Sociology - Winter 1999

Course Syllabus:

"Forbede us thyng, and that desiren we." -- Chaucer, The Wife of Bath Tale

"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither." -- Thomas Jefferson

Introduction: The ingestion of chemicals for purposes of altering consciousness has been practiced in virtually all human cultures and in all epochs of history. Sometimes this has resulted in problems, sometimes not, depending on how a society defines and deals with drug use and on how well it takes care of its citizens. Contrary to current wisdom, the mere use of drugs does not necessarily constitute drug "abuse," nor is the mere existence of human suffering or social harm from such drug use always defined as a "drug problem." The total social costs from the harm done by a single legal drug like alcohol or tobacco dwarf the total costs related to all illicit drugs combined. Yet, we tend to think of alcohol and tobacco use as "normal" (if unhealthy) and the use of other drugs as "deviant." Historically, such definitions have never been based on "objective" evidence of risk, but rather have been reflections of a society's conflicts and expressions of a culture's deep fears. Such conflicts and fears shape both the patterns and consequences of drug use and the nature of a society's drug policy. This course is neither a "how to" nor a "just say no" course. One objective is to explore the social, cultural, political and economic processes that shape our understanding of and policies toward drugs. A second objective is to provide an historical and theoretical grasp of the social causes and consequences of the use and abuse of consciousness-altering substances. Third, the course attempts to stimulate critical thinking about policies that can reduce the harms associated with drug use.

Course Requirements: Despite the "laid back" or "chilled out" zeitgeist of UCSC, and despite what might appear to be Bacchanalian course content, this class is designed to be intellectually demanding and rigorous. Attendance at lectures and discussion sections is mandatory and each student will be required to write (and rewrite if need be) bi-weekly essays. In theseessays students must meet two objectives:

1. provide brief, basic summaries of both lectures and readings, and

2. critically reflect upon what you are learning from both. While this type of assignment requires a lot of effort, it allows each student to engage those issues that s/he finds most interesting and it builds basic writing skills. This is why the course counts as a "W" or writing-intensive course.

Students will write a five-page essay on each of the five sections of the course. The first will be due to your Teaching Assistant in section in the third week of the quarter, with the others due at two week intervals thereafter. Turn in copies; keep originals. Each essay will cover the readings and lectures in one section of the course as outlined in this syllabus. Each essay will be a minimum of 5 typed, double-spaced pages in length. Although you will not be able to cover in detail every reading in a section in an essay, to pass this course you must give clear written evidence in your essays as a whole that you have attended all lectures, done all the required reading, and engaged the issues. Although this amounts to a good deal of systematic work, the essay format is designed to allow plenty of creative elbow room for you to pursue your own questions and interests.Each essay will be examined by the TA's to determine that students are attending lectures and doing the readings. Any student whose essays do not provide clear evidence of attendance at lectures and completion of readings is highly unlikely to pass the course. The first two essays will be read closely and carefully evaluated by the TA's. They will return them with comments so that students will have a sense of how they are doing and how to improve. If those comments include referral to a Writing Tutor, then it is the student's responsibility to meet with a Writing Tutor to improve his or her writing.

The final essay will both summarize the lectures and readings in Section 5 of this syllabus and attempt to synthesize the student's own comprehensive set of policy reforms to address "America's drug problem" based on readings and lectures. At the close of the course, each student will turn in a concluding essay and all the earlier essays as a complete set. A detailed reading of that set of essays will be the basis for narrative evaluations. This body of written work will be judged on its breadth of coverage of lectures and readings and the depth of engagement with the issues.

Professor: Pamela Roby
Webpage: http://zzyx.ucsc.edu/Soc/roby.html
Office: 218 College 8
Phone: 9-2587; messages: 9-3516
Location: Sociology 148
Office Hours: Tuesday & Thursday 2-3:45

In Soc. 148 I look forward to our becoming a community of learners studying together the sociology of learning. We will examine learning and achievement from gender, race and class perspectives; survey social structural innovations and conceptual tools for facilitating learning; and explore the interplay between past and present social forces affecting learning and achievement. We will apply theories to and test them with their own and others' learning and achievement. The class includes lectures, small groups, videos, films and panels. Seven out-of-class Listening/Learning dyads rather than sections are required (see "WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID" below for a description of the dyads).Soc. 148 is a 5 unit course that may be counted toward the Social Psychology cluster or simply as regular elective credit for the Sociology Major; or as a Social Science elective for the Women's Studies major; or as an elective for the Education Minor.

CLASS GOALS:

1. Survey sociological research on the nature of learning and human intelligence.

2. Examine how gender, race, class and other socially constructed factors, both past and present, affect learning.

3. Survey social structural innovations facilitating learning.

4. Consider how these operate or might be applied in our daily lives and work.

TENTATIVE CLASS OUTLINE AND READINGS:

>>>>>Day 1: Introduction: The Social Construction of Learning and Achievement.

>>>>>Day 2: Human Intelligence and Cooperation:Sociological Perspectives:

>>>>>Day 3: The Sociological Autobiography: Perspectives on Learning and Achievement:

>>>>>Day 4: Microsociology: Listening and Learning:

>>>>>Day 5: Developing and Achieving Goals:

***Assignment 1 due.***

>>>>>Day 6: The Social Construction of Reality, Applied Sociology and Educational Practice:

>>>>>Day 7: Schooling and Learning:

>>>>>Day 8: Social Reproduction, Cultural Capital and Learning Processes: Theoretical Perspectives on

Learning and Achievement:

***Assignment 2 due: See class handout on assignment.***

>>>>>Day 9: Learning, Feelings and The Use of Contradictions:Perspectives from the Sociology of Emotions:

>>>>>Day 10: Society, Self-Esteem and Achievement:

>>>>>Day 11: Writing: Myths and Reality:

>>>>>Day 12: Gender, Learning and Achievement: Women:

>>>>>Day 13: Gender, Learning and Achievement: Men:

>>>>>Day 14: Class, Learning and Achievement:

>>>>>Day 15: Class, Race and Learning:

>>>>>Day 16: Race and Ethnicity, Learning and Achievement:

>>>>Day 17: Overcoming Internalized Sexism, Racism, Classism and Their Effects on Learning:

>>>>>Day 18: Identifying and Overcoming Gender,Race, Class and Other Constraints on Our Own and

Others' Learning and Achievement:

>>>>>Day 19: Creating Environments Conducive to Learning: Communicating Important Ideas and Assuming Leadership: Issues of Free Will and Determinism, Agency and Social Structure:

***Assignment 3 due -- see class handout.

>>>>>Day 20: Summary, Evaluations and Future Directions:Professional Socialization, Careers and Work:

***Distribution of Final Exam.***

>>>>>Day 21: Final exam due - first hour, final exam day.

ASSIGNMENTS: All papers and the final exam are to be double spaced and computer printed or typed. Use sub-titles to guide your Reader. Number the pages of all assignments and print or type your name in the top right hand corner.

1) Assignment One: Sociological Autobiography and Learning History: A three to six page life history of your learning followed by a one to two page analysis of two or three social, economic or political factors that most affected your learning. In this paper, as in the class, learning is to be broadly defined. It is to include but not be confined to learning within school systems. Read C. Wright Mills, "The Promise" and the readings for Day 3 in the Reader before completing this assignment. Note: further instructions for this assignment are contained in Roby, "Sociological Learning Histories" (Day 3 reading in SLReader). Due day 5 of class.

2) Assignment Two: Due Day 8: In this three to five page paper you are to write a one-half page to one page report on each of your first two out-of-class listening/learning sessions followed by a one to two page analysis of the sessions in which you draw on concepts from at least three of the authors specified in the Reader. Cite the articles you quote or paraphrase from at the end of your paper.

3) Final Paper: An eight to fifteen page paper described further in class.

4) Final exam: The take-home exam will be distributed day 20; it is due on the final exam day, first hour.

5) Attendance at and participation in all class sessions and participation in at least seven out-of-class meetings with another member of the class, as described under assignments 2 and 3.

Required Text: The "Sociology of Learning Reader" is for sale at The Copy Center, Communications Building. It is the only required text. The syllabus suggests further readings for those who wish to pursue particular subjects in greater depth.

WHAT OTHERS SAY ABOUT "SOCIOLOGY OF LEARNING" (SOC. 148):

The editors of CARPE DIEM: PROMOTING INNOVATION IN TEACHING (Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 6), write:

"The sociology of learning is a topic that has generally lain buried within the sociology of education. In developing the `Sociology of Learning and Achievement: Gender, Race, and Class Perspectives', Pamela Roby built on and incorporated sociological theory, extensive sociological research about learning and factors affecting learning, and analysis of personal experiences with learning.

Through the use of panels comprised of class members, small groups that reported back to the larger class, and writing exercises as well as lectures, readings and films, students compared and contrasted the nature and effects of gender, race and class oppression and privilege on their own and others' learning.

"For the course, Roby gathered together a wide array of articles and audio-visual materials to examine learning and achievement from a sociological perspective. These included sociological research on the development, use and implications of concepts of human intelligence and empirical studies on the systematic effects of gender, race, and class on learning. Students in the course wrote their own `sociological learning histories,' including ananalysis of two or three social, economic orpolitical factors that most affected theirlearning."

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In CONCEPTS AND CHOICES FOR TEACHING: MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF UNIVERSITY INSTRUCTION, William Timpson wrote about the Listening/Learning Sessions:

At UCSC many instructors utilize cooperativelearning groups to empower students to play a more active, creative role in their learning. Pamela Roby (Sociology) utilizes dyadic listening/learning sessions as part of her course on the sociology of learning.Seven different times during the quarter, pairs of students meet together for two hours to discuss the readings, examine their own experiences with learning and achievement, and under-take activities related to class readings and lectures. To provide guidancefor students during the out-of-class dyads,Roby authored a listening/learning guide,which she continuously revises on the basisof students' experiences and suggestions.

This course will examine some of the pressing issues relating to global inequality and international development, including: hunger and vulnerability; East Asian development and financial crisis; environment and industrial development; colonial and postcolonial ideas of progress. It will use these issues as a starting point for the discussion of the history of development and underdevelopment, the rise of agriculture and industry, and for theories which attempt to explain that history. These theories help to provide a grasp of a strange world in which the world's 3 richest individuals have more assets than the gross domestic product of the world's 48 poorest countries.

It addresses three questions:

i) what concepts and approaches have been used to analyze gender relations?

ii) how are gender relations changing with attempts to raise living standards, particularly in the Third World?

iii) how is purposive collective action, by women's groups, governments and other institutions, influencing and responding to those changes.

The course will use case studies from a number of societies, including Bangladesh, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Senegal, Ghana, Brazil and Chile, to provide empirical foundations, and will draw upon ideas from several social science traditions, including sociology, political economy, anthropology, economics and history, to shed light on the changes taking place in those societies. Comparative material will be drawn periodicallyfrom North America, but that will not be the primary geographical focus of the course.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course explore morality from a sociological perspective and reflects a broader critique leveled against traditional ethics by many social scientists. All too often, ethical pronouncements seem to float down from the sky--usually requiring scriptural interpretation by "real" ethicists (e.g., philosophers, theologians, clinicians). Such pronouncements, based on abstractions, are often devoid of any connection to what is "really" going on in a particular social situation. Traditional ethical approaches have been "top down," moving from theory to practice with a core focus on universal (and universalizing) principles. In contrast, the newer approaches move from the study of actual practices to an empirical interpretation--from practice to theory. In focusing on how ethical decisions are actually made, social scientists attempt to counter persistent ethical abstractions. Sociologists are attentive to the contexts within which morality is formed and decisions are made; these processes are seen as deeply social and political. In this framework, ethics is seen as a particular type of discourse and practice embedded in social relations. Key issues such as power, inequality, social structure, interpretation, meaning, subjectivism, and cultural relativism are brought to the fore. Following these approaches, this course reframes "ethics" as a set of concrete social practices that can be captured analytically, examining the social processes and judgments underlying what comes to count as an acceptable practice or an acceptable moral account of a given practice.

The course begins with an overview of traditional moral philosophy, including the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Augustine, Aurelius, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hume, Mill, and Wollstonecraft. Special attention is paid to Aristotle's "virtue ethics" and Kant's "deontology," in part because they have garnered much criticism from social scientists. We will also examine the role of ethics in the writings of the classical sociologists, including Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and others. The course then moves on to discuss the impact of moral and ethical relativism, which posits that ethics is situational and contextual, including attention to issues of inequality, diversity, and power. Additional broad topics include religion and ethics, utilitarianism, rights theories, gender and moral theory, race and ethnicity, class and inequality, and ethics and policy. The remainder of the course will examine several substantive issues, focusing on how ethical decisions are made about them, who makes the decisions, and with what implications. These issues include abortion and reproduction, euthanasia, punishment and the death penalty, sexuality, poverty and welfare, world hunger, animal rights, biomedicine and science, health and disease, and the environment. Because this is a graduate seminar, the ethics of teaching and research will also be covered, including the uses of human subjects and informed consent.

Restrictions:

This course is open to graduate students only. Advanced undergraduates may enroll with adequate preparation and permission of the professor.

Revised 7/28/04.