Sociology Textbooks

I am a bit biased when it comes to sociology textbooks.  I dislike most of them.  David Nehring has a nice blog post about soc texts and their value in this post.

I would rather go back to the "old days" when I had no text and put together a reading list that accomplished the goals I had for the unit/course. That said, in the world of sociology texts, there are some good books out there.

Concerns in Selecting a Sociology Text

• Is the subject matter high school appropriate? (what grade levels are being taught?)
• Is the reading level appropriate to the students I have (not the ones I wish I had)?
• Is the reading engaging for a high school level student?
• Is the content substantive enough so there will not have to be much teacher-added explanation? 
• Are the complex ideas simplified enough to be understandable, but still retain the complexity?
• Is the text one that my school board would adopt--or is it too controversial? (some communities are more conservative than others--in fact, some would not even allow sociology)
• What kind of funding do I have?  Will I be able to afford the ancillaries?
• If the book is a college intro book, will the binding hold up for more than two or three semesters?
• How much will I have to supplement the text?  Is the book solid enough in terms of content for me to use frequently or will I be using photocopies of articles more?
• How extensive are the ancillaries?  To what extent will they be able to assist me?
• Test bank (if this will be a part of your course)
• videos
• additional primary source readings
• Presentations/lectures--are they more than just chapter outlines?
• online tutorials, glossaries, flashcards, etc.
• webquests online?
• Instructor's Manual--are there good activities for engaging students?  Who has written them--a theoretician or a practitioner)?

Publisher Reps
McGraw-Hill Higher Education
McGraw-Hill High School Teachers (there are several HS level soc texts)
Cengage Rep Finder
Pearson Rep Finder (for college teachers)
Pearson Main Page (rep finder is in top right corner)
Bedford-St.Martin's
Worth Publishers

If you know of others, please leave a comment.


If you were to go to Amazon.com and look for sociology texts, you'd get a nice list.

The list of possibilities from ecampus.com

Textbook.com offers this list

To be honest, I've not examined the sociology texts available in the past eight years.  When I created the sociology course at my school, I adopted the Diana Kendall book, Sociology in Our Times.  I really liked the approach that she used--her examples were relatable and her point of view as a woman gave her some gravitas in the eyes of my students.  The text also had great ancillaries.  Henslin and his texts are pretty popular and with the ones I've read, one cannot go wrong with either of them.









The Teaching High School Sociology web site

I'm New to Teaching Sociology: Now What?

Let's assume that you were like me 25 years ago and given an assignment to teach sociology at the high school level.  I had taken some sociology courses, but I had no usable textbook and was pretty clueless.  Where do you begin?  What should you teach?  What the heck is sociology and how is it different from psychology or history anyway?

There are a few steps to take if you are completely new to sociology.  Feel free to skip steps based upon your experience level.

Step 1:  Determining what sociology is


Check out this entry of defining sociology:
http://teachinghighschoolsociology.blogspot.com/2012/08/what-is-sociology-some-definitions.html

Get your hands on as many good sociology readers as you can find.  Read the intro chapter from at least three different texts.  That will give you a good idea of the readability of the text as well as a better understanding of the sociological perspectives.  It will take some time, but will be well worth it.


Step 2:  What should be in my sociology course?

The American Sociology Association Curriculum--click here for link
This is an intro college curriculum, so high school teachers can leave out a few topics.  What I teach can be found at this blog entry.
http://teachinghighschoolsociology.blogspot.com/2012/03/sociology-what-to-teach.html


Step 3:  What are some basic tools that I can use to make sure I stay ahead of the kids?


Read, that is to say, actually study the textbook/reader you are using.  Underline, highlight and mark up the text with questions in the margins.  This intellectual dissection of the material will give you knowledge of the topic, but also insight into what the students are experiencing.

But as I was reminded at the AP Psychology reading, when faced with a question, ask the student, "how would you understand it?"  As they explain, listen and see if it makes sense.  If it does not, ask follow up questions for clarification.  You do not need to know everything.  Keep some notecards around for kids to write questions on.  Admit when you do not know an answer.  Tell the kids that you'll need to look it up, that you do not want to give them wrong or misleading information.  The more honest you are about this, the more forgiving and supportive they will be.


Step 4:  How can I get my kids interested and still "teach" sociology?




This is where projects come in.  Sociology is not on anyone's list of standardized testing.  It's nearly always an elective.  Know your students.  What interests them?  Using your library media teacher (if you are fortunate enough to still have one), co-create at least one project where the kids are NOT doing a "bird project*"  Make the project on that allows the kids to get creative but still deal with sociological concepts.

Find some controversial readings about a topic that interests them.  Ask questions.  What do they think?  WHY have they reached that conclusion?  How does this debate tie into sociology?

Check out the various projects on this blog and in other teaching sociology blogs.  There are some really amazing ideas out there.


*a bird project is one where a student tells you the name of the bird, what it looks like, what it eats, where it lives, how long it lives, etc. It is a regurgitation of easily 'googled' facts and requires virtually no thinking. These are to be avoided like the plague and replaced with projects that include critical thinking and higher order thinking skills. Acknowledgement to Dr. Doug Achterman who has helped me create a variety of projects in my classes.


Step 5:  Where can I get support?

The ASA Sociology listserv
The Teaching High School Sociology Blog
Sociology Sal's Blog, "Ways of Thinking"
Join the ASA High School Affiliate Program (January to December)


Step 6: Knowing Yourself


Know that it will take you at least a couple of years (four or more times teaching the course) to get comfortable with teaching sociology.   Accept that.  The sooner you do, the more you will enjoy the course while you keep learning about it.

photo credit: http://awkwardlistdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/ahhh.jpg

The Teaching High School Sociology web site

What is Sociology? Some Definitions

The quotes below are taken directly from the cited web sources.  I claim no personal ownership of them.  I am simply trying to show some differences in comparison of definitions/explanations of sociology.

I do find the differences pretty amazing.  I would venture that the differences are due to the social influences of each of the authors' own organizational pressures.  Who is their audience?  What level of sophistication can they employ?  Some are descriptive and others tell the reader what sociology can do. Why the difference?  Perhaps that is one activity a teacher could try in a class.  Collect these and other definitions of sociology and attempt to construct a definition/explanation that accurately reflects how the teacher is going to teach the course.

My definition would look something like this (subject to changes in my mood and current reading).
Sociology is a field of study possessing tools and perspectives that allows for a user to examine all social interactions, from dyads and triads all the way to societies and planet-wide social groupings.  These tools allow for description, understanding, analysis, and prediction of social behavior.  A person taking a course in sociology will never be able to view the world in the same way as prior to the course.    While there will be some overlaps in topics with the other social sciences, the sociological imagination enables a view of the world around us that the student/teacher to engage in the topics in a depth and complexity not offered by other fields.


Wikipedia

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science (a term with which it is sometimes synonymous) which uses various methods of empirical investigation^[1] and critical analysis^[2] to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity. For many sociologists the goal is to conduct research which may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, while others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes. Subject matter ranges from the micro level of individual agency and interaction to the macrolevel of systems and the social structure.^[3]The traditional focuses of sociology have included social stratification, social class, culture, social mobility, religion, secularisation, law, and deviance. As all spheres of human activity are affected by the interplay between social structure and individual agency, sociology has gradually expanded its focus to further subjects, such as health, medical, military and penal institutions, the Internet, and the role of social activity in the development of scientific knowledge.
The range of social scientific methods has also expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitativetechniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophicapproaches to the analysis of society. Conversely, recent decades have seen the rise of new analytically, mathematically andcomputationally rigorous techniques, such as agent-based modelling and social network analysis.^[4][5] Sociology should not be confused with various general social studies courses which bear little relation to sociological theory or social science research methodology.

The American Sociological Association

Sociology is:

• the study of society

• a social science involving the study of the social lives of people, groups, and societies

• the study of our behavior as social beings, covering everything from the analysis of short contacts between anonymous individuals on the street to the study of global social processes

• the scientific study of social aggregations, the entities through which humans move throughout their lives'

• an overarching unification of all studies of humankind, including history, psychology, and economics

Dartmouth Sociology Department

What is Sociology?
Sociology enables us to understand the structure and dynamics of society, and their intricate connections to patterns of human behavior and individual life changes. It examines the ways in which the forms of social structure -- groups, organizations, communities, social categories (such as class, sex, age, or race), and various social institutions (such as kinship, economic, political, or religious) affect human attitudes, actions, and opportunities.
The discipline also explores how both individuals and collectivities construct, maintain, and alter social organization in various ways. Sociology asks about the sources and consequences of change in social arrangements and institutions, and about the satisfactions and difficulties of planning, accomplishing, and adapting to such change. Areas studied in examining social dynamics include: culture, values, socialization, cooperation, conflict, power, exchange, inequality, deviance, social control, violence, order and social change.

WhatisSociology.com

Simply put, sociology is the study of society.  This study uses a lot of different methods in order to investigate the way society works and why humans do the things they do as a society.  Sociology is a very broad term that covers a wide range of areas.  Trying to some it up in just a few paragraphs would not be possible, but I will try to hit some of the main points.
In addition to being the study of society, sociology looks at the social lives of individual people, groups or people and entire societies.  It takes a look at and studies our social behaviors, whether they be short interactions between people that don't know each other or social processes that span the entire planet.  It studies social aggregations from a scientific point of view to look at the groups and social circles that people move through during the course of their lives.  Mankind, psychology, history and economics are all studied and combined to get overarching results that compare to one another.
Simply put, sociology is the study of human behavior, particularly in groups.  Contemporary sociology deals more with conflict orientation.  The functionalism movement of sociology is now considered to be obsolete.  Samples are taken from large populations and broken into subsets.  The way a sample is selected is known as sampling.  Samples are usually chosen at random unless there are specifics in that population for which then a strategy for selecting samples will be implemented.  Other sampling methods can also be used when random sampling is not possible.
Topics in sociology are many.  The range and scope of these topics can include things like culture, law, the economy, environment, education, gender and more.  It's all about studying behavior in different settings, comparing people of one particular group to those of another group.  For example, sociology can affect the environment in various ways.  Researchers study the relation between social factors and their effects on the environment.  I guess one study could investigate why people of a particular social group litter and why those in another do not.  Education is also another big part of sociology.  This is the study of how educational institutions play a role in social constructs.  School systems usually mold people at a young age for better or for worse.  Good schools usually lead to better societies while bad schools can lead to more crime in a social circle.
There are so many ways that sociology can be viewed and studied.  This is why there are entire degree programs at colleges in various parts of sociology.  Man has been on the planet for a very long time, and we are still trying to figure out what makes them tick.  It seems that another million years will pass without anyone really knowing the full explanation of why people act and behave the way the do in certain social circumstances, especially with the way technology has changed things so recently.

A Youtube Definition taken from a Sociology DVD
The Teaching High School Sociology web site

Intro to the Social Sciences Video

Colleague Steve Jones (from North Carolina and @highschoolpsych and the THSP Blog) reminded me of this video I viewed, loved and promptly forgot about last year.  It's a nice intro to distinctions of the social sciences.  Perhaps you'll find it useful.

Soomo Publishing





The Teaching High School Sociology web site

AP Sociology?

Last night I had a Twitter post and back with AP_Trevor about creating an Advanced Placement Sociology course from the College Board.  We shall see what comes of it.  Perhaps we need to push more for this course.

Here is the link for the ASA proposed AP Sociology course:
http://www2.asanet.org/members/apsoccurr.pdf

The Teaching High School Sociology web site

Brief Hiatus

I've not been posting recently due to the death of my father and the upcoming AP Psych exam.  I will begin posting again soon.

Thanks for your understanding.

Chuck

The Teaching High School Sociology web site