—is very important, even as I accept that I am human and cannot live up to every standard.

I also expect students to respect my time. I state on the syllabus it is the students’ responsibility to show up for all classes on time, and to be on time for all scheduled meetings outside of class. Further, I state an expectation that they will be prepared for all classes and that they will ensure their ability to submit all assignments on time. In practice, I am flexible with many student circumstances—unexpected difficulties arise and I don’t want to be an asshole—but I also don’t tolerate asshole treatment from my students.

Om 5: Don’t Obscure the Information
In this age of anxiety about grade inflation (perhaps I should say this age of grade inflation, but I think the jury’s still out on that), it can be tempting to ‘fix’ grades by making the questions obscure—two steps away from what the students found in the readings and heard in lectures or discussions. It seems to me that this is a really sad mistake that misses our basic calling to educate students. I try to present the information in the clearest possible terms, and to make it seem real through the use of life-based examples. I give my students a review sheet for tests that comes darn close to directly stating the test questions. But this is not spoon-feeding. We deal in difficult and complex concepts. The material is sufficiently challenging when presented in a straight-forward manner. I feel far more comfortable with being a demanding grader because I know that I have presented this material as clearly as possible. The difficulty of the material has, thus far, prevented any situation in which I might be deemed a grade inflater, and yet students do not accuse me of being unfair either.

Om 6: Diffuse Unearned Power and Seek Earned Strength
This concept comes from Peggy McIntosh’s investigation of white privilege, in which she suggests that white people, like all people, should feel empowered in their everyday lives. But their empowerment should be derived from earned strength—their skills and training—and not from unearned power, specifically their race. She lists the many ways that whites benefit from their race on a daily basis—ways that they are often oblivious to. The concept applies broadly to a number of areas. In the classroom, I want to be a powerful and authoritative teacher, but I want that authority to come from my knowledge of the material, my skills as a teacher, and my commitment to my students. I don’t want authority to come from a title in front of my name or a particular classroom demeanor. I am proud of my doctorate—I worked hard for it—but I didn’t earn it from my students. So I don’t ask them to call me Dr. Kidd. They call me Dustin, just as everyone else in my life calls me Dustin, and I call them by their first names as well. I also don’t particularly dress up for class. I dress professionally, but still somewhat casually (trousers, yes, but no tie or jacket). I’m not trying to be ‘cool’ or act like I’m one of the students. I am the professor, but I earn that authority through professing the wisdom of my field, not through a title or a tie. And I actively discuss this distinction between unearned power and earned strength in the classroom, so that my students are very aware of why they are calling me Dustin and why I wear no suit.

Om 7: Be Kind to Yourself
By ‘yourself’ I mean myself. I do not abuse myself in my role as a teacher. I work hard, but not too hard. I make sure that I am actively engaged in my relationships, my research, my personal and physical needs, and my spirituality—never sacrificing these areas of my life to the demands of teaching. Frankly, that would just make me a worse teacher. I am sure that I would be an asshole then. I design my syllabi carefully to fit the ebb and flow of my own life. I try to avoid collecting assignments in more than one class on the same week. If I have to break my promise of returning papers within one week of receipt, in order to stay sane, I do so—and I simply explain my difficulties to my students and apologize for letting them down (I find that students are happy to forgive, if given the opportunity). In being kind to myself, of course, I also ask that my students be kind to me. I think this reasonable, and I return the favor by trying to respect the ebb and flow of their lives—avoiding major assignments around holiday periods, respecting the ways that their own religious beliefs conflict with the academic calendar, and so forth.

Om 8: Admit to Mistakes
I am a big believer in the power of apologies and forgiveness. Clearly, I have already alluded to this belief earlier in this statement. I experienced this most powerfully when I was still a graduate student and serving as an adjunct faculty at the University of Virginia. I had a class scheduled to meet early on the morning of September 12th, 2001. I have never been so profoundly aware of my own lack of wisdom as I was that week. In my sadness and confusion after the morning events of September 11th, I decided that I would still hold class the next day. It was a terrible class. I had a lecture that was well-prepared, but I just wasn’t present in it. Attendance was low as well. I didn’t even acknowledge the events of the previous day. I think there could have been lots of good reasons for holding class that day, but I didn’t lay claim to any of them. My reasons—stubbornness and confusion—were wrong. On the last day of class that semester, I finally got up the nerve to apologize. On my final evaluations, in addition to some comments indicating that students were actually glad to be in class that day—were other comments thanking me for the apology and outright forgiving me for the mistake. As teachers, we often feel that our students want us to be perfect, but we only feel that way because we invest so much into making them think we really are flawless. As I said earlier, students have deep wells of forgiveness that we draw on too rarely—not because we don’t make mistakes, but because we don’t admit to mistakes.

Om 9: Make the Changes that Need to be Made
We don’t inherit perfect disciplines or perfect curricula. To me, this is most clear in the ways that our material is dominated by men, economic elites, whites, heterosexuals, and the nondisabled. As a teacher, I can either reproduce these discriminations, or I can transform them. I never studied queer theory, but when I was first assigned to teach social theory I knew that queer theory had to be included. So it was up to me to survey the field and to present it to my students. When I was a student, my classical social theory classes never included works by women. But women have obviously long held innovative ideas about society, so it was up to me to find and teach these theorists and theories to my students. I am a terrible candidate for this kind of transformative work, but as the teacher in my classes, I am the only candidate.

Om 10: Communicate
Assholes don’t communicate. Teachers need to communicate. Communication comes in many forms, from a comprehensive statement of course policies in the syllabus to thorough feedback on assignments. Good communication begins with a clearly stated course purpose and a list of course goals. These should be presented in class and listed on the syllabus. Such transparency allows students to make the best decision about whether the course is appropriate for their own goals and purposes. One of the most important ways that I communicate with my students regards the participation component of my courses. This aspect of the course is very important to me, and it is crucial for student understanding of the material. Students are often intimated by this grade, and I suspect it often seems like something that is just made up at the end of the semester. To avoid this concern, I give my students a midterm participation feedback form. On the form, I list the many expectations that I hold for student participation. The form provides them with an estimation of their grade so far, and it indicates which of the expectations they should focus on in order to improve the grade.

I also use evaluations as a form of communication. I hold an evaluation about a third or halfway into the semester. The evaluation questions are simple—what helps you learn in this class, what hinders your learning, and what suggestions do you have. The feedback from these forms is typed up, and quantified in various ways. Quantifying the results helps me to put it in perspective. I might feel very upset about a particular comment, but the quantification reveals that it was an isolated concern. The results are shared with class, including a strategy for how I will respond to the feedback, and a request for how I want them to respond. In addition, I provide my own evaluation of how the course is going so far.

The issues of cheating and plagiarism raise some important questions about communication. On the one hand, I don’t want my students to cheat by accident because they don’t realize that a particular action constitutes cheating. On the other hand, I don’t want my students to miss a good learning opportunity—such as sharing their papers with each other—because they are afraid that it might be construed as cheating. The best way to avoid these dilemmas that I have found is to state a clear policy of what constitutes cheating on each assignment. This gets beyond the vagaries of the generic code of conduct and clarifies which actions are encouraged and which are forbidden.

Finally, I state clear communication policies on my syllabi, indicating how and when to email me, when to expect a response, when it is okay to call me at home, and how often I expect students to check their email.

Om
These six pages should not be confused for being a teaching philosophy. They are rather, a teaching philosophy statement; a lengthy introduction to a short teaching philosophy: do yoga and don’t be an asshole. My philosophy is premised upon these two commands. The second is like the first. Not being an asshole is, in many ways, the root of yogic philosophy. Kind people everywhere are yogis in my eyes—whether they exhibit this kindness by feeding the poor or by conducting thoughtful, careful research into issues that matter. To my readers, my students, and kind people the world over, I close simply...

Namaste.

Teaching as a Member of a Department
Fall 2007

In my short time teaching at Temple University, my approach has changed drastically as I have come to better appreciate the way that my courses fit into a larger curriculum within the Sociology Department and across the University. Having trained in a graduate program that emphasized theory, I have had to significantly reorient myself within Temple's more empirically grounded sociology curriculum, and my teaching is a significant space in which that transformation has occurred. In my Introductory Sociology course, I devised a series of five short assignments that asked students to critically examine data within a set of sociologically imaginative questions. Students approached the data only after formulating and defending hypotheses-a useful preparation for their future social science endeavors. The data ranged from analyses of race and gender in the General Social Survey, to ethnographic observations of norm breaching and qualitative analyses of children's books and websites. The students not only tested their hypotheses but also speculated on the explanations for their often-surprising findings. And in every case they were asked to link these findings to a sociologically significant issue such as a policy consideration or a moral dilemma. The logic behind these assignments was two-fold. First, it prepared all students to take on the sociological imagination in whatever educational and career path they might take. Second, it gave students a glimpse into the work of sociology and prepared students who might choose sociology as their major or minor for the real work that lay ahead of them. I chose the data sets and topics based on the kind of work they would face in higher level sociology classes. As they progress through the major, they should find not only the data but also the theories and modes of analysis to be recognizable from their early experiences in the introductory course.

My undergraduate course on the Development of Sociological Thought has been through several iterations and is now being re-shaped in preparation for its role within the sociology major as one of our writing-intensive courses. In the new version of the course, students begin by examining a collection of data sets, including US Census data on race and household income, Bureau of Labor Statistics data on gender disparities in pay, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data on sexuality. We will start the semester by looking for surprising findings in the data and developing a set of shared questions about these findings that we can then try to answer by making use of our various theoretical perspectives. Those theories include some of the most established paradigms of the discipline, such as Conflict theory and Functionalism, as well as more recent theoretical developments, including Queer theory and Intersectionality. The major assignment is a paper that compares two theoretical standpoints in terms of their capacity to explain a particular finding in the data (the students are allowed to choose which finding they wish to focus on). The premise behind this course design is that theory should not function as a bizarre aside within an empirically grounded major but rather as a set of useful lenses for making sense of research. To that end, the training in writing that students receive in my theory course should actually prepare them for the writing assignments they will face later in the major.

Similarly, my seminar on Popular Culture demonstrates the ways that teaching at Temple has improved the way that I teach writing. Students are asked to compare two similar items of popular culture-songs, movies, television shows, novels, magazines, websites, etc.-to elaborate on a surprising difference. For instance, students have examined magazines aimed at men to those aimed at women and often found that the visual content is surprisingly similar-sexualized images of women-despite the seeming opposition in the target audiences. The method of analysis is based on Michael Schudson's five-dimensional approach to cultural potency. But these papers, like those in my other courses, are written in stages. I find that students need a chance to experiment and take risks with their ideas, but they are rarely motivated when this risk-taking has little payoff. So I assign a series of five writing assignments, each worth two points towards the final grade in the class. Each assignment is a component of the final paper-the summary of the findings, the methods, the discussion, the conclusion or the introduction. Each assignment begins with an in-class workshop that provides an overview of the assignment and a chance to brainstorm and ask questions. Students receive both points if they put effort into the assignment, only one point if the effort is minimal, and no points if they do not turn it in. They receive significant feedback from me and from their peers and use this feedback to revise all of the sections and complete the final draft. Although popular culture as a substantive area is quite different from the other topics students may study in our department, the mode of sociological analysis is the same and students who have already taken substantive courses within the major quickly identify the pattern for asking questions and answering them with social research.

My graduate course on Contemporary Social Theory has taken on a practical approach to theory that is comparable to my approach in Development of Sociological Thought. The course takes a conversational approach to theory in which we hear from four theoretical perspectives on a particular topic each week. The goal is to show that theorists are in conversation with one another in their attempts to explain particular social phenomena. The students in the class are in the beginning of their second year of the Master's program and are preparing for their Candidacy Research Papers (CRP), one of the major requirements for entering into the PhD program. Students are strongly encouraged to use their course paper as a chance to write the literature review, theoretical frame, and methods sections of the CRP. The logic is that the literature review should help them to identify a gap in the writings that they can fill with their own research. That gap should be approached within a carefully constructed theoretical frame that is also based on existing literature. Finally, the theoretical framework needs to provide the grounding for the methodological approach to the research. In this way, I strive to prevent students from internalizing the fallacious notion that empiricism is somehow divorced from theory. I also allow the course to function quite practically as a step towards their larger research requirements.

Teaching as a member of a department, and not just as a lone ranger scholar/teacher, also requires that I take seriously the role of mentoring for both undergraduates and graduate students. I have worked closely and successfully with several students in preparing their applications for graduate school. I have also mentored an undergraduate student on a major research project that has received awards and resulted in multiple conference presentations. I have worked with graduate students on their candidacy research papers and dissertations, and I am currently serving on three dissertation committees. I believe one of my major roles is to complement and reinforce the advice they are receiving from other members of the department so that the feedback they receive is consistent and practical.

The meta-story of this teaching philosophy statement is that my teaching has been transformed at Temple by the profound respect that I have for my colleagues as intellectuals and as teachers. They have provided a great deal of mentorship for me and they have helped me to see the important role of the department in providing a strong social science curriculum not just for our majors but for the entire university.

Courses Taught

Courses at Temple University

Introductory Sociology (Spring 2005, Fall 2006, Fall 2008)
Tired of teaching the course as a quick survey through all of sociology, often heading into realms where my training is lacking or that simply don't interest me, I decided I needed to make the course exciting for me. I wanted to give the course a greater focus on inequality and I wanted to emphasize areas where I could give particularly good lectures. The courses now has six areas of focus: Race & Ethnicity, Gender & Sexuality, Class & Inequality, Consumer Culture, and Art & Popular Culture. There is a lab report for each unit, requiring various sorts of sociological research: quantitative research with the GSS (frequencies and crosstabs), content analysis, interviewing and ethnography. Instead of a textbook, sudents are assigned published sociological studies such as Juliet Schor's Born to Buy and Sharon Hays's Flat Broke with Children.

American Ethnicity (Fall 2004, Spring 2005 [2 sections each semester])
The ethnicity course is identified as 'race intensive' in accordance with the core requirements at Temple, and one section each semester was also writing intensive. The curriculum combined historical and sociological approaches to ethnicity. From the historical approach, we surveyed the diverse histories of a variety of ethnic groups in immigrating to the US, helping to build the US, and participating in contemporary American culture. We looked specifically at Americans who located their ancestries in China, Japan, Mexico, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Ireland, and England, as well as Native Americans. The sociological approach opened upon questions of how we conceptualize race, ethnicity, assimilation, diversity, and American identity. Questions of gender differences for ethnic group experiences were also kept at the center of discussion. The writing intensive sections also engaged a series of debates on affirmative action, language diversity, and the identification of 'model' minorities. I teach this course using Healy and O'Brien's Race, Ethnicity and Gender.

Sociology of Popular Culture (Fall 2004, Spring 2006, Spring 2007, Fall 2007)
I combine theoretical perspectives, research summaries, and contemporary debates in this special topics course. Theoretically, we explore whether popular culture reflects, produces, or challenges American social structure. The course explores research into issues of cultural production and reception, audience agency, and the kinds of representation that occur in culture. Specific debates in class center around the portrayal of sexuality in music videos, the representation of ideal beauty in the media, racial issues in television, and the exploitation of young people in advertising. Readings are drawn from published journal articles in the field. The major assignment asks students to conduct a content analysis of two pieces of popular culture that provide that logical comparison and which raise a sociological issue. For this assignment, the framework is derived from Michael Schudson's article "How Culture Works.

Development of Sociological Thought (Spring 2005, Spring 2006, Spring 2007, Spring 2008)
The course includes both classical and contemporary social theory, and even extends beyond the discipline of sociology. Readings include Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, WEB DuBois, Patricia Hill Collins, Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Antonio Gramsci, Gloria Anzaldua, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and many others. Student's are asked to write weekly journals on the readings. The major assignment for the course is a paper that compares two theoretical perspectives in terms of their capacity to explain data. The data is chosen from Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, CDC and other large federal databases. Students write these paper in stages across the semester. Based on feedback from each stage, they revise all of the earlier sections into one final paper. Class time includes a number of writing workshops.

Contemporary Sociological Theory (Fall 2004, Fall 2005, Fall 2006)
I take a conversational approach to this course. By that, I mean that each week the students are brought into a conversation among theorists about a particular topic. For instance, under the heading of 'Agency & Structure', students read a series of arguments between William Sewell and Theda Skocpol, as well as an article by Sharon Hays that responds to both Sewell and Skocpol. Other topics addressed in this class include: politics, power, media, race, feminism, postmodernism, education, medicine and the body, queer theory, terrorism, culture, and inequality. Students are required to complete theoretically grounded research papers by the end of the term. Students write these paper in stages across the semester. Based on feedback from each stage, they revise all of the earlier sections into one final paper. Class time includes a number of writing workshops.

Courses Taught at the University of Virginia (summaries, syllabi and evaluations available upon request)

American Society & Popular Culture (Fall 2001, Spring 2002, Summer 2002, Summer 2003)
Social Inequality (Summer 2003)
Introductory Sociology (Summer 2001)
Internship Seminar (Summer 2000)