Introductory Sociology

At UCLA, graduate students in the Department of Sociology have the opportunity to teach 6-week summer courses. Introductory Sociology, delivered in summer of 2024, was the first class I taught as the primary instructor. In my three years as a Teaching Assistant, I had developed a special interest in introducing students to the discipline of sociology after serving as a TA for Introductory Sociology for five quarters. I developed this course based on what I learned over those five quarters, incorporating empirical and theoretical sociological work with research skill building that helps students engage with academic literature. For each class, I assigned reading from both a textbook and journal articles—the intention was that the textbook would serve as an accessible source for finding definitions for key terms and overviews of important topics, while the journal articles would challenge their reading comprehension and expose them to both classic pieces and new frontiers of sociological research. Throughout the class, students were introduced to a variety of subjects that sociologists study, with an emphasis on inequality, and participated in interactive workshops that build research skills, including how to read academic articles and how to synthesize academic findings. Students completed the course by writing a literature review on a topic of their choice.