Sociology and You. Too

A later (circa 2008) version of this American High School textbook that has a clean, attractive, design and some interesting content. Might well be worth considering as supplementary material to your existing resources, particularly because it is free… I’ve previously posted an earlier version of this American High School textbook that seems to have gone […]

Sociology and You: A Free Textbook

This American High School textbook just scrapes into the “published in the 21st century” criterion I set myself for finding free, out-of-print sociology texts, but I’ve included it because although it’s obviously a little dated – at least in terms of content if not necessarily design – Sociology and You (2001) was probably one of […]

Culture and Identity PowerPoints

To complement the Culture and Identity Revision booklets I’ve assembled a range of PowerPoint Presentations from a variety of sources including some nice little presentations put together by the OCR Exam Board (with accompanying Instruction and Activity booklets). While the Presentations are probably more-suited to integration into an Introductory Sociology / Culture and Identity teaching session […]

Sociology Revision Booklets: 6. Culture and Identity

Somewhat surprisingly, at least to me, there seems to be a positive dearth of Culture and Identity related revision material, at least of the Word / Pdf variety (PowerPoint users seem much better served). Why that should be I don’t know but I have managed to find a few resources you and your students might […]

More GCSE Sociology Revision Stuff

While it’s possible to put-together a very reasonable – and reasonably comprehensive – set of revision resources from stuff that teachers have put on the web, there are a couple of things you should do before committing yourself to using these materials: 1. Check they are for your Specification – you don’t want to be […]

Family Relocation: A Neglected Dimension of Power?

When looking at power relationships within families there are a number of fairly-obvious areas – such as domestic labour and violence (both physical and sexual) – that tend to receive most of the critical focus at A-level. While not suggesting this “dark side of the family” is somehow unimportant, insignificant or unworthy of so much […]

3 | Socialisation and Identity

The third chapter in what’s rapidly becoming something of a legendary giveaway (in my mind at least) is one that applies the concept of socialisation to the development of a range of social and personal identities in contemporary societies (or as contemporary as things get, given this was first published in 2012). This chapter on […]

2 | The Process of Socialisation

Chapter 2 builds on the “culture material” in the first chapter by exploring how culture is created in one of two ways: 1. Through the influence of instincts, a largely non-sociological (‘nature’) approach to understanding culture. 2. Through the influence of our social environment, a conventional sociological approach that outlines different types and agencies of […]

GCSE Revision Resources

While it’s probably fair to say that teacher-created GCSE revision resources are a bit thin on the ground (and take a bit of finding), there are useful resources “out there” if you’re prepared to do a lot of searching. To save you the time and trouble, here’s some I found earlier (the quality’s a bit […]

7 Sims in 7 Days – Day 3: Window Shopping / The Art of Walking

Although these are two different sims I’ve included them together because both involve thinking about the “rules of everyday social interaction”, albeit in different ways: Window shopping is designed to encourage students to think systematically about the “underlying rules” of relatively mundane behavior. It can be used to simulate sociological research (such as field experiments […]

Seven Sims in Seven Days – Day 1: The Urinal Game

Background We can illustrate the idea of cultural learning (and show how the concepts of roles, values and norms are inter-related into the bargain) using Proxemic theory – the study of how people understand and use space in a cultural context – originally developed by Hall (1966). Although we are born with the ability to […]