ASA’s TRAILS
ASA’s Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology (TRAILS) is an excellent source for lesson plan ideas relevant to teaching race. Here are a few recommendations available through the TRAILS website:
Identifying Privilege and White Fragility (Brennan Miller, Kent State University)
What’s in a Name? (Jerome Rabow, UCLA)
Social Inequality: Race and the Criminal Legal System (Nick Rochin, UIC)
Implicit Association Test Assignment (Zachary Simoni, University of Alabama)
Stratification Active Learning Assignments (Annette Lareau, University of Pennsylvania)
Social Construction of Race, Ethnicity, and/or Gender Through Media (Amy Baumann Grau, Eastern New Mexico University)
Teaching Sociology
Teaching Sociology is ASA’s quarterly journal for discipline-specific research on teaching and learning. In addition to experimental research on teaching sociology, the journal publishes lesson plans and exercises (with commentary) that may be adopted by instructors teaching race in the college classroom. A few recommendations include:
Teaching Race as a Social Construction: Two Interactive Exercises (Nikki Khanna, UVM and Cherise Harris, Connecticut University)
Seeing Race: Teaching Residential Segregation with the Racial Dot Map (Charles Seguin, University of Arizona et. al.)
“Just Talking About Life”: Using Oral Histories of the Civil Rights Movement to Encourage Classroom Dialogue on Race (Melencia Johnson & Philip Mason, University of South Carolina)
Tracing Family, Teaching Race: Critical Race Pedagogy in the Millennial Classroom (Jennifer Mueller, Texas A&M)
The Social Construction of Social Facts: Using the U.S. Census to Examine Race as a Scientific and Moral Category (Eleanor Townsley, Mount Holyoke College)
Local Talent
Every semester, graduate students and instructors in the Sociology Department at UW-Madison are creating new, innovative ways to facilitate discussions about race in their classrooms. To share a lesson plan you have created with future instructors and TAs, email the MRRC and we will curate the lesson plan on this webpage.
An example lesson plan for Sociology 210, provided by Nona Gronert: Discussing Race Using Beyonce’s Superbowl Performance