Jeffries Vincent (Editor). Handbook Of Public Sociology

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212 Chapter 12

was free to articulate an alternative hypothesis initially, he was convinced

by what they found.

Policy Sociology

While professional and critical sociology usually exist within the academy,

policy sociology and public sociology are less common there. One of the

unexpected findings from the interviews with professional sociology lead-

ers was the value a number placed on “improving the world.” They wanted

their own sociological work to do this and they wanted to imbue students

with the idea that sociology could and should be used to improve the world.

Policy issues, for example, regarding the death penalty or legal options for

abortion or stem cell research, may help students learn how to use empirical

data to analyze possible costs and consequences of various social policies,

as well as become better at identifying competing value claims, some of

which cannot be adjudicated by empirical evidence. Policy sociology often

legitimates itself in terms of whether the policies advocated are effective in

accomplishing a stated goal. One major issue is who articulates that goal? Is

it a particular client, who may have a specific perspective on the issue and

one that may differ from those of other participants in the situation? Be-

cause policy sociologists may be relatively more dependent on the funding

received from clients than academic sociologists are, they may be less able

to resist restrictions on how studies are framed, who is included, or open

publication of results. This is the only form of policy sociology articulated

by Burawoy. However, some sociologists have initiated policy sociology by

clearly identifying problems and presenting specific solutions to them, as

Jeffries notes about the work of Sorokin, Yablonsky, and Jacobson (cited in

Jeffries 2005:79–80). It is noteworthy that Sorokin held an academic post

at Harvard, Yablonsky holds an academic position in the California State

College System, and Jacobson worked in government and currently directs

the Vera Institute for Justice, suggesting the importance of a relatively secure

position for providing the relative autonomy and insulation from client

pressures needed to initiate independent policy proposals.

Public Sociology

In one sense, all teaching is public sociology in that it is talking about

sociology to non-sociologists. Instructors have considerable (although

far from complete) freedom to decide what and how to teach in many of

their courses. To what degree do they acquaint students with all four of the

quadrants of sociology identified by Burawoy? Decisions about content

have been supplemented by efforts to provide students with opportunities

to learn more about public sociology by doing it in some form.

Teaching and Public Sociology 213

Since public sociology depends for legitimacy on its relevance, its risk of

pathology comes from judging issues by their current trendiness, whether

by virtue of being in the news or on afternoon talk shows. There, the quest

for novelty may trump social significance, for example by ignoring how

widespread or enduring a particular phenomenon is. There is the further

risk that public sociology “can be held hostage to outside forces . . . [or]

pander to and flatter its publics . . . thereby compromising professional and

critical commitments” (Burawoy 2005:17). Besides the independent contri-

butions each of the four types of practice may make individually, they may

also interact with each other in interesting ways.

RELATIONSHIPS, TENSIONS, AND SYNERGIES

WITHIN THE TYPOLOGY

Professional sociology can offer experience in using peer review as a way of

setting standards and assessing quality that would be useful for teaching,

public sociology, and policy sociology. For example, the rigorous standard

of theoretically grounded and empirically validated knowledge raises the

bar for assessing teaching effectiveness, potentially enhancing teaching and

learning. For several years in this decade, the Carnegie Foundation for the

Advancement of Teaching ran summer workshops for faculty from a variety

of fields (e.g., dance, law, pharmacy, political science, biology, chemistry,

psychology, sociology, among others) who struggled to ascertain whether

their approaches to teaching were helping students to learn, and why or

why not. Both professional and policy sociologists have a battery of quan-

titative and qualitative research methods to study such questions.

The development of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in

sociology and other fields is one effort to make teaching more professional,

in several senses. It focuses on making teaching public at least within the

community of scholars so that it can be critiqued, improved, and ultimately

validated by peer review. Making teaching public includes publishing

thoughtful, annotated course syllabi online that explicate the rationale for

organizing and constructing a course in a particular way, indicating what

worked well and did not work as well, and suggesting ways of improving

teaching in the future. Rather than being fixed, such a syllabus becomes a

living, reflexive work in progress. Another direction is to encourage people

to conduct systematic research on teaching and learning and to publish it

in peer-reviewed journals.

While some sociologists have achieved fruitful synergies by using pro-

fessional sociological concepts and perspectives to inform inquiries into

teaching and learning (e.g., Benson et al. 2002; Billson 1986; Kain 2005;

Rau and Heyl 1990; Wright et al. 2004), SoTL in sociology could even more

214 Chapter 12

vigorously develop or apply sociological theories to teaching and learning.

Many studies in Teaching Sociology focus on individual teaching, and some-

times learning, without always contextualizing that learning. Others have

consciously discussed ways of bringing current professional sociological

research into teaching (Atkinson, Czaja, and Brewster 2006; Bordt 2005;

Cook 2005; Lee, Wrigley, and Dreby 2006; Purvin and Kain 2005).

It cannot only be because SoTL is an interdisciplinary field that sociologi-

cal theory has not been used more, because another very interdisciplinary

field, namely social gerontology, uses sociological theories (see Putney,

Alley, and Bengston 2005). SoTL might incorporate more professional

sociology by including issues in the political economy of education such

as reductions in federal and state spending for higher education, growing

state expenditures on prisons and incarceration compared to education,

and how the rising costs of higher education are being passed on to families

and students (Sacks 2007); by analyzing the absorption of corporate mod-

els and practices into higher education; or by studying social movements

within higher education aimed at including new curricula in women’s stud-

ies, Black Studies, Asian-American Studies, or Queer Studies. Such develop-

ments could be related to learning goals, instructional practices, or student

learning. Sociologists investigate colleges and universities as organizations,

how environments and university managements affect new organizational

contexts and forms, and how diversity in higher education affects social

relationships. In my view, the scholarship of teaching and learning badly

needs to stay connected with professional sociology and to engage in theo-

retical and methodological dialogues with it. When it does that, perhaps

the total absence of citations to articles in Teaching Sociology in the American

Sociological Review, noted by Purvin and Kain (2005), will change.

Some might include within the purview of critical sociology such educa-

tional works as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Lisa Delpit’s “The

Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Chil-

dren”; bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress; and Berenice Malka Fisher’s No

Angel in the Classroom: Teaching through Feminist Discourse. These are power-

ful, emotionally, and morally moving works. How can they inspire new

research about teaching and learning or about professional sociology? They

might be brought into fruitful dialogue with insights from professional

sociology, such as the social psychological research of Cohen and Lotan

(1997) and Skvoretz, Webster, and Whitmeyer (1999) on how status and

power differentials among individuals affect interactions in group tasks.

How Might Each Form of Practice Influence the Others in Teaching?

If critical, policy, and public sociology were brought into the teaching

of professional sociology, how might it change? If critical sociology were a

Teaching and Public Sociology 215

stronger presence in professional sociology graduate study, would it change

what was presented to students, even as examples of professional sociol-

ogy? This is an interesting question that could be empirically studied if

departments with strong programs in critical sociology could be found and

compared with departments with weak or non-existent critical sociology

programs. Are there differences in how professional sociology is taught in

the two types of settings? The question of how a strong presence of criti-

cal sociology affects students’ levels of interest is more difficult to address

because of possible confounding from the self-selection of students into

programs with particular characteristics. However, one could investigate

the question of what types of students are attracted to which kinds of pro-

grams.

Even without such empirical studies, some mix of professional sociology,

with its relatively orthodox “normal” science paradigms, and critical sociol-

ogy that steps out of those intellectual boxes to examine the epistemologi-

cal and normative assumptions of professional sociology could very well

benefit a new generation of thinkers who might make major innovations

in our field and beyond. Acquainting students with professional sociology,

critical sociology, policy, and public sociology may be somewhat analo-

gous to learning different types of dance steps, for example, the Waltz and

Foxtrot (although both were somewhat revolutionary in their time) which

are more prescriptive and formed compared to the Monkey or other con-

temporary dance forms which are more open-ended. Each of these dances

is relevant for different purposes and in different contexts. Would our

students be better prepared if they understood and appreciated a broader

range of sociologies, like the cultural omnivores identified by Peterson and

Kern (1996)?

Most students need to see a broader spectrum of the social world, espe-

cially those who have grown up in communities relatively segregated by

color, class, or ethnicity. To the degree that sociology students can get out

of the academy to do some form of policy or public sociology, they will

bring more diverse social experiences and observations to their study of

professional sociology.

Some instructors make a point of not only telling their students about

the existence of policy and public sociology, but provide opportunities to

do them. For example, one of the peer-recognized leaders described the fol-

lowing project he had his students do:

We did statewide surveys in Pennsylvania with a sample of 2000 to 3000

people. Each student in the class had to interview 35–40 people, although

some did as many as 75 or 80. Some students went with me to Harrisburg to

present the findings to the state government. When Governor Ridge was there,

he generally liked the surveys. We did questions on issues the legislature was

debating. We worked with the Pennsylvania Education Association, a state

216 Chapter 12

environmental group, or other state agencies to get enough support to pay the

telephone bill and pay for the report. The deal we made was that we would

release all our findings; they could not restrict or suppress any of them. We

were doing it as a public service. We got about a 30% response rate which was

helped by the students doing the calling who told people they had to do the

interviews for the course. They did some pre-election surveys that predicted

the winners of the national elections very closely. They never missed in their

predictions. That gained credibility for their surveys. (Persell, Pfeiffer, and Syed

2008)

By doing this, students were able to learn a great deal about the concrete,

pragmatic, and potentially effective nature of one type of policy sociology,

namely opinion research on current issues. They dealt with clients (or spon-

sors) and learned something about how instrumental knowledge generated

by sociological methods could enter the public arena and be viewed as

legitimate because it was accurate.

Another professor had students in a research methods course do a

qualitative and quantitative study about student satisfaction on campus,

based on a random sample of students. Together the entire class of about

25 students wrote the final report, which included tables and qualitative

interview results. The report was sent to the department chair and under-

graduate dean on the campus. While technically in that case the dean was

not the “client,” the students did feel that they were doing something real

that might have an impact on college policy and practice in the future. They

also learned a lot about how to do surveys and interviews. The way these

projects were structured avoided the potential pathology of policy sociol-

ogy, namely of being “captured by clients who impose strict contractual

obligations on their funding” (Burawoy 2005:17).

Other professors have students do public sociology. Several leaders en-

courage students to work with one or more local grassroots social move-

ments. While not the same as public sociology, many sociology programs

have instituted service learning as either a requirement or an option within

the major. Service learning gets students out of the classroom into a variety

of public settings, where they can begin to talk with and hopefully under-

stand the perspectives of a wider range of people than they have previously

met. Others, for example, Edna Bonacich (2005:113) involve students in

multi-faceted projects that have clear research and action implications. She

says she tries to “inject a ‘Marxist’ understanding into research and discus-

sions.” By this she means considering such questions as: “What are the

underlying power relations? What are the major economic interests? How

does the capitalist system shape social policy? How are people and commu-

nities, especially racialized groups, hurt by these policies? What community

organizations have formed to combat them, and how can we help them?”

(Bonacich 2005:113).

Teaching and Public Sociology 217

Within classrooms there are many opportunities for students (and in-

structors) to practice developing communicative knowledge and consensus

building. Many instructors have used collaborative and cooperative re-

search projects with the express goal of helping students to understand they

can learn from the knowledge of others and to see how knowledge is built

by moving toward consensus about values, warranted methods of obtain-

ing information, and provisional understandings.

In my own teaching, when I ask students to point out what they don’t

understand in a reading, I learn from them. For example, I wrote in a

scholarly paper that several research studies have found that when you

control for seven socioeconomic factors, the black-white gap in test scores

disappears. When questioned by my students I learned the importance of

adding “statistically control for” to indicate that there was not yet a situa-

tion (or a program) that I know of in the United States where the gap has

disappeared, since the control factors (including wealth, birth weight, age

of mother at birth, parental education, occupation, and income) are all

correlated with race.

Dialogue with more broadly defined publics may also be built into cer-

tain assignments. For example, Eleen Baumann and Richard Mitchell had

students conduct research on the amount of violence on TV. Besides writing

up the results of their research, the students were required to write a letter to

the editor of a local newspaper and to a television network president report-

ing on the results of their research and indicating how they felt about those

results. Graduate courses on writing sociology and the American Sociologi-

cal Association’s recently inaugurated award for “Excellence in the Report-

ing of Social Issues” also illustrate efforts to improve the communication of

professional sociology’s insights.

How might professional, policy, and public sociology influence the

teaching of critical sociology? Professional sociology might ask sociology

of knowledge research questions about critical sociology, such as under

what social conditions is critical sociology more or less likely, more or less

isolated, or more or less likely to fall prey to pathologies? Public and policy

sociology might press to include examples from their work in the teaching

of critical sociology, to illustrate the kinds of critical concerns that could be

raised. Each of these three forms of practice might ask of critical sociology,

“what difference does it make for what we do?” For example, do values

change the research questions we ask, how we conduct research, or teaching

practices? How do we keep our values from biasing how we do research?

Professional, critical, and public sociology might also interrogate policy

sociology. Are policies or policy makers taking too narrow a view of the

issues at hand? Are there relevant theories that might illuminate the phe-

nomenon? Can theoretical questions be addressed by a particular policy

study? Are the research methods flawed or biased? Are key constituencies

218 Chapter 12

being ignored? Will a given policy benefit some publics more than others?

When policy is taught, perspectives from other forms of practice need to

be included. For example, when military sociologists help the U.S. Army

accomplish military goals, professional sociology might ask what new

knowledge could be generated here? Critical and public sociologists might

question whether sociological knowledge should be used to help one group

in a conflict harm members of another group. Thus, instruction could in-

clude raising a broader set of theoretical and ethical questions, as well as

policy concerns.

Professional, critical, and policy practices can influence public sociology.

If we take the case of teaching as a form of public sociology, we see that

considerable thought has gone into bringing more professional sociology

into teaching, so that students can know more about sociological research.

Examples beyond those discussed above include the experimental use of is-

sues of Contexts in teaching and the recent publication of a Contexts reader

for teaching. Critical perspectives and practices might seek to elevate the

value placed on teaching and the place of values in teaching. A policy per-

spective might call for more research on the effectiveness of various methods

of teaching, and might suggest a variety of methods for assessing efficacy.

How Might Critical, Policy, and Public Sociology Influence the

Teaching of Professional Sociology?

Professional sociology might ask critical sociology to bring their discus-

sions about the good to the formulation of existing or future research ques-

tions and to the shaping of course content. Policy sociologists might press

professional sociologists about the policy implications of their work, and

ask that they bring such concerns into their teaching, particularly if they

are teaching in a law, business, education, public policy, medical, or other

professional school.

Does bringing all four forms of sociological practice into the teaching of

professional sociology require curricular change? Some of the incorpora-

tions described occur within existing classes, whether in research methods,

social problems, or topics courses. Others involve additional curricular

components such as internships or service learning (more likely in under-

graduate programs). Should there be formal courses or programs in critical

sociology, policy sociology, or public sociology? In the 2007 ASA Guide to

Graduate Departments of Sociology, only 11 departments (eight in the United

States) indicate a specialty in Policy Analysis/Public Policy and one of these

is in criminology only (according to Jeffries 2007). Some universities, for

example, Columbia, have organized extracurricular seminars that bring

together academics, policy makers, and community practitioners to discuss

issues of common concern.

Teaching and Public Sociology 219

One way to begin approaching the issue of curricula might be to col-

lect syllabi, exercises, and other teaching materials being used in existing

courses and programs in critical, policy, and public sociology, and get them

published by the Teaching Resources Center of the American Sociological

Association. In the early years of sociology, course syllabi were published in

the American Journal of Sociology in an effort to share curricular content. Be-

fore it is likely that there would be significant curricular changes in graduate

departments of sociology, I think it would be important to have a critical

mass of existing courses, scholarly materials, and teaching resources, as well

as visible career paths for students pursuing such specialties.

CONCLUSION

Teaching may be the most frequently practiced form of public sociol-

ogy. As a consequence, it behooves us to be mindful of how and what

we teach and who are our publics. Michael Burawoy’s articulation of four

types of sociology raises a series of questions and issues for the teaching of

sociology, including what should be taught both to undergraduates and

graduates and how professional, critical, policy, and public sociology might

enrich each other and the teaching of sociology. If we introduce students

to all four forms of sociology we are likely to reach more publics. We can

enhance teaching and learning by using professional, critical, and policy

perspectives to interrogate them. Doing this may suggest potential curricu-

lar changes. Continuing to explore the four forms of sociological practice

discussed here has the potential to affect the future of both teaching and

public sociology.

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