Lateral Thinking | Icebreakers
A few years ago, when thinking about how to introduce some icebreakers into the sociology classroom, I chanced upon the idea of using lateral thinking puzzles, for a couple of reasons: Firstly, because they get students who may not know each other talking and discussing possible answers. Secondly, and perhaps more-importantly, they’re an interesting way […]
Flipping Good | 1. The Structure of Social Action
This is a simulation I’ve slightly adapted from Renzulli, Aldrich and Reynolds’ “It’s Up In The Air – Or Is It?”, where they use the game of “Heads or Tails?” to show “How social structures can constrain individual actions”. They apply these ideas to an understanding of social inequality, while here I mainly want to […]
Mass Media | Complete Chapter
Over the past few weeks (months? I lose track) I’ve been assiduously assembling a series of mass media booklets from Notes that have been hanging around taking up space on a hard drive for the past few years. Where I’ve thought it necessary – either because I wanted to include some updated material or because […]
Podcasts With Pictures | GCSE
I’ve been meaning to do a post on the growing number of teachers creating video resources for some time and now I’ve finally managed to drag myself away from Far Cry 5 make a bit of time I thought I’d start with a set of GCSE resources from MTO Sociology aimed at the AQA Specification. […]
When Good Labels Go Bad…
One of the enduringly fascinating things about studying sociology is the way it frequently throws up counter-intuitive ideas that lead us, as teachers and students, to question what we think we know about something. Take, for example, the concept of labelling. By-and-large, when we discuss labelling in the context of education the focus is generally […]
Mass Media 5 | Effects
The final chapter in this series on the Mass Media to accompany the chapters on:Defining and Researching the Media,The Ownership and Control Debate, The Selection and Presentation of News and Media Representations looks at a range of models of Media Effects: how and in what ways (if any) the mass media affects individual and social […]
Free Sociology Textbooks: A New Batch of Contenders
Those of you with long(ish) memories may recall the previous posts in a series that delivers a variety of slightly out-of-date sociology textbooks found gathering dust and mould in some unloved corners of the Internet to your desktop (Sociology Textbooks for Free and More Free Sociology Texts). If you do remember them you’ll no-doubt be […]
Sociology Flipbooks: Free Textbook Previews
So. Here’s the thing. I like to occasionally root around on Pinterest – mainly, it must be said, when I’m pretending to do “research” in order to avoid doing any actual work – because it’s a good source of interesting ideas and practices. Like stuff I’ve shared in the past, such as structure strips […]
Deviancy Amplification: Some Notes
I’ve been editing and updating a piece on Media Effects and decided the section on deviancy application didn’t really fit into what I was trying to do. Loathe to completely scrap anything at all I’ve ever written, I thought someone might be able to find some use for it as a standalone piece on deviancy […]