Popular Postmodernism and the Crisis of Masculinity…

Popular forms of postmodernism are arguably a feature of many forms of current journalistic analysis of social behaviour, in both main stream and social media, with a current “crisis of masculinity” being a firm media narrative. Locating such arguments in their historical context may, however, be a more-sociologically useful way to understand them at a-level. […]

“Society Is Like”: Simple Sociological Analogies

This activity uses simple analogies (plus some optional optical illusions…) to introduce students to a variety of sociological perspectives. Whatever you may think about the notion of “sociological perspectives” (useful categorising concepts that help students get to grips with a range of related ideas? Or a misleading way of grouping writers in an oversimplified attempt […]

Culture and Identity

These documents were created for the OCR A-level Sociology Specification around 10 years ago and although they’re not bang-up-to-date in terms of the studies they cite there’s nothing to stop you adding a few more of your own if and when the fancy takes (they’re all presented as Word documents for reasonably-easy editing). They were […]

The Hidden Rules of (Social) Class

Although the concept of social class is deeply-embedded in A-level Sociology Specifications, a lot of time and effort nominally devoted to this concept is actually taken-up by talking about the economic dimension of class. Although clearly important, the continued emphasis on economic class means students come to see the concept largely in these terms: class […]

When All’s SED and Done: Write. Review. Revise

Reviewing and revising student work at GCSE or A-level is a crucial part of the teaching and learning process and one way to encourage this is to use a simple formula: Save, Erase, Develop (SED). This post looks at how your students can review and revise their written work using this  formula. It can also, […]

Sex and Gender: A Short Film

If you’re into flipped teaching (or even if you’re not) and want a relatively short (around 15-minute) video-introduction to sex and gender this Ted-Talk on “Understanding the Complexities of Gender” by Sam Killermann should fit the bill for a couple of reasons: Firstly, it introduces a wide range of gender-related concepts and issues, including: • […]

Introduction to Psychology: The Noba Collection

The simplest way to describe The Noba Project is that it’s a collection of free Introductory Psychology (Psychology 101) modules designed to fulfil, in the words of its creators, three main aims: 1. To reduce the financial burden on students by providing access to free educational content. 2. To provide instructors with a platform to […]

Paranormal Activity: Another Dimension to the Secularisation Debate?

Although the secularisation debate in sociology has a number of different dimensions, involving arguments over issues like sacralisation, desacralisation, resacralisation, post-secularisation, religious fundamentalism and the like, one key assumption in the debate is rarely, if ever, questioned: the idea that “secularisation” is effectively a zero-sum game that consists of two, fundamentally-opposed, sides: 1. The Religious, […]

Three More GCSE Sociology Revision Guides

These revision guides were created for the WJEC exam board so if you don’t follow this Specification you need to be careful about the areas that might be included in your Specification that are not covered in these guides. And vice versa, of course. There’s not a great deal of point revising material from these […]

Sociology and You: Supporting Materials

The original publishers of Sociology and You (Glencoe) made a bit of an effort to produce branded PowerPoint resources to accompany each chapter and while there’s nothing very special about them – they’re pretty much bog-standard “text on a white background” slides – these ready-made resources can be useful as a way of introducing key […]