Sleeping in the Box, Thinking outside the Box: Student Reflections on Innovative Pedagogical Tools for Teaching about and Promoting a Greater Understanding of Social Class Inequality among Undergraduates

Abstract

Teaching about social stratification and social inequality is fundamental to any curriculum in sociology. Yet often students are not as excited about these courses as they are about others. In order to engage students in active learning, I developed a course that used a variety of pedagogical strategies designed to provide experiential and service-learning situations to help students connect readings such as those by Marx, Olin Wright, and Davis and Moore with the situation of social class in contemporary United States. Students were required to keep journals of their experiences, and their journal entries provide the data for this paper. Though there is considerable room for improvement, the data suggest that the pedagogical tools employed were successful in promoting a deeper level of learning around issues of inequality, particularly social class inequality, as it exists in the United States.