Sociology Noir: This Sociological Life

The second in the Sociology Noir series, This Sociological Life, is a prequel to the original Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Whodunnit, Curtain Call at the Lantern and both covers the origins of Sociology (Comte, Marx, Weber and Durkheim) and introduces students to three different sociological perspectives on science: positivism, interpretivism and postmodernism. All within the general structure of a Murder Mystery.

The basic premise is that students work their way through the Adventure, making choices that result in different outcomes. While also “learning some sociology” while they’re doing it. The “sociology part” comes from the fact that the text is my original work – a combination of material that did and didn’t make it into a published textbook.

 In case you’re not aware, while lots of material gets written for a textbook a substantial amount also gets edited out or doesn’t make the final cut for reasons of room. What I’m saying, therefore, is that I get to reuse a lot of spare material that, for one reason or another, didn’t feature in the final textbook. The text has been parsed through an AI chatbot in order to transform it into a clearly-structured Whodunnit built around some solid sociological principles.

As with any experimental resources, this may or may not work as intended and I’ve left it up to you as to how it might be used inside or outside the classroom. I have no opinion either way and am certainly not given to claiming that material presented in this format will magically transform student understanding and grades.

I think it has potential, given the objective is to try to encourage greater immersion in sociological texts through the medium of role-play, but that might just be wishful-thinking on my part. The exciting part, for me, is the idea that teachers might be able to develop this base work into something that really does help students to understand sociology.

As with all past and future Adventures there’s a Page Map for teachers that details things like the file associated with each page in the Adventure, the pages to which it links and the location of the clues and flags. It also contains a list of the comprehension questions students encounter with indicative content (which they don’t see unless you want to suggest ways for them to answer the questions. In fact, the complete file is not something students can access during the Adventure).

I’ve also added a Revision Recap file that links the clues in the Adventure to the relevant sociological content. It also links the original underlying text chapter to the part of the Adventure in which it most coherently appears. This file is available to students once they’ve completed the Adventure.