7 Sims in 7 Days – Day 4: The Anomie Within

This short (5 – 10 minute) sim can be used whenever you want to introduce the concept of anomie, such as if you’re introducing Merton’s Strain Theory or looking at Garfinkel’s breaching experiments. The package includes a little bit of background on breaching experiments and a couple of different anomie variations – mild and strong […]

7 Sims in 7 Days – Day 3: Window Shopping / The Art of Walking

Although these are two different sims I’ve included them together because both involve thinking about the “rules of everyday social interaction”, albeit in different ways: Window shopping is designed to encourage students to think systematically about the “underlying rules” of relatively mundane behavior. It can be used to simulate sociological research (such as field experiments […]

Seven Sims in Seven Days – Day 2: Cultural Deprivation

Cultural deprivation, as an explanation for differences in educational achievement (particularly those of class and ethnicity), is something of a Vampire Theory in the sense that no matter how many times sociologists have tried to kill it off it refuses to die. It is, for example, an explanation that continues to have currency among UK […]

Seven Sims in Seven Days – Day 1: The Urinal Game

Background We can illustrate the idea of cultural learning (and show how the concepts of roles, values and norms are inter-related into the bargain) using Proxemic theory – the study of how people understand and use space in a cultural context – originally developed by Hall (1966). Although we are born with the ability to […]

Seven Sims in Seven Days: The Introduction

I’ve long been interested in the idea of using simulations (and games – see Disclaimer below) as teaching tools – there were a couple of online efforts I created many moons ago when the Internet was still young and frames seemed such a good idea: Education and Differential Achievement: The Sociological Detective was an attempt […]

Word Clouds

I’ve always been a big fan of Key Words as a revision memory tool for a couple of reasons: Firstly, because it’s easier to remember half-a-dozen powerful ideas (culture, socialisation, roles, values, norms, social control…) than the page of text in which they’re embedded. Secondly, if you choose powerful Key Words, by bringing them to […]

Sociology ShortCuts: Labelling Theory

Labelling is a staple theory in the sociology of crime – both in its own right (Becker’s concept of the Outsider, for example) and in terms of its incorporation into other theoretical explanations (Radical Criminology, for example) – and in this ShortCut Professor Sandra Walklate outlines some of the theory’s key ideas: Outsiders Social interaction […]

Visualising Class Structures

Visualising Class Structures is a PowerPoint Presentation, designed for whole-class teaching, that features visual representations of ten different class structures / variations,  accompanied by some of the key ideas involved in each classification. Brief background Notes for teachers are also included with each slide. The current presentation has been updated (2019) to include Savage’s “7 […]

Modernity and Sociological Theory

This is the first part of a two-part series looking at the relationship between modernity, postmodernity and the development of sociological theory. In Part 1 (Modernity) the focus is on: Part 2 (Postmodernity) is available here. Sociology and Modernity “Sociology”, according to Taylor (2000), “is a product of modernity”; its origins as an academic discipline […]

Global Culture Teaching Notes

Nature and Extent Although the idea of global influences on local and national cultural behaviours is not particularly new (different cultural practices and products have influenced “British culture” for many hundreds of years) what is new is the scope and speed of cultural diversity and change – processes hastened by technological developments such as cheap […]