Morning Edition Sociology

This isn't directly about teaching, but it is about making connections with the "real world". I recently read Peter Berger's excellent book Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore. It's an intellectual autobiography that outlines how he came to some of the major perspectives in his approach to sociology -- perspectives that have changed the study of religion, and the sociology of knowledge and showed sociology to be what he called a "humanistic perspective" (not secular -- compassionate). Berger saw all sorts of applications the sociological perspective brings to our daily lives and, conversely, all the ways in which our daily lives illustrate sociological matters.

Listening to NPR's Morning Edition the last couple of days, I kept hearing things that resonated with my sociological background. I'd like to think that Berger sensitized me to this. Maybe returning to the classroom just makes me collect examples to use in future classes.

Tuesday morning, NPR ran a story on how some evangelicals are "questioning the existence of [a literal] Adam and Eve." You can read the transcript here. What caught my attention in the story was the way in which those who are Not Questioning maintain their position because of a logical premise. They argue that if Jesus is the Second Adam who defeated Sin, we have to have a First Adam. And so they will not consider any other perspective, seeing their faith as more substantial than science (more later).

Not surprisingly, my mind went immediately to sociology. For nearly half of the 20th century, a single theoretical view known as Functionalism dominated American sociology. Folks who went to grad school before the mid-70s were steeped in it. Folks, like me, who went after that were well versed in its critique. One of the central notions of functionalism, as best espoused by Talcott Parsons, was that social forms fulfilled functions. Those social forms must be necessary for society to operate smoothly (or else they'd go away). We could understand any past feature by seeing the role it played in the current stability of society. The critique came that this was a circular argument. Non-essential features got extinguished so if a form survived, it had to be significant. One of Parson's followers, Robert Merton tried to redeem some of the extremes of functionalism by introducing the notion of "functional equivalents" -- the idea that a variety of somewhat interchangeable forms might perform similar functions. While this wasn't enough to keep functionalism operating as the dominant approach in sociology, it does redeem the logical argument.

So when Albert Moeller and others argue that we must hold to our guns because without this one piece of scripture, everything falls apart, it reminds me of the functionalist argument. Isn't it possible that a solid creation story that defines the human condition as sinful still "works" in Pauline Theology? To argue that this One Thing is the hinge-point of all else is no more true in Biblical Studies than it is in sociology. [I do need to point out that as a Wesleyan, the suggestion that my faith will unravel if I "accomodate science" as Mohler says, is not consistent with Wesley's synthesis of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Scripture is preeminent for Wesley, but reason is not to be denied and experience both in interaction with others and in the witness of the Spirit, allows for "functional equivalents".)

Yesterday, the Morning Edition host did an interview with Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor. Here's the transcript for that. It was one of the clearest, non-partisan analyses of our economic situation I've heard in years. In the midst of his consideration of unemployment, there was the following exchange:

Mr. ROSS: Well, I think there's several factors. Number one is we believe that unemployment is going to remain high. Virtually all companies we know of have learned to live with fewer employees per incremental dollar of sales than they ever had before. So we believe that part of the high unemployment is due, not just cyclical factors, but to structural change in the economy. And that's why corporate America is in much better shape than Mr. and Mrs. America.

INSKEEP: Just to make sure I understand that, when you structural change, you're saying that corporate America has resized or downsized the necessary workforce and it's just not as large as the workforce population in the United States.

Mr. ROSS: That's correct. The substitution of capital for labor has been continuing. I think that people have also restructured the way that they do business, all with an eye toward reducing labor costs. And you've seen those big gains in productivity. June was the first month where productivity didn't really go up, actually it declined a little bit. And that's the first month in many, many months where there hasn't been a big productivity gain. So I think that's a problem and it's going to be a continuing problem, partly because the American educational system is not producing people with the qualifications to do the jobs in the new economy. 

Right away, I realized that Ross had just clearly explained Karl Marx's theory of labor. This is the essential structural contradiction of capitalism -- owners must minimize labor costs but rely on consumers to purchase products while the consumer's buying power is shrinking. This doesn't mean revolution is in the offing -- just that this billionaire investor make a sociological argument that your Ivy League Tweed Wearing Marxist sociologist has been preaching to undergraduates for years.

One more example from yesterday, but it really needs more sociological awareness. In their second story about the riots in England (transcript), the Tottenham MP David Lammy, said: 

The majority of young people, obviously, in Tottenham and other areas similar to Tottenham are totally against this violence. But there are two or 300 people in areas like mine who are very much at the margins of society who have a different value set, and I'm afraid we are seeing those young people running rampage through the country. And to see people losing their lives now as a result of this is something I never thought I'd see. 

Prime Minister Cameron made the same "wrong values" argument. It is true that the rioters were not protesting the police shooting. But this is an example of classic collective behavior. Pent-up frustration, a trigger event, inadequate social controls, the deindividuation of anonymous crowd behavior, and disproportionate response. Sociologists studying incidents from the Watts Riot, Foreign revolutions, and the like show the same types of behaviors. Not surprisingly, all of those situations begin with leaders dismissing the behaviors as "not reflecting our values". The line between us and them is never as bright as we hope it is. And I can write that even before I see Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

"The Cult of Hawthorne"

In my first post on this teaching and learning blog, I referred to a great little book titled Teaching with Your Mouth Shut. Written by a classics professor who taught at Evergreen State until his death in 1999, it explores the variety of ways in which students can be challenged to learn that don't require one to "profess". All those PowerPoint outline makers will be sorely disappointed!

It was a helpful book. One piece I've taken away in planning courses for the fall is to have the readings interact with each other. I have intentionally laid out the course design in one course so that the books overlap. In another course, I'm asking subsets of students to read an additional book beyond the "required for all" list, so that they can look for the interactions between the common readings and their specialty reading. In my criminology class, I'm working on a strategy to engage the class in case study trials to force the application of the material, using the students as specialists.

This isn't the first time I've tried something like this. And it certainly won't be the most effective. That prize goes to a class experience in a Sociology of Religion class at Sterling College in the early 90s (I think it was the spring of 92 but I'm not certain). On our recent trip to Michigan to close on our house in Jackson, we visited one of my former majors, Jennifer (Losey) Masar, whose husband works at Tabor College in Kansas. As we were remembering old times and she reported on it on Facebook, a number of the Sterling College connections began bringing that class to life again.

It was a pretty simple class session. I was exploring the sociological implications faced by religious organizations experiencing exponential growth. Simplicity and Charisma quickly give way to Formalization and Concerns Over Orthodoxy. To illustrate, I suggested that we imagine that the class was a cult and I was the leader (my class, after all). We then explored what would happen when we went from 10 to 40, from 40 to 120, 120 to 240, and so on. Very quickly, we get to the need for middle managers, seminaries, doctrinal statements, compliance mechanisms, educational institutions, and succession plans. It was one of those great socratic moments and I felt that my unit goals had been achieved.

I had no idea!

When I entered the room for our next class meeting, I was stunned at what I found. All of the students had come in costume (70s hippie garb, I've never known exactly why), had cans of coke (which I brought to every class), and held up masks with my face on them (thanks to Jeralynne for providing the picture used). One of the students, Joel Noble, had found a big curly wig and an "appropriate" sportcoat. Clint Walker gave a great introductory speech and Janelle Miyasharo (von Storch) had developed a chant they intoned as I came in. The class became a party.

It was one of those wonderful moments in teaching where the relationship between faculty and students destroys the power imbalances that are often present in the classroom. We enjoyed the fact that we had been together through the experience. Based on the comments on Facebook in recent days, it was something we all quickly remember. I think that one class experience stayed with them. They even remember what it was about!

I'm looking forward to more surprising experiences like that one where the joy of learning by the students takes over the best laid plans of those who "profess".

Postscript: Somebody found the picture taken of the whole class. It helps explain what I tried to describe above.

Life Cycles and Cohorts

It's been interesting in the last 40+ hours to follow the varied reactions to the news about Osama Bin Laden's demise. In the midst of all the questions about "how knew what when" and the inevitable harping about how "President Obama didn't do this, the military did", it's been fascinating to track how evangelicals of various ages are responding.

Some of my contacts are responding with deep concern as they try to struggle over the difference between justice and vengeance. They wonder what "loving enemies" really looks like. What distinguishes this group from at least some others is that they are putting primacy on what Jesus actually said. Those who are celebrating find themselves drawn rapidly to Old Testament historical books or out-of-context Pauline epistles. Anyway, this group of folks are struggling over how the Church could celebrate nationalism over the Gospel. I tend to share their concern.

I'm generalizing, but the folks in this camp are slightly older than college students. They've been out of school for a few years and wrestled with trying to make sense of Christian living in the post-Christian-College world.

I ran across a great piece in the Washington Post today by Alexandra Petri, their "popular culture" blogger. She was one of the folks celebrating outside the White House on Sunday night. She explains: "Osama was our Voldemort." It's a fascinating analysis. I hadn't realized that Petri was in her very early 20s (she writes quite well). But she makes reference to being 12 to 14 in 2001. If you look at pop culture trends in the early 2000s, the Harry Potter books top the list. It's no surprise that she and others would draw a parallel between the total evil created by Rowling and the evil perpetrated on 9/11. And to finish the parallel for that generation, the last Harry Potter movie should beat Voldemort in just over two months.

Pegging this response to "people of that age" is fascinating. It suggests that it's not just "college students acting out". It's what happens when the life cycle changes interact with concrete events of the cohort. So my troubled friends didn't want Osama around indefinitely. But their experience of all this was different. Being slightly older means a lot.

I'm reminded of the analysis that Robert Putnam and David Schwartz did in American Grace that I discussed in my other blog. In figuring out changes in religion in America, Putnam and Schwartz attempted to separate life cycle effects (growing older, having children, empty nest) from cohort effects (growing up in the 60s or 80s or 2000s). What we're looking at is the interaction between the two.

The last time I taught Intro to Sociology, I used Annie Dillard's wonderful little book An American Childhood. It's one of the best testaments to growing awareness of one's place I've ever read. Over the course of the book, she moves from stories of her family, to her school, to her neighborhood, to the social structure of Pittsburgh. She gets to that outermost concentric circle at about 12 years old.

I just wrote an introductory e-mail to the students in my senior seminar course for this fall. Just to say "hi" and ask them about themselves. When we're together this fall, I need to learn a lot more about their lives from 12-15. While we all go through the journey to a developed sense of self in the world, the world we interact with is different than those of other generations.

I tell students that I'm a sociologist today because I was 14 when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated. My emerging sense of justice was caught up in the idealism of those times and then shockingly replaced. That's very different than seeing thousands of people die one sunny morning while you're eating breakfast (on the west coast).

This isn't simply about knowing which pop culture references to toss out in a lecture (my Simpsons references went nowhere when I did my interview lecture at Spring Arbor). It's not about relevance.

It's understanding the events that shaped our students in forming their view of themselves and how they interact with the world. It becomes all the more important that I grasp where they've been. I have a lot to learn from them.

If our classes are going to have impact on the students in the decades to come, as they move through their life cycles, it will not happen because I told them what it was like for me to grow up but only because I heard what it was like for them.

"No Fixing, No Saving, No Advising, No Setting Each Other Straight"

The title of this post is the primary rule for Parker Palmer's "Circles of Trust" from A Hidden Wholeness that I mentioned previously. It was developed over years of running workshops in which individuals could give voice to their "true self". Palmer argues that we bottle up our true self out of fear of what others might think. We surround ourselves with such noise, distraction, and quiet compliance to expectations that we forget what it's like to venture out of our existential caves.  Think Punxsutawney Phil on Feb 2nd but on a much more significant and personal scale. If we gain the courage to poke our nose out and sniff the air, a "fixer" in the crowd can push us deep into the cave thinking long and hard before ever crawling out again. Believe me, it won't be six weeks before you come back out -- more like six years, if that!

Palmer's book on finding the safe space to let your true self speak and to listen to what you really think when unfettered affected me deeply. As I've said, it's been a long time since I thought of myself primarily as a sociology professor -- and administrative life leaves its share of bruises -- but I'm eager to let my true self speak.

Palmer's book isn't about the classroom -- it's far too much of a contrived and unsafe environment for the deep work he imagines. But I've been thinking about the students who will be in my classes. Even within the great confines of a Christian University, they have been pushed to academic success by learning to hold their true self in check. It is far better to jump through the professor's required hoops and to stay mildly disengaged. This brings out the strategic and bulemic learner responses I discussed last time.

But I've heard faculty for years say that we want Christian liberal arts education to make a difference in how students live their lives, not simply while in class but for generations afterward. If that's not our core mission, we have a hard time defending our existence. What Palmer helps me realize is that students can only make those deep changes if they can take the risk of incorporating the lessons learned in class into the individual identity. Way too much of education in America works directly counter to those goals. It strikes me that the first task in my classes is to engage students in the conscious process of setting aside the "taken for granted" nature of education they've become so good at. Only then can we really work together in educating the soul. If I break Palmer's rule in discussion or in paper comments or in a hallway conversation, I set back our goals and suck the life out of the educational enterprise.

This idea of Palmer's shares some deep commitments with Ken Bain's "Best Teachers".  There is much in his wonderful book that I'll need to re-read on a regular basis. But some lessons I can appropriate on the first day of class in September.

First, the best teachers "set high expectations and conveyed a strong trust in their students' abilities to meet them". They are challenging and encouraging simultaneously. They stand in stark contrast to those professors who measure their own ego by how tough they were on students "who didn't belong here". My task for three hours per week is to give the student permission to engage the class material in truly significant ways.

Second, the best teachers "start with the students rather than the discipline." Where are they in their journey? What do they care about? What questions have the framed already? Only then should we make a connection to sociology or liberal arts or criminological theory. It's not that this is more enjoyable; it is. It's that there is a proven connection between past schemas and new learning. Such an approach validates who these students are while building upon that with new perspectives. This is so much better than the strategy engaged in by those who think the professor's job is to show students that their past knowledge was woefully inadequate. Is it really surprising that students in those aggressive settings 1) become strategic learners, 2) build defensive walls around the ego, and 3) forget everything when they sell back their textbook (if not sooner)?

Third, the best teachers "displayed not power but an investment in their students." One of the points of greatest commonality between Palmer's writing and Bain's teachers is that the best teachers don't need to exercise their authority for all to see. I do have a Ph.D. in sociology and I'm proud to have it. I believe I have something to share and I want others to be as thrilled with the topic as I am. But it's not important that I be Dr. Hawthorne or Professor. Those are part of who I am, but not the driving part. I'm reminded of one of the best sociology presentations I ever heard, given by Ray DeVries of St. Olaf. Ray was talking about "structural evil" but instead of talking about the normal issues of race, gender, and social class, he challenged us to consider the ways in which we can exert power in a classroom to make students do whatever we say. He suggested that we name that as the evil manipulation it is, repent, and build relationships. At least that's what I took away -- it was over 20 years ago but I've held on to the message even when I failed to live it out.

If my students live in fear of sharing of themselves, are concerned about their ability to repeat "the Hawthorne view of the world", or don't believe they can perform, real damage is done to their true self. That damage may not be great (it's only three hours a week, after all) but it's still there. More significantly, a chance to heal some of the past damage has been lost.

My pastor, T. Scott Daniels, is working through a year-long series on the book of Mark. The one message in Mark he says (and he's right) is "the Kingdom of God is at hand." He says that we are living in a time of two Kingdoms, one of principalities and powers and the other of Grace given by the Spirit. I pray that my classes will operate according to the values of the coming Kingdom. Maybe my students will find healing and courage on Monday and Wednesday afternoons beginning in September. That is, if I don't mess it up by trying to fix everybody!

A Whole New World

I am extremely excited to be returning to the classroom this fall. I'll teach sociology and core studies courses at Spring Arbor University in Michigan. But I haven't done this full time since the spring of 1993. That's eighteen years. As it happens, that's the age of many entering freshmen. Yes, that means that the last time I taught full time, THESE STUDENTS HADN'T BEEN BORN!

Even as I'll teach some juniors and seniors, I still will have the same challenge. The world they are in is a very different one than when I last taught (don't get me started on the world when I was a freshman!). Consider that in the early 90s, I had not used the world wide web, didn't have a cell phone, and thought my Sony Walkman was pretty cool. I taught in the way I had been taught. You stand in front of the room and share your lecture notes, hoping that somebody takes something of value with them at the end of the course.

During my years in administration, I learned a great deal about how we should assess students' learning and what careful curriculum design looks like. I gave many speeches motivating others to pay attention. Along the way, I began to shift my thinking about the educational process. The book mentioned at the top of this page was revolutionary for me (along with most of Palmer's work). Palmer argues that it is the professor's job to find the ways to allow the subject matter to come alive for the students.

So my new position at Spring Arbor gives me a remarkable opportunity for a fresh start (one of the great blessings of teaching, by the way). How can I approach my love of sociology in a way that's meaningful to today's students? How can I design experiences that move the conversation from "do we need to know this" to "that's interesting -- let's talk more".

In preparing myself for this transition, I've been reading books in higher education. I recently finished Academically Adrift, written by sociologists at New York University and the University of Virginia. This is one of the first comprehensive studies of the impact of general education on the critical thinking skills of students. They examined how much gain students made between the beginning of their freshman year and the end of their sophomore year. The answer -- not so much. While they spend much of the book analyzing various background factors, the key finding is that we aren't asking enough of our students. They don't spend enough time studying out of class and professors' expectations aren't high enough. One  of their criteria is whether a class requires 20 or more pages of writing over the course of a semester and/or 40 pages a week in reading material. I don't know how one meets that requirement if you're teaching physics, but it's worth considering. I've been using that those benchmarks as I think about upcoming classes.

I do think that the authors are onto something. Now I'm not sure that things were more rigorous when I was in college. I don't think I wrote 20+ pages in some graduate classes. But if we see their point as being founded on what promotes student learning and not simply what gets the teacher through the material, then what they've found is worth attending to. I've long argued that if sociology students are only to learn what I know about sociology, we've wasted a lot of time -- I knew it already and they're going to forget it. But enhanced critical thinking would benefit us all (for evidence, see my blog about Civil Discourse at http://theninthcommandment.blogspot.com/).

I'm currently reading three books interchangeably. I do one chapter and then move to the next book and read one chapter and so on. It's really wonderful. Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do reports on a study of about three dozen excellent teachers.  Amazon recommended an accompanying book, Teaching With Your Mouth Shut by Donald Finkel, an Evergreen State University professor who died in 1999. Finally, I've got a recent book by Parker Palmer himself, A Hidden Wholeness. All three books are helping me in rethinking the role of the professor, introducing new priorities in student learning, and investigating alternative classroom strategies.

Pastor Rick Warren opened his famous Purpose Driven Life with the phrase "It's not all about you". That's some of what I'm taking from this reading and hoping to incorporate. Both Palmer and Finkel are talking about taming the ego and being attuned to what's going on around you. It's hard, because I like to talk and will fill silences with my words even if they aren't having much impact!

The two best takeaway ideas from Bain's folks in the first two chapters -- that good students have become "strategic learners" and that all students face the temptation to be "bulemic learners". The former are planning tasks to be accomplished that serve as markers toward specified goals, even if it detracts from true learning. The latter do exactly what it sounds like: binging and purging. The put all that stuff into their heads prior to an exam or assignment, cross it off their to-do list, and then vacate their craniums to make room for the next exam or assignment. It's just as unhealthy as the eating disorder it's named for. The response these excellent teachers make is not to gripe about "the state of students today". The challenge is to begin where they are, confront the students with what real learning could look like, and make commitments to change behaviors. It's not their fault that they've had 12 years of being socialized into this game-playing, passive, minimalist style of learning.

Breaking that paradigm will require work from professor and student alike. And it's likely to be riskier, harder, and way more uncertain that what I did pretty well all those years ago. I can't wait till Fall!