Milgram and Obedience

Psychology – and to a lesser extent Sociology – teachers and students generally need to have an understanding of both the mechanics of Milgram’s classic “obedience experiments” and their general implications. However, as recent research has argued (Social psychology textbooks ignore all modern criticisms of Milgram’s “obedience experiments”) this understanding has not necessarily been advanced […]

The Kendal Project: Professor Linda Woodhead

In this short interview filmed in 2009 Professor Linda Woodhead talks briefly about secularisation and post-secularisation and, at greater length, The Kendal Project.

Teaching A-level Research Methods: Part 3

Talk the Walk At this point students need to get to grips with learning the basics of research methods. How you organise this is up to you, but one way is to get students to take ownership of their learning: If there are sufficient students, split the class into groups and give each group responsibility […]

Teaching A-level Research Methods: Part 2

Virtual Research in a Real Location The idea here is that we use students’ knowledge of a real location as the basis for virtual research: while the scenario is real – a location such as a high street, shopping mall, school or college – students aren’t required to carry-out any real (time-consuming) research. Rather, they […]

Teaching A-level Research Methods: Part 1

A few years ago I was asked to deliver a Conference on “Sociology and the Internet” to teachers interested in learning more about what was available on the Web and how to incorporate this material into their teaching. The “one proviso” stipulated by the commissioning company was that “there would not be any access to […]

ShortCutstv Weekly Digest

We post a lot of what we think are interesting and useful sociology, psychology and “general interest” articles and links through our Twitter account each week and, as an experiment, thought it might be helpful to publish a weekly digest of these links for those who are Twitterless or who may just have missed something […]

Educational Achievement: Professor Becky Francis

In this short (10 minute) interview, (recorded in 2009 in what looks and sounds like a cupboard somewhere…apologies for the less than pristine sound quality and video), Professor Becky Francis talks about her research into educational achievement.

The Crime and Deviance Channel

The Channel is a collection of original resources – Text, PowerPoint, Audio and Video – designed to complement the teaching of crime and deviance. It’s been running since 2010 and we’ve recently decided to give it a complete redesign, partly because the old design was getting a bit long-in-the-tooth and partly because hardware and browser […]

Crime, Deviance and Labelling

This is a short discussion piece about Labelling (and Labelling Theory) based on the following Guardian article: Smash the mafia elite: we should treat offshore wealth as terrorist finance Aside from the issues it raises about globalisation, social class and social inequality, this article is also useful as a contemporary example of labelling theory. How, […]

Keyword Revision Mapping

Although revision techniques are many and varied one of my favourite techniques is based on keywords because it’s so highly-adaptable; it’s equally suited to on-course as it is to post-course revision (although I actually believe the former is both more effective and encourages a greater depth of revision). In basic terms keyword revision simply involves […]