Connecting Pedagogies to Enhance Methods of Resistance

Teaching students to think sociologically in a psychologically oriented culture is one of our most challenging tasks as instructors. Recognizing and understanding how sociological phenomena shape the classroom experience invites a more reflexive pedagogy in line with the tenets of the discipline, such as striving for social change and social justice. We are teaching our students to understand systemic inequalities and to fight for social justice, but is our pedagogy consistently in line with and using this lens? Many educators who are committed to social justice are embracing trauma-informed educational practices, an approach that does not reduce rigor or imply that students are unaccountable but that allows instructors to respond to trauma by fully integrating their knowledge of trauma in class policies, procedures, and practices. Sociology courses are especially poised to merge trauma-informed educational practices with orientations of social justice. I add to this and argue that sociology instructors can ‘do sociology’ by situating their pedagogy at the intersection of trauma-informed educational practices, culturally responsive pedagogy, and anti-racist practices; that we can teach students to be social-justice-minded, understand and respond to power imbalances, and consider differences in lived experience through these models of pedagogy—and that we in fact have a duty as instructors to teach sociologically because sociology is pedagogy; and that the ethos of our classrooms can and should lie at the intersection of these practices.