Broadening the scope of an introduction to sociology course


Shirin Shahrokni, York University, Glendon Campus

As a faculty at York University’s Glendon Campus Sociology Department, I have been teaching the full-year Perspectives Sociologiques course, our introductory course to the discipline for the past eight years. In this short presentation, I will discuss two main sets of challenges I have been confronted with, and some of the strategies I have put in place to address these. The first has to do with difficulties of, and initiatives aimed at, introducing first and second-year students to epistemologies and perspectives that decenter the voices of sociology’s “founding fathers” and invite students to engage with geopolitical locales outside of the Global North when applying their sociological imagination. Like most educators striving to “decolonize” the discipline, one challenge comes from the sources from which students learn to think sociologically in the early years of their training. While increasingly, introductory textbooks written in English expose students to critical perspectives ranging from decolonial frameworks to anti-racist feminist scholarships, these initiatives remain rare in French, the language in which my introductory course is delivered, and most textbooks take as their empirical foci societies located in the Global North. One pedagogical has thus been to diversify, as much as possible, sources from which students learn: as opposed to making a sociology textbook the central piece from which students develop their sociological imagination, I have used research pieces from the Conversation, from francophone investigative journalism websites, blogs, podcasts, etc. Additionally, as one of their assignments, students are asked to create posters introducing the class to a sociologist whose work has illuminated perspectives that have not been acclaimed as canonical. My presentation will point to other pedagogical tools through which I have tried to introduce students to voices within our discipline that have been, and continue to be, largely marginalized with the dominant epistemic structures in which sociological knowledge production processes are embedded. The second challenge I have often encountered has been to show new students the value of sociological work beyond the Ivory Tower. While some of our students will pursue graduate education with the goal of joining members of the academic community, many will not. One of my objectives has thus been to demonstrate the value that a degree in sociology may have, outside of academia, in what some of my students call “the real world”. To this end, one of my strategies has been to invite guest-speakers working in various professional sectors, to come and share with students the benefits that their sociology degree has had as they have transitioned into the professional world, as educators, members of an NGO, policy-makers, etc. Often, I have noticed, these outside voices leave a profound mark on the students, as they open up new ways of envisioning their futures. In a final section, I highlight pedagogical strategies through which students can come to view sociology as “fun” in multiple, complementary ways.

This paper will be presented at the following session: