Hi! Nice meeting you! Could you introduce yourself? What department are you from? What courses are you teaching or have been teaching? What are the classes you teach like, such as format or class size? Is there anything you want to tell us about your teaching, research, or other projects?
My name is Benjamin Adam. I teach courses in the Sociology department related to deviance, inequality, and social control as an associate adjunct. Over the past few years I’ve been teaching sections of Social Inequality, Crime and Justice from a Sociological Perspective, Criminology, and Intro; and a few special topics classes on sexuality, law, and social theory. Most of my classes are 20-35 students and include varied majors. I try to engage my students by teaching about contemporary politics in all my classes.
Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar?
I’ll be working on my hybrid Social Inequality class for the Winter intercession. Because it’s important to me, I focus especially on sociological explanations and analyses of inequality which offer a counterpoint to contemporary discourse about individual responsibility and culpability. I try to teach with accessible and compelling materials that offer those perspectives, and to foster discussions which engage students in the process of Sociological thinking. Sometimes it’s a hard sell.
What are the listed learning goals of your course? They could be ones provided by the department, or ones that you have written for your syllabus? Please list them (pasting is fine!).
Here’s the course description from the department: This course examines individual and structural explanations for the generation and maintenance of inequality in the United States and the impact of stratification on the social mobility of groups and individuals. It looks as patterns of allocation of societal rewards according to class, race, and gender; the distribution of educational opportunities and cultural capital; and labor market segmentation by race, class, ethnicity, gender, and immigration status.
I’d like to develop more organized, complete, and specific learning goals. Here are the 5 modules in the course, and excerpts from short descriptions I share with students about a few of the modules.
Course Introduction and Introduction to Inequality
Capitalism, Class, and Inequality
Inequality and Democracy
Intersectional Inequality
Social Mobility
In this class, students will be introduced to key sociological ideas related to inequality including
* What is Social Inequality? What are some of the ways inequality shapes our experiences, identities, and worldviews?
* The scope and degree of inequality in the U.S.
* Individual attributes v. structural approach to understanding and explaining inequality
* What is inequality and why is it important? Is inequality functional (i.e. necessary)?
* What does inequality have to do with power?
In this module, you’ll learn about how Sociologists think about the political economy of capitalism, and the class structure associated with it. For (most) Sociologists, inequality is a feature of capitalism associated with the division of society into owners and workers, and particularly, with the question of how labor is controlled and surplus value is distributed.
In this module, you’ll have an opportunity to explore one of the major axes of inequality in the United States: race, with a focus on the social construction of race in the colonial period, and the historical and ongoing racial inequalities associated with housing and household wealth.
This module will explore the concept of intersectionality a bit further, and will examine at some forms of inequality that are multi-dimensional and not easily explained by reference to what Kimberle Crenshaw calls a “single-axis framework”: that is, a perspective focused on a single axis of identity and discrimination such as race, or (but not also) gender.
What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?
I’d like to develop a few general lesson plans for in-person and online activities, especially better alternatives to “open” or prompted online discussions. It’s been a challenge for me to foster spontaneous and ongoing verbal engagement in online synchronous sessions, which often feel forced and alienating – especially because so many students have their cameras off.