I wasn’t sure anyone would show up. My students had worked for six weeks to prepare a pop-up exhibit event showcasing their archival research projects on Georgia’s carceral history. In groups of four or five, my 44 students in Criminal Punishment & Society at the University of Georgia (UGA) prepared eight exhibits that told multi-layered stories of incarceration, convict leasing, probation/parole, fines and fees, boot camps, and life on death row spanning the late 19th to the early 21st centuries. The students worked in collaboration with university archivists to cull through multiple collections housed at the UGA Special Collections Library. They located and interpreted archival documents and objects, including media, and carefully crafted overview and caption texts to help visitors engage with big questions about how and why people have been punished by Georgia’s carceral state. During our final exam period for spring semester 2022 we set up our tables, put out our signage in the hallway of the UGA Special Collections Library, and crossed our fingers that at least some of the friends, colleagues, and community members we’d invited would come.

And they did. About 30 minutes into our event I scanned the room and smiled. I saw my students interacting enthusiastically with diverse members of our university and local communities. Guests included faculty and students, of course, but also the former head of our local public defender’s office, our county’s current district attorney, a former probation officer from New York, a friend of mine who spend 25 years locked up in Georgia prisons, and many others, including local activists involved in bail reform efforts and death penalty abolition. One attendee was delighted to see that an exhibit featured a letter he’d written decades ago as part of criminal justice reform efforts in southwest Georgia. My students left their final exam period feeling accomplished and wowed by the conversations they’d had about their work and guests’ real-world experience with their topics. All told, it was one of the most fulfilling teaching experiences of my career. In this article, I describe and reflect on my initial experiences implementing archives-based learning in undergraduate courses focused on criminal justice topics.

What is archives-based learning?

I designed this course after participating in UGA’s Special Collections Library Faculty Fellows Program that provides instructors with supported exploration of archives-based learning as a high impact learning practice. As a fellow, I collaborated with UGA archivists with the aim of including an archives-focused approach to the pedagogy and course design of a new or existing course. The program builds on the work of TeachArchives.org, a resource born of a three-year partnership between archivists and faculty in Brooklyn, New York to pioneer an approach to teaching in the archives. There are many models for incorporating archival materials into the classroom, including one-time encounters and semester-long engagement. Teaching with the archives includes directed, hands-on activities based on specific learning objectives, thoughtful selection of documents/objects, and small group activities. It is considered a high-impact educational practice because it teaches research skills, creates a common intellectual experience, and requires collaboration.

My approach to archives-based learning in two courses

So far, I’ve implemented archives-based learning in two of my courses: Juvenile Delinquency and Criminal Punishment and Society. Both are upper-division undergraduate elective courses, largely comprised of sociology and criminal justice majors. In Juvenile Delinquency, we visited the Special Collections Library twice during the semester, once near the beginning of the term and once later on. In the first encounter, students were assigned to groups and examined sets of archival documents and media clips that relate to the early juvenile court in Georgia from 1908 to the 1950s. Example documents included one of 100 original copies of a 1908 bill to establish juvenile courts in Georgia and a 1939 report describing subsequent reforms. I drew media clips largely from newsreel footage from the 1950s, including judges discussing juvenile court practices, youth sharing their experiences in juvenile training schools, and parents encouraging more community involvement in preventing delinquency. For the second visit, I curated several sets of documents and media clips from the “get tough” era of the 1980s and 1990s. Topics included boot camps touted by Georgia Governor Zell Miller in the 1990s, a movement to raise the age for the death penalty in Georgia to 18, and the 1998 settlement agreement between the state of Georgia and the Department of Justice to address suboptimal conditions in Georgia’s Youth Development Centers. Example media clips for the second visit included a segment of a documentary on boot camps and a two-part investigation by an Atlanta news station about Youth Development Centers. To assess students’ learning, I assigned reflection essays following each encounter that prompted students to articulate connections between the archival materials they worked with and course content (e.g., readings, class discussions, etc.). For Criminal Punishment and Society I used a much more intensive model. For the final six weeks of the semester, I moved all class meetings to the UGA Special Collections Library. I curated eight sets of archival documents, objects, and media clips that related to Georgia’s carceral history from the late 19th to early 21st century. Students were assigned to groups of four or five to work together on creating a pop-up exhibit. Unlike the two-encounter model I used for Juvenile Delinquency, students were required to search for additional archival materials beyond those that I provided. Students were guided by archivists in searching the archives as well writing captions and overview text for their exhibits. To chronicle and reflect on their learning throughout the project, students were responsible for writing blog posts describing their work as it unfolded over the six weeks. Their efforts culminated in the popup exhibit event that I described in the introduction to this article. Regardless of the model, implementing archives-based learning requires a great deal of preparatory work. From my experience, the process of locating, evaluating, and selecting archival materials for each course required many hours in the archives reading room. I enjoyed the research process a great deal, yet in both cases it took more time that I had anticipated. Of course, now that I’ve done this work once it will be far easier to implement future iterations of these courses with little additional time on the front-end. It’s also important to prepare students for encountering difficult language and topics in archival materials, especially in courses related to crime and criminal justice. For example, students in my courses regularly grappled with offensive language pertaining to race and sexual identity. I not only gave “trigger warnings,” but also provided space for students to take breaks or to discuss their reactions to offensive material in class, individually with me or one of the archivists, and in their writing, depending on how they felt most comfortable.

Impact on student learning and community engagement

Themes from my students’ reflection essays in both courses mirror findings from evaluations of the TeachingArchives.org project: working hands-on with the archives can be “revelatory,” working in small groups generates camaraderie, and intensive interaction with archival materials makes course content more relevant. Students in my courses remarked on how the visceral experience of touching archival objects and documents, as well as hearing and seeing first-hand accounts in archival media clips, brought course concepts to life for them in powerful ways. Students expressed that working with primary sources allowed them to apply course material to the real life events and people that generated the documents, objects, and clips they handled. Students also indicated that engaging with archival materials helped them understand and contemplate the historical context of our present moment more fully, especially in comprehending how policies related to criminal punishment and juvenile justice are developed, implemented, critiqued, and experienced by real people over time. Most notably, students in my Criminal Punishment and Society course indicated that working so intensively in small groups to create their exhibits helped them appreciate the value of group work for the first time. More than one student remarked that this course was the best group project experience they have had in college. Multiple students expressed that they made real friendships in their groups; for some this was the first time they had made friends through a college course. Many students stated that the small group work helped them consider others’ points of view on the same material and appreciate the benefits of learning with and from their peers.

Closing thoughts

My experiences in implementing archives-based learning have been fulfilling and I highly recommend this approach. It is timeintensive on the front-end, but there are a variety of formats that can fit just about any course, from one-time events to full semester engagement. TeachArchives.org is a wonderful resource with example exercises that can be adapted. Students have overwhelmingly endorsed it as a highly impactful learning experience. And, as our public pop-up exhibit event showed, archives-based learning can engage the broader campus and community in vital conversations about our shared past, present, and possibilities for change.

About the Author

Sarah Shannon’s research focuses on systems of criminal punishment and their effects on social life. Her interdisciplinary research has been published in top journals in several fields including sociology, criminology, public health, social work, and geography.

Sarah is also an award-winning teacher, having received recognition for excellence in undergraduate instruction, research mentoring, creative teaching, and service-learning. She proudly facilitates UGA’s first-ever Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program course in partnership with the Clarke County Jail.

As a publicly engaged scholar, Sarah’s research has been cited in several high profile media outlets including The New York Times, The Economist,  and the Washington Post. Prior to her graduate work, Sarah worked in the non-profit sector. As a result, she cares about doing research that matters for academics, policy makers, and ordinary citizens.

From Whence We Came

At some point, we realized that a classroom could be an interactive environment for learning, and that students should be more centered. We could still lay out our learning objectives and share from our content expertise, but the classroom itself would be their place to shine, not ours. Our time and efforts shifted from preparing our lectures to strategizing lesson plans that would engage students in working towards those learning outcomes. In a way, we were drawing the maps but they were driving the cars.

The importance of this student-centered approach to teaching became more apparent with research on trauma and trauma-informed classrooms. We realized that trauma affected students’ brains and their very DNA. We needed to not further traumatize students who were taking our classes, and we needed to remove racial violence from our curriculum, an essential consideration beyond the scope of this piece but hopefully something you are already mindful of. 

For example, avoid teaching about race differences through a deficits-only model that makes students of color experience trauma so that white students can experience learning. One common case of this in the classroom is the so-called “privilege walk” exercise, which typically leaves students physically sorted, with those who have darker complexion literally at the back of the room when you are done. That exercise is likely traumatic to Black students and other students of color, who already know they will end up in the back, and do not appreciate their bodies being used to model that disadvantage yet again so that white students can learn something that day which they have lived their whole lives. There are other class exercises, beyond the scope of this article, that should be revised and reviewed. The bottom line on this? We must remove racial violence from the curriculum and minimize the extent to which we further traumatize our students.

Trauma-informed teaching places relationships at the center of our job as educators. There are several frameworks and sets of principles on how to do this.

• Perry, Bruce D. 2009. “Examining Child Maltreatment Through a Neurodevelopmental Lens: Clinical Applications of the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics.” Journal of Loss and Trauma 12:240–255.
• Walkley, Meg and Cox, Tory L. 2013. “Building Trauma-Informed Schools and Communities.” Children & Schools 35(2):123–126.
• Australian Childhood Foundation. 2010. “Making SPACE for Learning: Trauma Informed Practice in Schools.”

The Multiplying Connections Model (Perry 2009; Walkley and Cox 2013) says that school has five tasks: stay “Calm,” be “Attuned” and “Present” while remaining “Predictable” as possible in an otherwise unpredictable world, and basically “Don’t let students’ emotions determine your own. Their acronym is CAPPD.

The Australian Childhood Foundation’s model (2010) has SPACE as an acronym, which summarizes their take on the five basic principles of trauma-informed classrooms. Their approach includes a lot of practical suggestions, such as, “Provide impromptu fun experiences which are not defined as a reward” because playfulness is a resource for students experiencing trauma.

The popular “Compassionate Teaching” model (Wolpow et al. 2009) offers thorough overviews on building trauma-informed learning environments.

Researchers at Boston University (Atallah et al 2019) have published findings that support the benefits of trauma-informed learning environments, welcoming and inclusive classroom environments, in which educators attend to students’ social and emotional needs, led to improved academic outcomes.

• Atallah, Devin, Koslouski, Jessica, Perkins, Kesha N., Marsico, Christine, and Porche, Michelle. 2019. “An Evaluation of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative’s (TLPI) Inquiry‐Based Process: Year Three.” BU Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.

Where We Are Now

And now here we are in the present, and our classrooms have a decidedly uncertain future. Some faculty are going with face-to-face (F2F) instruction. Some are teaching synchronously online or asynchronously-only; others are trying to offer or a bit of each. Some educators are teaching “HyFlex” which means they are going to be doing every single option simultaneously.

And through whatever medium one is teaching, something essential might be lost. We are planning, and getting training on how to lecture in this time. In doing this we risk reverting to that era in which we would talk and they would write down what we say.

Take a step back outside of the classroom and scan the globe for a moment. Perhaps now more than ever, we recognize the presence of racial trauma, poverty trauma, and natural disaster (pandemic) trauma. Now, as much as ever, our classrooms must be trauma-informed spaces that are student-centered.

We do not need to reinvent this wheel. We just need to remember that it’s a really important wheel, and keep it in the forefront of our planning. Since we all have been traumatized to some extent by recent events, acknowledging that burdens are not equally shared in our society, our hearts should naturally go in this direction anyway, towards creating trauma-informed classrooms, wherever and whatever those classrooms may look like.

How to be trauma-informed

It is not a quick and easy thing to be trauma-informed. Trauma is an experience, which means that it is a response to a situation or event, not the situation or event itself. Not all students experience an event or situation the same, because students have different resources and baseline stressors to begin with, and therefore trauma differs among them. Having a trauma-informed classroom is thus about listening and centering the actual students you have in your classroom. It is about communication, trust, and relationships, which means you will have to build and maintain this as you go.

Here are some broad, trauma-informed teaching strategies that should work across disciplines, drawn in part from the following references.

• Carello, Janice and Butler, Lisa D. 2014. “Potentially Perilous Pedagogies: Teaching Trauma is Not the Same as Trauma-Informed Teaching.” Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 15(2):153–168.
• Downey, Laurel. 2013. “Calmer Classrooms: A Guide to Working With Traumatised Children.” Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: State of Victoria, Child Safety Commissioner, & Queensland, Australia: State of Queensland, Department of Education, Training and Employment.
• Wolpow, Ray, Johnson, Mona M., Hertel, Ron, and Kincaid, Susan O. 2009. “The Heart of Learning and Teaching: Compassion, Resiliency, and Academic Success.” Olympia: Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) Compassionate Schools.

Strategy #1: Empower your students

Empowerment is an ongoing process through which those who do not have an equal allocation of resources gain increasing access to resources. In the classroom, you can offer choices to students about how they will participate and meet learning objectives. By handing over some controls, you can help students feel like not everything in their life is out of their control. This can be very motivating for students, helping them beyond your class.

Strategy #2: Check in with students

Make it a ground rule in your classroom that students’ emotional safety is important to you. And it should be, because it is necessary for learning. Pay attention to your students so that you will notice when something is different, and then reach out. You cannot know what is going on in any student’s mind or life, but you know what you observe, and so that is what you share. For example, you might say, “I noticed that you were late this week, and you are not usually late.” If that does not lead to an explanation, follow it with, “How are you?” This lets your students know that they are not invisible and that they matter, which can help them beyond your class.

Strategy #3: Avoid idealizing trauma in your content

Avoid idealizing trauma narratives in subject content. Make sure your lecture content does not romanticize trauma. What this does is that it skips the healing process, showing only the end points of the tragic event and the triumphant survivorship. This can serve to inhibit coping and healing for students, who need more freedom to express real lived experiences and pain, as appropriate and if it is related to your course content.

Strategy #4: Identify social supports

Make sure you are aware of institutional peer supports and mentor supports available to your students, and how to connect students to these resources. If possible, be a conduit of mentoring connections yourself. I keep in touch with former students for the sole purpose of connecting them with current students, a practice I highly recommend. Few things are as useful to a current student struggling as an outreach from a former student, now ten years out and living the dream the current student hopes to reach. I find that former students welcome the chance to support current students in this way, even during a pandemic. If you have never done this before, you could begin by reaching out to a few former students now and asking if they would be willing to communicate with a current student who has similar career aspirations. In my experience, I have never had one decline this invitation, and it can be a form of meaningful social support for your current students in need, a connection that, after you make it, does not involve you.

In the last few months, higher education institutions have faced the challenge of moving in-person coursework to various online platforms in response to COVID-19. During this unprecedented time, a graduate level course at the University of Minnesota called “Teaching Sociology” launched a project to evaluate how instructors were handling the transition. The graduate students administered a survey to the Sociology department’s instructors and teaching assistants and issued a final report highlighting broad trends and making recommendations for the department to consider as the crisis continues and planning for the fall begins. Given how widespread these issues and challenges are, we thought it might be useful to share some of those ideas here on TSP, with particular focus on the experience of teaching assistants.

While the survey was meant to provide reflections on the rapid transition to online teaching, the findings suggest some important considerations regarding the roles of and challenges faced by teaching assistants during unsettled times. Borrowing from the literature on workplace harassment, we find that individuals in low- to mid-level supervisory positions, such as TAships, often experience such challenges in their roles.

TA weekly hours worked pre- and during COVID, Spring 2020 

The literature on workplace harassment suggests that, unfortunately, backlash against low and mid-level supervisors is not uncommon. Although many would view the authority of a supervisor as providing a protective measure from harassment, research suggests that it provokes backlash from subordinates. As a result, workers in supervisory roles are more likely to experience harassment, and that likelihood increases even more if they are female. 

In contrast, in the United States, people in higher supervisory positions such as an executive or department head are less likely to experience sexual harassment. Given that women in low- or mid-level supervisory positions are often on career tracks for these higher level positions, it is somewhat surprising that they are the most likely to experience workplace harassment.

While this literature focuses on women and sexual harassment in the workplace, these frameworks are useful for understanding the harassment faced by others in low-level supervisory positions, such as TAships. TAs may receive more “blowback” from undergraduates who hesitate to make demands or express frustration with professors, and this backlash is likely to fall more heavily on TAs who are women and/or people of color.

Because TAs often have a lot of responsibility but relatively little power, our findings suggest that instructors consider the following recommendations: 

1. In designing remote courses, reconsider assignments and expectations for students and TAs. This may require giving TAs ample time to deal with technological challenges, as well as additional training in how to provide tech support to students.
2. Both instructors and TAs reported a significant increase in extensions and accommodations. Consider creating a shared document so that TAs may better manage a range of deadlines and accommodations.
3. Establish and reinforce norms and expectations for respectful communications with students throughout the semester. 
4. Recognize and discuss responsibilities around emotional labor. Discuss which student comments or emails should go directly to the instructor and which should be handled by the TA.
5. Put explicit email and office response hours in the syllabus to help manage and bound TA work hours.

Works Cited

Olle Folke, Johanna Rickne, Seiki Tanaka, and Yasuka Tateishi. 2020. “Sexual Harassment of Women Leaders.” Daedalus 149(1): 180-197. 

Heather McLaughlin, Christopher Uggen, and Amy Blackstone. 2012. “Sexual Harassment, workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power.” American Sociological Review 77(4):1-23.

At Troy University in Alabama, students went online to help a county with a high infant mortality rate in the state of Georgia to analyze health disparities and develop solutions.

At Cornell University, where I teach, law students are providing legal services online to death-row inmates in Tanzania and children and young farmworkers in upstate New York.

At five state universities in the U.S. heartland, students are helping Michigan towns create government websites.

These are all examples of “e-service learning” – that is, service learning that takes place online. Service learning refers to a wide range of student experiences meant to help a community organization, local government or business.

I am an education researcher and – along with my colleague Yue Li – I am investigating the best ways to engage students in e-service learning, both here in the U.S. and around the world.

Even though colleges and universities have shut down their campuses due to COVID-19, e-service learning shows how college students can still do their volunteerism in the virtual world. Students need not be physically present to help support local government, local nonprofits and vulnerable individuals like farmworkers, all of whom have a greater need for the help of volunteers due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vast benefits

Service learning is not meant only to help community organizations, governmental agencies and businesses. It’s also meant to advance the student’s individual academic goals.

A key part of service learning is for students to reflect on the service they actually do and how whatever they are studying – whether it be health, law or the environment – relates to the real world. Reflection also helps students clarify their personal values and gain a sense of civic responsibility.

Better outcomes

Compared to peers who didn’t do service learning in college, graduates who did participate in service learning report higher levels of civic-mindedness. That is to say, they are more likely to work with others to achieve public goals.

For community organizations, the benefits of having college students help with their work are vast. Students can offer companionship for elderly clients, become role models for high school students or simply serve as an extra hand to tackle a nonprofit’s back-burner project.

Research applied

Through e-service learning, communities can gain access to the latest university research. For instance, residents of Gracias Lempira, Honduras, and Rohne Village, India, used engineering research to build electricity-free water purification systems. And in Louisville, Kentucky, students from several universities created models to help residents decide where to plant trees to cut down on air pollution.

Each partnership has unique benefits. For instance, an official at an international climate action group – Team 54 Project International – remarked on how a Cornell University student played a key role in gathering information for a tree-planting guide. The guide will be used to help plant trees in Serbia that are suited for the region. The guide will also serve as a template for similar tree-planting projects around the world.

Is virtual the same?

Can students still have a meaningful service learning experience in cyberspace?

A study of business marketing students shows that students who engaged in online service learning gained the same skills, such as the ability to work well with others and understand cultural and racial differences, as those who worked alongside their partners in person.

Back in 2013, some university scholars predicted that online technologies would disrupt in-person university teaching as it was known, including service learning.

What I have found is instead of disrupting in-person teaching, e-service learning has enhanced it. It does this by offering opportunities for any student and any nonprofit with an internet connection to form a partnership on short notice. E-service learning has also added new opportunities for busy students to help NGOs overseas, U.S. nonprofits and local governments in other states. Students help with everything from disaster planning to food waste and hunger issues.

Ever since colleges and universities have been forced to move their instruction online due to COVID-19, critics have worried about whether or not they’re doing a good job. But as schools continue to teach online for the summer and possibly even the fall, similar attention should also be paid – in my view – to how well they are engaging students in service learning online.

Especially with employees working from home due to social distancing, e-service learning may prove itself as one of the most effective ways to prepare students to solve the kinds of problems they will encounter once they start their careers.

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Marianne E. Krasny, Professor of Environmental Education and Civic Ecology, Cornell University

Are you exhausted? Zoomed out? As we say in critical incident stress management (CISM), “You are having a normal response to an abnormal situation.” This reflection is considering the faculty or administrator perspective on our current interpersonal reality. The student perspective is a separate writeup.

How could you have attended the same number of meetings in Normal World B.C. (Before COVID-19) and your schedule wasn’t nearly this exhausting? This is a matter that potentially affects only those of us privileged enough to be able to do at least two things: (1) continue doing our paid jobs, and yet (2) stay home and safe. For those of us in this virtual boat, many are realizing how attending the same number of meetings as in a usual week is way way way more exhausting when they happen via a video conferencing platform such as Zoom. There are many reasons, and here are three:

1. Perceptual mismatch

When you’re in a meeting, like back when we did that sort of thing together in the same space, you’d get a “read of the room.” It’s in our nature to do this. You’d scan the room, passively attending to details like, how are people feeling? What’s the mood or the vibe here today? Do folks seem to be on the same page? This is natural. In a video conference though? You are trying to read 25 rooms. You are. It’s in your nature. And you’re trying to do this while, ironically, ignoring the room you are literally in. That is not how perception works, which is the process through which we attach meaning to our sensory input in order to understand the social world. You’re trying to read all the rooms up on that screen, while ignoring the sensory information coming at you from within the room in which you are physically located, and that’s before you even engage with anybody. Speaking of the rest of the people:

2. Interpersonal intensity

When you’re in a room in Normal World B.C., you are not trying to maintain continuous eye contact with 25 people for an hour. In person, you can be in a group in shared space, completely engaged, attentive and present, and you’re still not maintaining eye contact with every single person at the same time. In a video conference, even looking down at a relevant piece of paper can be perceived as you checking out, no longer actively listening, or some other indicator assumed to be a lack of effort. 

3. High vulnerability and intimacy

While reading all the rooms and ignoring your own, and doing your best to maintain eye contact with everyone in a group continuously, you are also letting people read YOUR room. Your room right now is probably inside or outside the place you presently call home. That’s a level of vulnerability and intimacy greater than you signed up for when you began in this position, right? You didn’t plan on letting these people into your living room or your bedroom.

There’s Science Behind This!

The psychological and mental health effects of shifting nearly all of our interpersonal interactions into video conferencing is yet unstudied. What I’ve written in this piece is based on what we know to date about how the brain does its job. 

For more information on the perceptual burden you might be experiencing, look first at the process of “unconscious inference” known as perception itself. As we take in sensory information, through the process of sensation, our brain has to work with that input to produce something for us to understand and to which we then respond, through the process of perception. Reading 25 rooms while ignoring the sensory input from the very room you are in, makes this entire meaning-making process inherently more complex and likely burdensome. This is a traditional, bottom-up explanation of perception. 

• Brascamp, Jan, Philipp Sterzer, Randolph Blake, and Tomas Knapen. 2018. “Multistable Perception and the Role of the Frontoparietal Cortex in Perceptual Inference.” Annual Review of Psychology, 69:77-103.

Another perspective on perception is one of top-down processing, which “occurs when people’s expectations, emotions, and bodies affect how they see the world” (Reiner, 2019:267). This explanation is one of embodied perception, considering sensation and perception as not linear and not separate from our physical selves. 

• Riener, Cedar. 2019. “Approaches and Debates on Top-Down Perceptual Processing.” Teaching of Psychology, 46(3):267–272.

Whether you view processing as top-down or bottom up, you will find explanations of your present state of exhaustion. Then recognize that making eye contact is one of the earliest forms of social communication we learn in our lives. This primal social role is made more central when we’re in video conferences that make most other social communication harder to gauge. We might feel the need to maintain eye contact more than what we would normally do, given this restriction of the medium, and this would likely contribute to our cumulative exhaustion.

• Mansour, Hassan, and Gustav Kuhn 2019. “Studying ‘natural’ Eye Movements in an ‘Unnatural’ Social Environment: The Influence of Social Activity, Framing, and Sub-clinical Traits on Gaze Aversion.” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72(8):1913-1925.

What else?

Of course, there are more than three reasons why you might be feeling exhausted. The runners up include blurring of boundaries that can lead to you working well into the evenings and weekends when you never did that before. You might not be the cause of those boundaries blurring – especially when your boss expects you to respond at all hours, but you might find that you need to draw a line more firmly around your off time. You’re also suddenly some kind of movie producer to some extent, which probably isn’t within your skillset, so that’s tiring as you try to excel at something you’ve possibly never even planned to try. And none of this even considers the exhaustion and psychache we all are feeling to varying degrees as we interpret the current global pandemic, with concerns for the future of society and worry for the people we love within it. How could you not be exhausted right now?

If you are reading this and you have any authority in this world, please cut folks some slack. If your organization can continue to be fully functional online? Cool. If you’re a boss, shorten the meetings. If you are an educator, lean towards fewer assignments and lessened demands. Shorten the meetings and classes. The exhaustion you are feeling makes sense, and it is universal. Please take care of junior faculty, graduate students, and the support staff whom you are probably realizing are working more than they should be.

In this unprecedented time of suddenly teaching courses online that were designed to be taught on campus, and as we look ahead to the upcoming semester, we are now solidly in the realm of online teaching and learning. Neither you nor your students signed up for this. No matter what you chose to do early on in the response to COVID-19, what are you going to do looking ahead? What have you learned that can help you decide? Are you going to teach synchronously or asynchronously? What’s better for your students? What’s better for you? 

Teaching synchronously involves holding “live” sessions that generally allow interactions in real time. Teaching asynchronously means you are probably producing little movies of what you wish you could be teaching in the in-person classroom environment where we all thought our classes would be taking place, and you upload these little movies for students to view on their own schedule. Acknowledging that there are strongly-held beliefs about the superiority of the method on each side of this debate, let’s walk through the key strengths and drawbacks of each option.

What’s so great about teaching synchronously?

This category of online learning allows students to see and interact with one another and with you, to give and receive real-time feedback on their ideas, to brainstorm and collaborate with peers, to ask questions of you as a lesson is being shared, and to be reminded that we are community members, separated physically but not in spirit. With real solidarity, synchronous classes can remind all of us that we are not alone even as we negotiate our changed landscape amidst the novelty that is physical isolation.

You can be creative in nurturing a sense of community in your synchronous classroom. You are a team, on a shared mission. You are in this together. Making eye contact and having conversations at your regularly scheduled class times is priceless as a preventative measure for mental health outcomes, and for increasing engagement with the course materials. Whether students are in your class to complete requirements of a major, or to earn elective credits or specialty skills and knowledge, in the synchronous online classroom you can readily help students remember why they registered for your course to begin with, which can be very grounding. 

So the benefits of teaching “live” include improved communication efficiency and clarity, increased sense of community, fostering solidarity with and among your students who might deeply value the peer support and shared experience of being together for your class. 

What is good about teaching asynchronously?

The most popular reason for choosing this option for your teaching is flexibility regarding when work is done. You can make your little lecture movies whenever you have the time and space to do so, recognizing that your own obligations have likely increased for now as well, so this flexibility can be invaluable. Also, of course, your students can watch those recordings at their convenience. Students’ life circumstances have likely changed. They did not plan to be where they physically are right now while they are completing your course. They might be sharing technology and not have unlimited access to it. They might be across the globe in an incompatible time zone. They might not want to let you and their entire class into the space where they are living right now. This unprecedented social intimacy may have unknown effects on their emotional well-being, and an asynchronous class lets them receive lecture information without that intimate reciprocity of audio and/or video from the place that’s currently home to them.

Asynchronous classes have pedagogical benefits too. They allow students to literally “pause” your class when they are confused or need a break, something only possible in their dreams for in-person and synchronous online classes, which go at a pace not set by them at all. Also, the technology requirements to take in an asynchronous class are lower, and this is therefore more accessible to more students. Watching or downloading a video can happen on the most basic internet-capable devices. Asynchronous lectures can even be mailed on DVDs, or transcribed and printed out with captioned graphics as needed. They can also be closed captioned for accessibility. 

What have you learned so far teaching under these conditions?

You need to set up mental scales of your own, to weigh out and determine what really matters to you, and what is best for you and for your students. I’ve spoken with many individual faculty members at several universities while consulting on this topic, and in every conversation, we’ve decided the best option is to offer some combination of both synchronous and asynchronous offerings in a class. This is not necessarily ideal or superior. It’s just one way of trying to maximize the benefits of both options, while using each to cover the shortcomings in the other. Perhaps thinking through this example will help you refine your own plan as we look ahead to more of this sort of course design, of teaching classes online that were slated to have taken place in person.

An example of “doing both”

Suppose you were scheduled to teach your class twice a week, Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:00 am – 11:15 am local time. For this example, you can now meet synchronously (live) Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 am local time, for about 30 minutes. Keep it briefer to minimize the fatigue that results from too much continuous video conferencing, for them and for you. After revisiting your course’s learning objectives and determining what’s most essential, cover the associated lecture topics live, interactively. Remain, or reclaim if you’ve steered apart, the community that you were before everything shifted online. Invite your students to your live classes assuring them of both your accompaniment and your realization that they likely have new burdens and expectations. Use some simple measure of classroom participation (i.e. three short questions that you introduce throughout the 30 minute class, and that can be answered typing on a smart phone); offer them some various live office hours each week, and teach your class. Give them whatever is most important for your course.

What about those students who cannot make it to the live classes? There are valid reasons. If at all possible, do not expect them to share the reason with you. Asking them to justify why they cannot attend your class online, when they had not planned to be an online student right now, is a bit unfair. Trust your students when they say they cannot make it to your synchronous class. Their reasons may include time zone difference, lack of technology, no free space in their home, no quiet space, less time to be a student because of shifted family responsibilities such as caregiving, etc. Some are working jobs to make up for parents’ lost wages now. Some are homeless because student housing was their solution for where to live right now. For students who have never had an online class before, they might have anxiety about how it all works. There are many reasons why one might not be present for synchronous classes.

The solution for them is simple. Record those 30 minute live classes, and make them available to those who cannot attend at the regularly scheduled class time. Make sure they can complete the same simple measure of classroom participation in a way that is no more or less taxing whether one is live or one is watching the video later. Make sure you follow FERPA regulations and basic copyright laws for recordings, and that you only make public your own face and your own thoughts. You can also restrict access to these videos with passwords, time-limits and other means depending on your platform. Check with your institution for these details. 

Which option is better for you and your students?

That is the question we have answered on the fly, and may be reconsidering as we look ahead to plan future semesters, and only you can answer. I am in favor of the “doing both” option as in the example above. I have had the most success with, as have faculty I’ve helped figure some things out. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary. No matter the option you go with, do your best to be truly present with your students, and to let them see that, either as they make eye contact with you themselves, or otherwise when they see you offering your accompaniment as they view the recording later. If you are choosing to go strictly asynchronous, do what you can to connect with your students and to allow them to share the experience of your class with one another. One pro tip: Talk to the camera, not to your screen, to convey eye contact. It is worth practicing this skill.

You are probably doing great. If possible, consider synchronous classes such as in the example, with a recording offering a comparable experience for the students who cannot get to the live class. If you offer no synchronous classes, try to have some optional synchronous time in general, whether that’s office hours or something else. You’re reaching out through the physical distance between us, to show them that you care about their learning and their struggles. 

If you are personally juggling too many unforeseeable stressors, or you need to do exclusively asynchronous instruction for whatever other personal reasons, that is valid, My hope is that you find nothing but institutional support for you doing the best that you can. If you are struggling with the fatigue that comes from too many video conferences, all while trying to hold your concerns about the world and your loved ones in check, please hang in there and be kind to yourself. You are not alone either.

Previously we posted “Using TSP to Teach Online.” This week we’re featuring content from our partner and community pages. In addition to producing in-house content, The Society Pages is an online hub for blogs written and curated by other social scientists. We can’t feature them all here, but you can find the full list at the bottom of our homepage.

“Sociological Images” is designed to encourage people to exercise and develop their sociological imagination by presenting brief discussions of compelling and timely imagery that spans the breadth of sociological inquiry.

• Check out a recent guest post, “Social Inequality, Medical Fears, and Pandemics” showing data on American’s health fears. 
• You can also find course guides and collections for instructors.

“Contexts”  is a sociology magazine produced by the American Sociological Association. 

• If you want some timely takes by sociologists on COVID-19, Contexts is currently producing a series of themed articles doing just that! Right now you can read their series on “East Asia’s Response,” “Healthcare and Critical Infrastructure,” “Structural Shocks and Extreme Exposures,” and “COVID-19 Impact on Asia and Beyond.”

“Council on Contemporary Families” shares research and best-practice findings on American families. 

• Read Jess Calacro’s recent thoughts about the digital divide and how some families will have a harder time with online learning. 
• Check out “What’s New About Consent,” a research report based on CCF’s online symposium, Defining Consent.

“Give Methods a Chance” is a series of conversations about research methods, demystifying how we know what we ‘know’.

• Check out the recent conversation with Barbara Gurr and Maura Kelly on Feminist Research Methods.
• You can find many more discussions of innovative methods, as well as conversations about quantitative methods, qualitative and interpretive methods, and mixed methods.

“Engaging Sports,” provides sociologically-informed analysis to help readers think about sports in a way that goes beyond the scores, highlights, and statistics.

• Read about race and social class in American football, how India came to love cricket despite colonial rule, the sexism in rock climbing route names, and more. 

“Cyborgology” reflects on the promise and perils of living in constant contact with technology.

• Check out posts about the digitization of justice, crowdsourced fact-checking and Facebook, technology to eliminate clothing sizes, and more. 

“Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies” at the University of Minnesota promotes academic research, education and public awareness on the Holocaust, other genocides and current forms of mass violence.

• Check out content on teaching genocide and mass violence, like this post on how Minnesota curriculum covers the legacy of the U.S.-Dakota War or this one on teaching Americans about the Holocaust.
• You can also find content on how Germans separated children from parents in present-day Namibia during colonial occupation, as well as content on featured scholars, and much more. 

This article is reposted with edits from an original post made 3/11/2020

Erika Sanborne is a TSP Graduate Board member who has received various awards for teaching and often serves as a teaching & technology consultant for faculty and graduate instructors. Her research interests include the life course, race, and religion. Her favorite course to teach is statistics.

Many of us are a week or two into teaching a suddenly-online course that we had designed to teach in person. Having taught about 50 undergraduate class sections in person, and about 50 undergraduate class sections online, I am duly familiar with both options. To be clear, when I have taught the same subject online and on campus even during the same semester, they are very different courses. Yet here we are with this current situation, so let’s deal with it as best we can. In this write-up, I’m inviting you into “round 2” following all the big changes you have made in the past few weeks to get to this moment.

Before anything else, please hear me that you are probably doing great! If your students are still learning something, and you can still somehow assess that, awesome. You are not aiming for a well-designed online learning experience, because it takes both time and expertise that you probably don’t have in order to develop a quality online course. That’s not your goal, so please lower the bar if you haven’t done so yet. Your goals at this point are teaching for accessible student learning, and your assessment (grading) of student work. Everything else is bonus, and good on you.

A centrally important consideration is students’ mental health. You have probably noticed that your students are somewhat anxious, scared, and unsure, and that’s if they are not also sick or caring for someone who is sick yet. We must take care of their emotional well-being in this unprecedented time of change, and in advance of the numbers of sick people rising.

Are your suddenly-online classes accessible?

According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights:

Accessible means a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and equally integrated manner, with substantially equivalent ease of use. The person with a disability must be able to obtain the information as fully, equally and independently as a person without a disability. Although this might not result in identical ease of use compared to that of persons without disabilities, it still must ensure equal opportunity to the educational benefits and opportunities afforded by the technology and equal treatment in the use of such technology.

Even suddenly-online courses should be accessible. Digital accessibility ensures that students can navigate and interact with all of your online content, regardless of ability. For example, you should not use any video that does not have correct closed captioning, which is a full-text transcription. Are you linking to something on YouTube? Cool. Go ahead and double-check if you need to replace that, which you do if it’s not properly captioned. Most institutions will caption any video you legally own for course use, but that’s not going to happen in this short-term crisis mode, so just pick a new video that is already accessible. Also, do not use red or green fonts, because of color-blindness, and describe all images for screen readers, as in the following example.

Oh, right. My image caption reminds me of copyright issues, which you need to keep in mind. Photos are copyrighted by the person who took the photo. They may release them with a license or by designating them public domain. Pixabay is a good site to find released images that you can use. There are other sites. And, conversely, anything you create right now that moves your in-person course into an online course will likely become the copyrighted property of your employer. Please check on that, but I suspect it to be true in all or most instances. Sorry to bring it up, but some of us value our intellectual property rights and this is a thing. You’re doing this labor because of your current employment, and that probably makes whatever you create “work product” in terms of who owns it.

My concern is that this crisis is going to create a lot of low-quality online courses which are totally fine for this short-term crisis but should not become something thought of as a complete library of online learning experiences. You don’t need to think about that right now, but please remember it down the road. It might also help you reclaim rights to content, by pointing out to your institution that it’s not great and should not be reused. Ideally, you would be creating something much better than whatever you’re piecing together right now if or when you create your first proper online course.

Continuing with accessibility, be sure to use a san serif font such as Arial because it is easier to read. Use black “ink” on white “paper” meaning black font on a white website. I agree that it looks cooler to have white font on dark background, but that’s not ADA-compliant because it’s not accessible. Also, don’t use any scans of text that are not text-searchable and thus text-readable to screen readers, and never underline words in an online course unless they are links. Yes, really.

For more information on ADA Compliance within your suddenly-online courses, you can visit a good article on accessibility, and the website for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

What about assessments – i.e. grading?

Regarding your current-semester, suddenly-online course, think of the major course assignments that remain. Come up with a way to sustain them if you can. A course syllabus is a legal contract between students and the university, through you, so the fewer changes you have to make to your syllabus, the better. If you can keep remaining major course assignments, emphasize to students that your remaining major course assignments remain unchanged. We are past midterms, so presumably you have already talked to them about these major course assignments. If they involve students presenting in class? Keep those but allow various means – i.e. they can make a video with their cell phone propped up, of them “presenting” to the camera. I don’t advise insisting they create something else, a PowerPoint presentation for example, if the initial requirement was that they stand in front of class and talk through something.

If that something was a PowerPoint, though, then try to keep it as is. You can ask them to add the voiceover in PowerPoint. Note: ADA compliance doesn’t waver, so this, like all video, would need to be captioned. Consider whether you want to add that burden or not, then either scale back the assignment (i.e. to allow PowerPoint to stand on its own, and it just goes to you instead of the whole class) or take out something else, so the captioning can happen. Captioning is needed for the voiceover, and captions are needed below graphics, for a video presentation to be accessible and shared within the course.

Please remember that, for some students, their access to technology is related to their access to the campus. Where are they staying if told to vacate? Do they still have access to software that allows creation of PowerPoint presentations, for example? Consider this, and allow for alternatives such as this: Students can create something on ordinary paper, with a pen, and take a photo of it with their phone, and email it to you.

Also please consider reducing expectations altogether – i.e. tossing out complicated assignments. Feel empowered to do this, as it’s your course and thus within your power to make their lives easier right now. With all that you cannot change or control in this world, work with what is in your power to change, and do it.

Do you have smaller assessments – i.e. little weekly writing tasks that students complete? Try to keep all of those. Use whatever course management system (CMS) your institution has – i.e. Blackboard, Canvas, etc. Create an assignment for each week, name it something obvious, and invite creativity amidst your aims at consistency.

As you can see, thinking through assessments shouldn’t be too bad, which means you should have stuff to grade, right? Cool. Now on to lecture content delivery (teaching).

Okay. How are you going to teach now?

If possible, try to have weekly interactive time set by video. Your CMS should have this capability, and most institutions have Zoom, GoToMeeting, and other solutions you can use too. Be mindful to not use anything that students are unlikely to now have access to. If most courses from your institution are using a certain platform, please use the same one, even if you don’t think it’s the best. Students shouldn’t need to spend extra time learning a platform just because you have to have things your way. This isn’t about you right now; it’s about them. Please keep it simple.

If you already lecture using PowerPoints, this is great. You should add that voiceover to your PowerPoints (which you should caption, because accessibility should not be optional) and now you will have decent online learning content. If you don’t have PowerPoints for your lectures? You should write some things out, but write them like I am writing this article you are reading right now. Do you notice how reading this feels different? It is an acquired style, almost conversational, and it invites students to read when written lectures are in front of their eyes. Keep that in mind. For the love of all things holy, do not write like you’re writing a textbook. Write like I am writing for you here.

You should definitely have online time that is synchronous, meaning the whole class is online at the same time. This should be your regularly scheduled time, and this is, at minimum, for Q&A and clarifying things. It’s exactly for the non-lecture parts of your class time each week! You might also have the entire lecture time synchronously, but an asynchronous lecture delivery could be good too. Ideally, you offer some of both: some live online interactive time, and some asynchronous stuff. Having them together at some shared time and space is good, but maybe not three hours a week of it.

Also be sure you maintain online office hours. This should be able to be scheduled with you, or make a range of hours on different days, like you normally would, and have them be drop-in, and then allow students to privately chat with you – like in your office, with other students standing in the hall – it’s a thing, and they will understand. Use video chat if at all possible – both for having the most efficient communication, and to remind them with your face and your voice that they are not alone.

A 3-credit, undergraduate course is supposed to meet in person for 3 hours, and students are expected to complete about 6 hours of work outside class time. That’s standard. When you move online, you are replacing the 3 hours of contact. I’m going to be honest, you are not going to create anywhere near three hours of asynchronous online content. And that’s because a lot of in-person class time is interruptions, announcements, tangents, and other things that are truly useful to student learning, right? As much as that can lead you in the classroom, let it continue to do so. For this, you should offer synchronous online time.

 And look. You’re probably anxious about this whole process. Your students are too, and some of them additionally aren’t sure where they are going to find food for the longer term. I’m sure you are on their team, and this is a great time to demonstrate that with your accompaniment. Start class by offering resources you know of – i.e. local food banks still operating, for example, for those still near your campus. Make sure your students know that you are aware that this is probably hard for them. People don’t fear change (they fear loss) and for some this will be realized as they will have lost access to not only technology but their social support. As best as you can, foster a supportive environment online, by showing true solidarity with your students. Be kind through it all. You can do this.

As instructors move their courses online, we at The Society Pages want to help out by offering a guide to our site. We have lots of sociological content that can be used in teaching, from new research coming out of journals to podcast interviews with sociologists. We strive to make our content clear, concise, and public-facing — perfect for undergraduates! 

What kind of content do we have? (and how can you use it to teach?)

“There’s Research on That!” – In this blog, we curate sociological research that speaks to things that are happening in the world.

• Have students read “#SayHerName and Black Women’s Experiences with Police” for an overview of research on Black women’s experiences with police, including distrust of police and the challenges that come with motherhood. Then, ask them to respond with a short post about the racialized and gendered challenges that lie ahead in developing police-community trust.

“Discoveries” – In this blog, we review new and exciting research coming out of peer-reviewed journals, vetted and summarized by our graduate editorial board. 

• Have students think about which groups are having more same-sex sex and register their hypotheses through an online poll (available in Zoom or Google Hangouts). Then have them read “Who Is Having More Same-Sex Sex?, a summary of new research in Gender & Society that shows that younger people demonstrate more same-sex sexual behavior than older people, with a greater increase for women and black men. Finally, encourage them to explain why they think women are reporting more same-sex sex by collectively editing a set of google slides. 

“Teaching TSP” – We produce a variety of teaching-related posts, from classroom activities and assignments, to new research published on teaching and learning.

• Adapt the “Introduction to Sociology TROT Project” to have students write their own post or outline based on “There’s Research on That!” articles. 
• Draw on tips from “Teaching Writing with 5-Minute Workshops” to help students craft their sociological voice through writing. 

“Features” – Long-form articles meant to give a broad, social scientific view on an issue or topic without the usual academic jargon. This category includes white papers, special features, and roundtables. Roundtables bring together several sociologists and social scientists to give context to what’s happening in the world. 

• Have students read “Re-evaluating the “Culture of Poverty,” then discuss how the sociologists interviewed might make sense of the economic inequalities exacerbated by the coronavirus.

“Office Hours” – Podcast conversations with sociologists about their research, often from recently published books. 

• “Trevor Hoppe on Punishing Disease”
• “Joanna Kempner on the Gender Politics of Migraine”

“Clippings” – When sociologists’ work gets picked up by the news, we highlight the coverage. These articles emphasize the usefulness of sociological thinking for understanding real-world events.

• Why Poor Parents Say “Yes” to Junk Food
• No, Immigrants Don’t Cause Crime

“Editors Desk” – Writing by our Editors in Chief, Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen, as well as our weekly roundups where you can read what we’ve published that week. You can sign up for our roundups HERE. 

How can I find the content I’m looking for? 

1. Use the search icon (looks like a magnifying glass) in the top right corner of the banner at the top of the page. You can search by keyword, blog name, or author name. 
2. Search on a specific blog. From each blog’s page you can use the search icon (usually a magnifying glass) to search only content on that specific blog. For example, from the “Discoveries” page, you can search only “Discoveries” posts. You’ll also notice on the “Discoveries” and “There’s Research on That” pages, you can also search by category.
3. Browse our topics pages. On the homepage, you’ll notice tabs labeled with different topic areas commonly studied by sociologists (health, gender, crime, etc.). Each topic page features curated content at the top of the page, recent posts that relate to that topic on the lower left side of the page, and places to find data and news about that topic on the lower right side of the page (if you are using the desktop site). 

This resource is the final project for “Race and Racism in the U.S.” The course is designed to explore how race structures contemporary issues in the United States. The course focuses on historical and contemporary race issues to demonstrate that race is a constructed system of privilege, power, and inequality embedded in everyday life. Using sociological theories and methods, students learn to locate claims about race in society by examining media, news, television, and other fields of public discussion.  

This final project reflects students’ ability to assess the dominant social narratives of race in the United States. Students use secondary sources and critical content analysis to uncover what people think and feel about race.

Assess Narratives

Narratives are repeated stories or discourse that help people make sense of the world. Narratives can clearly say something about race; other times, the message is implicit. In the case of this course, narratives make sense of racism or racial dynamics in our society. Narratives are active — they are telling people to think or act in a specific way. Myths, stereotypes, and “common sense” statements can all act as narratives. They can be positive or negative. It is important to uncover unspoken assumptions about racialized populations that have the power to influence policy and social behavior.

Throughout the semester, students learn how to recognize narratives about race, how to use secondary data and content analysis methods to uncover what is being communicated about race, and using historical data to understand how the narrative came to be.

For the final project, students started with a topic they are interested in- then considered what is said repeatedly in that topic. The process of locating a narrative is difficult since many narratives are implicit and their repetition embeds them as “common sense.” While this is difficult, it is one of the goals of this class to teach students to scrutinize repeated ideas about race in society that contribute to structures of racism.

The final project follows this process of inquiry:

• Start with a narrative about race that is present in society
• Assess what this narrative is saying about race
• Ask: What data do we need to assess this statement? Or How do we know? What kind of evidence would we need to have to know about this narrative?
• How did we get here? What is the history of this phenomena- How does this history influence the narratives we hear in society?

Write For a Public Audience

The goal of the final paper is to write a short assessment of a popular narrative on race or race issues.  This paper should be written in a style that is appropriate for a common reader, a piece that could be published on a website like The Society Pages, or an online news source. The writer’s job is informing the reader. You (students) do not have to take a stance for or against the narrative, though you can if you have sufficient evidence to support your stance.

An important component of this assignment included teaching about writing for the public. The Society Pages graduate editor, Allison Nobles, provided a writing workshop in class on how to write clear, concise, and supported pieces that are accessible to many readers. The workshop included an insider view on editing writing for The Society Pages modeled with submissions from student authors.

Build up to the final project

This final project is a culmination of the teaching and learning throughout the term. Each section taught skills that supported the final project. The first section of the course introduced students to the history of race in the United States highlighting structures that continue to reinforce racial inequality today. Students considered their racial social position, seeing themselves in a racial social order. Race theories helped examine racial issues from different perspectives. Contemporary theories on race help to see through the implicit nature of current race talk, building student skills in identifying racist ideologies in everyday language. Research methods lessons examined what types of data and evidence is used to understand how racism works in society, paying attention to the potential for bias in dominant research methods.

The rest of the course was divided into three sections:

1. The first section modeled the process of inquiry for the final project using a topic on race (Race and the Food System).
2. In the second section, students practiced the process of inquiry as a class. Students selected narratives within a topic introduced by the instructor (Race and Immigration).
3. The final section guided students through their research process. In-class activities allowed students to reflect on their research, get feedback from peers, the instructor, and the teaching assistant.

Assessing Popular Narratives on Race, Final Project

Requirements:

1. Clearly states the narrative.
2. States what this narrative is saying about race- there might be more than one point to be made.
3. Provides a historical context for how this narrative developed.
4. Utilizes at least 4 outside sources, one of which must be academic, the others can be news or academic. No op-eds, opinion, or blogs that are not supported with data.
   • Note: No use of your own personal experiences as data for this assignment
   • Examples of data: Ethnographies (Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies), Interviews, Primary documents from archives (journals, cookbooks, immigration records…), Documentaries, Statistics (Census), News articles from trustworthy sources

Writing:

1. No jargon- Jargon is language specialized for a field and may not be easily understood by the general public. Instead of trying to be fancy with your words, be direct and say what you mean.
2. Provide readers with a hook at or near the beginning- this is a great place to center the reader on why this is an important topic to understand. A “hook” draws the reader in- makes them interested.
3. All statements supported by evidence. All evidence cited. If you don’t know how to cite sources, please look to your resources (writing center, writing sources on the course canvas site, the internet). If you have attempted citations and are not sure if it is correct, cross check with a resource, then if you are still unsure you can ask your TA or instructor for feedback.
4. Discussion of the topic should be organized in a logical order.
5. Paper should be without grammar and spelling errors (points not taken off in the draft but will be in the final paper). It is up to you to locate errors.

Assignment 1: Topic Proposal

DUE: One Month Before Final is Due

Topic proposal will respond to the following prompts:

1. What is the narrative about race you are taking on?  This should be clearly stated as a narrative and NOT as a broader topic. If you need help, ask for it.
2. Why is this interesting to you?  (4 sentences)
3. What data do you want/need to assess this narrative? What kind of information or knowledge will be helpful to understand and discuss this narrative? Why is the data you are pursuing going to be useful? Remember, data can come in many forms. (4 sentences)
4. Provide at least 2 sources that you plan to use with a couple of sentences on why they will be helpful for this paper. Sources should include: Author name, date, title of website/publication, Title of document, web address (if applicable).

You can type the responses to each prompt and paste them into the assignment template which is accessible on our course website.

Some example narratives from students in the course include:

• Where are you really from?
• Sports mascots using indigenous people are “honoring” them
• Mexico is not sending its best people
• They are stealing our jobs
• Make America Great Again
• Black Lives Matter/ Blue Lives Matter/ All Lives Matter
• #TakeAKnee
• (Insert racialized group) is sexy/not sexy
• Angry Black Woman
• Dreadlocks, braids, and natural black hair are “unprofessional.”
• Undocumented immigrants/“illegals” are not entitled to basic human rights
• Muslims are terrorists
• Blacks are lazy, which is why they are uneducated
• Real American
• Asian Americans are Rich
• Black people are in prison because they are violent
• Black women are innately hypersexual
• Affirmative Action is discrimination
• Work Hard= American Dream

Assignment 2: Rough Draft of Final Paper

DUE:  Two Weeks Before Final is Due

Draft should meet all of the requirements of the final paper, missing requirements will result in a 4 points (10%) grade reduction for each missing element. The goal of this assignment is to take a complete paper and improve upon it through revision. Revision is an important step in good writing.

Length: 1,500 words MAX

***NOTE***  Drafts can be slightly longer than the final paper, since editing wording to be shorter is easier than adding something that is missing.

Assignment 3: Peer Review of Final Paper 

DUE:  One Week Before Final is Due                           

Peer reviews will be completed online using the same process that was followed for Paper #1. You will be automatically assigned a paper to review. Peer reviews are not anonymous so be aware of your tone in the comments.

Rubric will be provided in class and on the course website.

Final Paper

DUE: Final Class Meeting

Final Paper submissions must have revisions highlighted so we can easily assess your progress from one paper to the other.

Length: 1,000-1,100 words

RUBRIC

Final Paper-  (40 points)  (Points earned/40 points = percent/100%)

Content (15 points) (38% of grade for final project)

• The narrative being addressed is clearly stated (2) (5%)
• Clearly connects the narrative to race (5) (12%)
• Historical context of how the narrative came to be/developed (5) (13%)
• Positionality is discussed- how does your social position influence how you approached this subject (3) (8%)

Organization (4 points) (10% of grade for final project)

• Point of the paper is clear in first paragraph (2) (5%)
• Ideas in the paper follow a logical progression (2) (5%)

Sources (6 points)  (15% of grade for final project)

• At least 4 sources outside of course. One source is academic. No opinion (2) (5%)
• Sources are cited throughout (4) (10%)

Writing  (15 points)  (37% of grade for final project)

• All statement supported by evidence. (5) (13%)
• Clear writing: ideas and points are clear and direct.  No jargon used, specialized language defined/clarified   (3) (7%)
• Hook- has found an interesting way to draw reader in (2) (5%)
• Direct quotes: Used no more than 2 (2) (5%)
• No grammar and spelling errors  (points not taken off in the draft but will be in the final paper) (2) (5%)
• Maximum 1,100 words (Final) 1,500 words (Draft) (1) (2%)

Monica Jarvi is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Minnesota.