Trails: The ASA's Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology

This activity, created by Dakota Dougherty, is designed to help students strengthen their understanding of key sociological theories and concepts through analysis of the 2004 film Mean Girls.
https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/learning-social-processes-through-mean

Trenton Ellis and Michael Hollingsworth created an activity that facilitates critical investigation of theories that explain the causes and experiences of disability in society and can be completed by individual or groups of students via in-person or online class modalities.
https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/grocery-run-teaching-the-social

Chengguang Hu created this activity to teach students that politics are not limited to elections or public protests but also appears in everyday conversations, decisions, and moments when people choose to speak or stay silent.
https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/between-voice-and-silence-political

In this activity, Hannah Judson designed it to help students learn core sociological concepts through analysis of and application to a short game show TV episode
https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/what-are-the-rules-of

In this assessment, Beatrice Waterhouse challenges the normative
assumptions present in students’ existing definitions of violence by asking students to confront ambiguous cases individually, see the divergent opinions within their classroom community, and begin to seek sociological explanations for the sanction or approval of different kinds of violence in society at large. https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/polling-to-interrogate-students-lay

In this class activity, Reginald Byron enables students to make connections between race and space on their own campuses. https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/teaching-about-racialized-space-on

In this syllabus, Ellen Meiser created it for a 17-week long, upper-division in-person Sociology of Food course designed with an interdisciplinary Food Studies approach. The course touches on topics ranging from food systems, access, identity, (de)colonization, gentrification, and consumerism. https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/sociology-of-food-syllabus

In this class activity, Reginald Byron has undergraduate students engage with multiple interactive maps using a sociological/criminological lens and tries to convey an understanding of how the social structure of neighborhoods spatially coincide with U.S. fatal gun violence. https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/4332

In this assignment, Jaclyn Tabor uses the documentary Teenage (Matt Wolf, 2013) and the New York Times “Teenage Bill of Rights” (1945) to help students analyze adolescence as a socially constructed life stage. https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/the-teenage-bill-of-rights

In this assignment, May Takeuchi and Alex Takeuchi uses BBQ to introduce students to step-by-step spreadsheet operations, and help them acquire basic knowledge and skills of simple linear regression analysis discussed in elementary statistics textbooks.
https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/4298