I was delighted – and honored – to learn that some of my students have nominated me for a teaching award.  Win or not, this nomination has forced me to try to articulate some things about my approach to teaching, especially lecturing, these days.

Telling Stories

Professors often complain that students today have more trouble listening to lectures than students did in the past, possibly because they have grown up in a media-soaked, stimulus-rich social environment that reinforces modes of perception not conducive to the kind of calm focus necessary to listen to long oral presentations.  I am not persuaded.  Yes, I no longer just lecture in my big classes.  Where appropriate, I enrich my lectures with projected images, mostly documentary photographs, and I go on line and display a series of web pages that illustrate some point I am trying to make.  But mostly I tell stories.  That’s not difficult to do in my environmental sociology classes because most of Environmental Sociology consists of stories, stories of common folks made ill by toxic waste chemicals, stories about how corporate behavior creates hazards, stories about how scientists expand our knowledge of hazards, stories about how government regulators do or do not protect public health.  I also teach sociological theory courses and one would think that it is harder to organize lectures as stories when it comes to a topic as abstract, as laden with academic jargon, as social theory.  Not so, I find.  True, large segments of these lectures consist of rather straightforward recitations of basic concepts, but I find that students are more engaged when I bring these concepts to life with illustrative stories, especially if these stories are either deeply disturbing or strongly tinged with irony and black humor. 

I am speculating, here, and I am sure this will sound far fetched to anyone deeply committed to the view that almost everything about human experience is socially or culturally constructed, but I tend to believe, in spite of what Michel Foucault has written about discourses and epistemes, that the story narrative form is somehow embedded in our species’s innate cognitive structure.  I think we believe we know things, about our past, about our lives, about our relationships and our jobs, about our social world, when we can tell stories to ourselves about those things.  When we turn experience into stories, we find that deeply satisfying.

The Problem of Experiential Connection

Historically speaking, Sociology as a discipline arose as an attempt to study, theorize, understand the problems of modernity.  Sociological inquiry was motivated by the appearance of new forms of societal problems in 19th Century Europe.  Today many of those same problems still plague us.  Vast differences between rich and poor, for example.  Or the problems associated with rapid urbanization.  In addition, new problems have emerged.  The environment, my specific area of research, is an example. 

Today, much of Sociology is still about social problems.  Necessarily, that’s what a lot of our teaching is about.  We teach about the problems of the world because that’s what Sociology does best, what Sociology is most passionate about.  It’s an important thing to do, I believe.  Higher education serves a variety of purposes.  Most obviously it prepares and credentials students for careers.  In a democratic society, though, higher education should also prepare students to be active, engaged, knowledgeable citizens.  Sociology, at its best, does exactly that.  It exposes students to the whole spectrum of important social issues and it gives students the cognitive tools they need to understand these issues.

In the past few years, though, I have become acutely aware of the lack of an obvious, experiential connection, between what we teach about the world and the world as the typical American college student experiences it.  To some degree, it’s a matter of age.  They are, most of them, too young to have directly experienced the worst of social problems.  To some degree, it’s a matter of the social position of many of our students.  Though not drawn from the truly wealthy, most privileged, most sheltered segments of society, most of our students come from homes and from communities that are rather insulated from, distanced from, the most serious of social problems.  That experiential disconnect can make much of what we teach seem abstract, feel far away, feel like something that will affect others, not them.  The student can hear it, perhaps think about it, in a rather abstract way, but it won’t get them in the gut.  Absent an experiential connection, important lessons degenerate into just something the student has to remember for the final exam.

When I have been able to think about teaching in some deeper sense, recently, I have been mulling over how I can bridge that gap, how I can created that experiential connection where one doesn’t naturally exist.  Let me give one example of how I have tried to do this:  I teach a course on the sociology of water.  Some of the material has to do with access to water in underdeveloped countries, or the impacts that climate change is likely to have on California in the next 30-50 years.  Those things are quite serious, but they are far from the experience of the UCSC undergraduate, far in terms of social space, far in term of time.  I don’t think I could make any of this seem real, hence really worth caring about, if I didn’t find some other theme that brings the sociology of water closer to home, somehow.  So I start the class not with global differences in access to clean water, or with what California is going to look like when the snow and rain come in the “wrong” amounts and at the “wrong” time in the year.  I start with the body.  Their bodies.  I start with the findings of biomonitoring studies that document how the typical American’s body now has in it hundreds of different substances, PCBs, pesticides, flame retardants, plasticizers, solvents, pharmaceuticals, hormones, all in tiny amounts.  Then I lead them through a process of discovery about how those substances get into our bodies when we drink tap water and also ingest water that is in the foods we eat.  From that, we move “backwards” to where those contaminants enter the water supply and the water we give to food animals and use to water crops, ... and we eventually get to Economic Sociology (how economic actors behave and why), and to Political Sociology (how toxic substances in food and water are or are not adequately regulated).  That’s the way I have sought to create experiential linkages between how the student experiences their own lives and the larger insights about society that I wish for them to learn.

One other example:  I taught Sociology 185, Environmental Inequalities, in the Fall of 2005.

Now, again, demographically speaking, most of our students are not themselves victims of environmental racism.  But the class was happening only months after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, once again reminding Americans, in the most dramatic way conceivable, of the plight of poor minorities in the inner cities.  I seized this opportunity to bring the idea of environmental inequality to life.  I argued that when a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, harms one part of the population disproportionately, that’s the clearest possible evidence for social inequalities.  I organized a joint research project.  I subdivided the New Orleans catastrophe into 11 different topics and set 11 different groups of students to work, studying in depth each facet of the event (see attached assignment sheet).  After all the groups presented their findings, we, as a class, attempted to synthesize all the pieces into a coherent, overall analysis of the event and what it taught us about how American society works.  

Not Leaving Them Feeling Helpless

Assuming I have succeeded, at least some of the time, getting students to experientially feel a connection between their lives and Sociology’s sometimes quite dire diagnoses of the troubles of modernity, I then face the following challenge:   The students now, at least for the moment, feel the weight of new knowledge about the troubles of the world.  Many, though, respond by feeling helpless, overwhelmed.  What should they do about it?  What can they do about it?  It all feels so huge and intractable.  They are already having plenty of trouble passing their classes, working part time, relating to boy or girl friend, roommates, parents.  Now they also have to think about ALL THAT, too?

This is another issue I think about a lot.  I am not as close to a satisfactory solution here as I am to the solution for the lack of experiential linkage.  I do make sure to include in all my classes a hefty section that looks at activism – what citizens have done in the past to organize themselves, fight for change, try to improve the conditions of their lives.  And I emphasize the successes that activists have enjoyed, the shortening of the working day to 8 hours, improvements in working conditions, passage and implementation of clean air and clean water laws.

I want to leave them with a feeling not just that the world is in far worse shape than they have ever imagined, but that it is possible to do something constructive about it.  Citizens have done it before, in other tough moments; they can do it as well.

Keeping Students’ Attention; the Tension Between Structure and Improv; Ironic Distance

I am acutely aware that if I don’t keep the students’ attention, I will not be able to teach them anything.  Telling stories helps.  Trying very hard to make the experiential connection helps.  I do a couple of other things.  I have a very precise outline, the main ideas logically laid out (and displayed over my head), secondary arguments that flesh out the main points, illustrative materials.  It’s all written out ... and when I lecture I hardly look at the notes in my hand.  I improvise on the main ideas.  Some lectures I’ve given every year for the past 20 years and it’s never worded the same.  It’s a bit like doing acrobatics without a safety net.  Sometimes I am not as articulate as I would like to be or know that I could be (have been, at other times), but it is always fresh.  Finally, a lot of the stories I tell are told from the point of view of a rather disillusioned, but still idealistic, observer, a perspective that I know appeals to students.