Tapping Contexts for Teaching

ASA’s newest educational publication, The Contexts Reader, is a joint effort with the College Books division of W.W. Norton & Company. It is intended to further assist teachers to use timely, real-world sociology scholarship in the classroom. The content is derived from Contexts: Understanding People in Their Social Worlds, ASA’s five-year-old award-winning magazine.

Nearly 70 of the best articles and original essay photos from Contexts comprise this 500-page anthology, which has been priced for educational use. Because students are the target audience for this collection, each article is accompanied by study and discussion questions, which were developed by the Contexts editors working with an ASA advisory group.

Education has been a recent focus of these Vantage Point columns. Release of The Contexts Reader at the Annual Meeting in August stimulated this column’s fourth consecutive discussion of education issues. In July/August, I addressed ASA efforts toward an Advanced Placement test in sociology; in May/June, I wrote about the U.S. Department of Education ambitious and controversial Spellings’ Commission; and in April, I lamented the departure of ASA’s veteran “mother of sociology education,” Carla Howery, and chronicled the development of the teaching and learning movement in sociology and at the ASA. Publication of the Reader represents the latest in the Association’s efforts to support and lead in undergraduate sociology teaching.

A Culmination of Education-Focused Efforts

Contexts magazine has evolved in many ways, one of which has been to become an exciting teaching tool in undergraduate, community college, and high school classrooms. The accessibility of its writing and the timeliness of its content are the magazine’s strongest characteristics in presenting scientifically based knowledge to a broad audience. Its content is becoming prized for its fit with curricula, not only in sociology courses, but also in related disciplines that deal with today’s pressing social issues and public debates. University of California (UC) Press has helped ASA make Contexts magazine available for classroom adoption by facilitating access to pre-publication articles and reduced-price bulk subscriptions. The Contexts editors and ASA were also committed to providing other cost-effective ways to compliment the print, online, and library e-reserve access teachers have through RightsLink.

The summer 2007 publication of the Reader is the culmination of a two-year effort of Contexts editors James Jasper and Jeff Goodwin, ASA staff, W.W. Norton editor Karl Bakeman, UC Press, and an advisory group (Rebecca Adams, Tina Martinez, Jodi O’Brien, Richard Schaefer, Patricia Warren) chaired by New York University’s Caroline Persell. Jonathan Wynn of Smith College worked on the study questions. Several professors have already adopted it for the fall semester, according to Norton. Bakeman was an enthusiastic supporter of publishing the Reader because he shared ASA’s agenda “to bring the best and most interesting work by today’s sociologists to a general audience.” The Contexts editors and Bakeman wanted to make more of the magazine’s content available during a single semester than could be provided by one or two new quarterly issues. Their goal was a flexible collection including some of the articles for which the most reprint permissions have been sought.

Read or re-read Contexts editor Jasper’s elaboration on the educational uses of the magazine (January 2007 Footnotes, "Contexts Magazine as a Teaching Tool") and explore the UC Press’s special webpage for teaching with Contexts at www.Contextsmagazine.org/classroom.php. Jasper has confided that the popularity of Contexts among undergraduates, the magazine’s largest non-sociology audience, is largely a result of the tough editing criteria established by Contexts’ founding editor Claude Fischer, who insisted and rigorously enforced that articles be readable by non-experts. Recognized by The Library Journal as one of the “Top-10 Best New Magazines of 2002,” and by the Association of American Publishers as “the best journal in the social sciences for 2002,” Contexts magazine remains highly regarded also for its syntheses of the diverse sociological work of scholars into essays aimed at a general audience.

Contexts’ growing popularity as a teaching resource was a driving force behind efforts to capitalize on the tremendous investment of time and talent all its editors put into launching the magazine and to sustain the ASA financial investment. According to Jasper, the Reader provides an alternative approach to using standard introductory texts and greater accessibility to the undergraduate than typical journal articles.

Goodwin also reminded us that the Reader’s inclusion of special “keyword” essays, which dissect important social-science concepts as well as articles, is intended to help readers better understand and retain knowledge from the articles. The inclusion of recommended readings and website addresses add to the value of the publication’s utility for students wanting to dig deeper into the articles wide-ranging and exciting content.

Read more about The Contexts Reader at http://www.wwnorton.com/college/titles/soc/context/.