Teaching Critical Sociology: The Consequences of Pursuing a Critical Pedagogy

Presenter Information

Abdihakin Abdi, Minnesota State University, Mankato

Location

CSU 204

Start Date

6-4-2010 10:00 AM

End Date

6-4-2010 12:00 PM

Student's Major

Government

Student's College

Arts and Humanities

Mentor's Name

Paul Prew

Mentor's Department

Sociology and Corrections

Mentor's College

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Description

While there has been a great deal of literature dealing with critical pedagogy and also a separate literature dealing with students’ perceptions of bias in the classroom, there has been little that looked at the relationship between the two. Professor Prew’s course used a critical pedagogy and approached sociology from a variety of perspectives, but it was still perceived by some students as a single ―liberal perspective or his own opinion. In casual observation, we noticed that evaluations that tended to contain negative comments about Dr. Prew’s perspective tended to be lower than the class average. In this paper, we reviewed and coded the written comments on Dr. Paul Prew’s Sociology 101 course evaluations for the past 3 years to assess whether there is a correlation between the quantitative feedback on evaluations and the qualitative comments. Using correlations, means and Anova, we specifically tested to see if the qualitative comments that contain overtly negative assessments of Dr. Prew’s perspective in the course were significantly more negative than those that are neutral or complimentary regarding his perspective. The findings tended to support this hypothesis.