A Voice in the Classroom: Encouraging Community College Students to Talk

• In Event: 2322 - Activities and Techniques Poster Session

Abstract

How do we engage our students, increase classroom participation, and create sociological thinkers? One way I try to achieve this is to embrace and leverage evolving media and technology in order to connect students’ personal experiences with larger social forces at play. The hope is to make sociology understandable, current, accessible, and relevant while encouraging students to view the world through a sociological lens as they contemplate the “everyday”.

My poster outlines a multitude of online sources that I use in the classroom and how these are beneficial to student learning. Sources include: a short film that examines what it means to make the familiar strange, a social-media campaign marketing feminism, a documentary addressing gentrification in the Mission district in San Francisco, and an animation of social networks and use of mobile technology. Issues are made relevant to students because they pique the sociological imagination facilitating a scholarly discussion.

Classroom activity is twofold. Firstly, students watch a short film, social media campaign, animation, etc. of interest, and take notes whilst bearing in mind questions that focus their viewing. Second, the whole class or smaller “break-out” groups work their way through the questions and discuss.

My hope is that these classroom strategies will provide audience members with some ideas on promoting student participation in the classroom. There is also consideration that, broadly speaking, our student demographic are digital natives and typically visually literate. Moreover, while overuse of sociological jargon can be prohibitive to student learning, application of sociological principles to the real world is still vital.

Author

• Sarah Louise Earl-Novell, Chabot College