GrudgeBallUK: Making Revision More Fun

I found this idea on a blog called Engaging Them All run by Kara Wilkins  and while I’ve made a few slight additions / modifications what I describe below is essentially her work. Grudgeball is basically a team-based revision quiz game with a twist. While teams gain points for answering questions correctly, they also get […]

Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes

The 2017 OfCom Report on “Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes” (2017) covers different types of on-and-offline media use by children in the UK and it’s quite a treasure trove of visual and verbal information that will repay careful analysis – although at around 300 pages it may prove a little hard-going for most […]

Spaced Study: What It Is (and How To Do It)

Spaced Study or Spaced Practice is a theory of learning that argues, in a nutshell, that students study more effectively and retain more of the information they learn if the study period is “spaced” – or spread out over a number of hours / days – than if studying is “crammed” into short intensive blocks. […]

How does Cultural Capital Work in Chinese Society?

This research, created and carried-out by one of Richard Driscoll’s students at the Shenzhen College of International Education in China applies the concept of cultural capital to an understanding of the relationship between class, status and education in contemporary China. As such, it’s a useful teaching resource for both the way it applies the concept […]

Creating Structured Sociological Discussions with Kialo

Although “discussions”, in one form or another, are probably a teaching staple in social science classes, one of their major drawbacks is that they can be devilishly difficult to structure, control and record. Which is both a shame and a problem: • the former because students seem to find discussions useful and teachers can use […]

23 | Health: Part 4

In this final chapter in the Health series the main focus is on the role of health professionals in society, as seen through the lens of four sociological perspectives: • Functionalist, with the main focus on the role of health systems and health professionals. • Marxist, looking at medicine in terms of its production and […]

Visual Sociology: Picturing Inequality

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of using graphic material (pictures and illustrations rather than examples of extreme physical violence) to both illustrate sociological ideas and encourage students to think a little more deeply about such ideas and how they can be applied to increase their depth of sociological […]

Sociological Theories And Frameworks

This is a web page where you can find a bite-sized run-down of a range of: a. Sociological frameworks – from those fairly central to a-level, such as Functionalism, Feminism. Conflict theory, Critical theory and those (symbolic interaction, phenomenology) that tend to be a little more optional. b. Sociological theories – some fairly central ones, […]

Popular Panics and the New Right

Following the police shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, widespread rioting broke out during August 2011 in London and many other English cities. If you don’t remember or aren’t familiar with the civil unrest, the BBC has a handy timeline of events. I recently came across an Economist article, written at the time and addressing […]

When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?

I chanced across this blog post from the Smithsonian Institution of all places and it struck me as something that could be useful as a way of getting students to think about all kinds of sociological stuff – from gender and identity, through the role of the media to more-abstract ideas about childhood, invented traditions […]