Taking Students to the Field: Experiential Learning and Cultivating Future Sociologists

• In Event: 2222 - Teaching and Learning Symposium Roundtable Session
  In Informal Discussion Roundtable: Table 04. Taking Sociology Beyond the Classroom

Abstract

As teachers at an urban community college, one of our greatest challenges is how to make the classroom experience significant and engaging so that students, who are already pursuing higher education against a great many odds, want to remain. Teaching so many whose educational trajectories are often compromised by income, food and housing insecurities, how can we make the learning experience as meaningful as possible?

In this discussion, we share our experiences training over 30 undergraduate students—most of them community college students—in various aspects of an externally funded grant. The Battery Park City Authority approached us to conduct a User study of their parks, modeled off of the Central Park User Study (CPC 2011). The funders were particularly interested in the educational component of working with us, in that students would be hired as research assistants, learning how to conduct systematic counts, randomized survey interviews, as well as enter the data into SPSS.

This became a great opportunity to both introduce students to hands-on research demonstrating the importance of utilizing social scientific methods in an applied way (Zevallos 2009), as well as enhancing the learning process through direct experience (Kolb and Kolb 2005; Gross and Rutland 2017). We will discuss some of the challenges and rewards we encountered both inside and outside the classroom. We also provided opportunities for students to reflect on their experiences, and will be sharing these as well.

Making any individual course rewarding is a valued goal, but we also seek to introduce students to the potential of public sociology (Burawoy 2005; Gans 2016; Hartmann 2017). Our pedagogical goals are more future-oriented as we ask how can we make Sociology more meaningful to our students? How can we open up doors, expanding horizons of what is possible? How can we attempt to cultivate future sociologists, especially among those who may never have thought college itself was possible?

Authors

• Robin G. Isserles, City University of New York-Borough of Manhattan Community College

• Michelle A. Ronda, City University of New York-Borough of Manhattan Community College