SOCI 303 Presentations

Thursday, December 6, 2012 4:30 PM EST
Innovation Hall, Room 326

SOCI 303, “SOCIOLOGICAL METHODS:  THE LOGIC OF INQUIRY,” is the portal to the sociology major.  It challenges students to take primary responsibility for their own education, by immersing themselves in the experience of primary research of their own conception and design.  Among the first readings is John Dewey’s classic “My Pedagogic Creed,” which declares in part:

The student’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education.   Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the student is carrying on of his or her own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without.

As the sociologist Don Levine summarizes Dewey’s pedagogy:

For Dewey, the reconstruction of society and the reconstruction of education were aspects of the same process.  The capacity to solve social problems required intellectual habits needed to perceive problems, identify their features, and entertain in imagination diverse options for their solution.  In order to promote such habits at all levels of learning, Dewey maintained that new forms of teaching were needed, forms in which curiosity and imagination were awakened through direct encounter with puzzling experiences (*Powers of the Mind:  The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America*, p. 80).

WE INVITE YOU TO THE PRESENTATION OF ORIGINAL RESEARCH BY THE STUDENTS OF SOCI 3O3 ON THURSDAY, DEC. 6, IN INNOVATION 326, FROM 4:30-6:30.

You will hear presentations inspired by the following research problems:  Why are enrollments in the Vienna Little League dropping, even as the town is growing?  Why do some women “ascend” to Orthodox Judaism, despite the rigidity of constraining gender roles enforced by that branch of the religion?  Why is search for sacred observance characterized by so much secular distraction, in Christian mega-churches as well as in Islamic mosques?  Are playgrounds for the benefit of children or adults?  Why are almost all the patrons of inner-city breweries white, when the surrounding neighborhoods are majority-minority? How do traffic rules designed to promote safety create dangers for pedestrians and drivers?

You will also have the opportunity to interact with students whose poster presentations address the following research problems, among others:  what does cell phone use indicate about the social meaning of meals?  Why are men the primary purchasers of the “Plan B” pill?  What motivates the growing rate of reverse migration among Koreans?  What explains the low rate of participation by Latino parents in their children’s schools?  What are the extra social costs of invisible disability?  How do special education teachers normalize the violation of classroom regulations?  How are high school health classes structured to avoid health education?  How useful is George Mason’s Career Center?  Why do women play computer games so demeaning to women?  How do multiple realities condition conflict among the Bronies  (adult male fans of the My Little Pony television show)?  Are bar regulars addicted to alcohol or to the bar?  Why do obese people frequent fast food joints?  Why do states with lax gun-laws have relatively low rates of gun violence, and conversely?

HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE—INNOVATION 326, THURS. DEC. 26, 4:30-6:30.