Doing Nothing as Deviance
“What are you doing?” “Nothing” “No, really. What are you doing?” “I’m. Doing. Nothing”. While breaking social norms is always a fun and interesting way to get students to think sociologically about the world in which they live and generally take-for-granted, it’s not always something that’s easy to do / demonstrate in a safe and […]
Sociology Transition Materials
If you’re unfamiliar with the idea, Sociology transition materials are resources designed to help students transition from either GCSE to A-level or from A1 to A2. In the normal course of events they consist of notes, readings, activities and exercises that students complete during the long months of their summer holidays when they would otherwise […]
Mapping Gender Identities
The classical sociological distinction between “biological sex” and “cultural gender” is based on the idea of a more-or-less fixed binary biological classification (“male” and “female”) and a more-or-less fluid set of cultural characteristics (“masculinities” and “femininities”) that are, to some extent, associated with, or expressive of, these biological categories. In other words, classical concepts of […]
Sociological Research Articles
I found this document lurking on a hard drive and while I’ve absolutely no idea from where it originally came, the metadata says “2008” and since it’s called “Sociological Research articles (since 2000)” it’s a fair bet it contains articles published between those two dates. As you can see, very little gets past me. Digging […]
Sociology Lesson Elements
This set of resources from the OCR Exam Board is, as you might expect, designed to support teaching and learning for their A-Level Specification. While some of the resources may fall outside the remit of other Sociology Specifications this isn’t to say that teachers of the latter won’t, with a little bit of judicious editing, […]
GCSE Sociology Freebies
The Sociology Support web site has some new and interesting freebies available for GCSE Sociology, the first of which is the Spec Check Pack. This consists of neat, one-page, summaries of the AQA Specification content (including an indication of Key Studies) that students (and teachers…) should find useful for both tracking progress through the course […]
Year 12 Sociology
A web site that is both a name and an accurate description of what it contains, Year 12 Sociology has a range of resources created by Stephanie Parsons, mainly based around what seem like Lesson Plan PowerPoint slides that have been saved as pdf documents. What you seem to get in each resource is a […]
Theories of Self and Identity
This is quite a large (18 slide) PowerPoint Presentation, complete with a core list of lesson outcomes, covering personal and social identities and, in the main, perspectives on The Self and identity (Functionalist, Marxist and Interpretivist). While you may find the content useful I’m a bit more ambivalent about the “lesson outcomes” – not so […]
Globalisation, Culture and Identity
A while ago I posted a piece on cultural differences illustrated by a range of adverts produced by HSBC around 10 – 15 years ago as part of a campaign to position themselves as a “global bank” that understands local cultural differences. If you want to explore some of these ideas in more detail – […]
Introducing Sociology: Core Concepts
Core Concepts in Sociology was a series of short films on areas like culture, identity and socialisation produced by OnlineClassroom. If you’re interested, the films are still available in various places but since they were originally published in 2007(ish) the technical quality is probably not up to the standards to which we’re now accustomed. The […]