Teaching
Teaching
I have taught seventeen distinct undergraduate courses across five institutions, in sociology departments, a criminal justice school, and a joint sociology and management program.
How I build a course
My courses are organized around a single conviction: students learn a discipline by doing what people in the discipline do, not by being told what those people concluded. In practice that means most class meetings end with students having handled something real, whether that is a federal enforcement database, a set of survey measurements, a sentencing document, or their own prediction about a trend, drawn before they are allowed to see the data.
The vehicle for that is a set of in-class labs I write myself. Each one is a self-contained web page that runs on whatever device a student brought, holds published data or real cases, asks for a judgment, and then shows what the evidence does to that judgment. Students submit their work at the end of the session. Forty-seven of these are finished, and all of them are posted publicly for any instructor to use.
Beyond that, three commitments show up in every syllabus. Reading comes from articles and primary sources rather than from a textbook wherever the course can support it, so students meet arguments in the form their authors wrote them. Assessment is scaffolded rather than concentrated, so a student who is lost in week four finds out in week four. And the policy on generative AI is explicit about where it is permitted and where it is not, rather than leaving students to guess.
Courses by area
Introductory and general education
Introduction to Sociology
A first course that treats sociology as a set of tools for seeing familiar things differently rather than as a tour of topics. Each unit pairs a concept with published data students interrogate directly, from census category changes to the decomposition of the gender pay gap to a runnable Schelling segregation model.
Criminology and criminal justice
Criminology
Theories of crime and the evidence for them, taught alongside the question of where crime data come from and what each counting system cannot see. A semester-long scaffolded paper asks each student to build a complete criminological account of one offense type, one part at a time.
Community Oriented Policing
The organizational side of community and problem-oriented policing: officer discretion, how departments measure work that resists measurement, and what happens to problem-solving efforts designed by officers who are evaluated on something else.
Juvenile Delinquency
Dangerous and Violent Offenders
Elements of Criminal Offenses
Federal Criminal Justice System
Applied Ethics for Criminal Justice Practitioners
Careers and Technology in Criminal Justice
White-collar crime and deviance
Sociology of White-Collar Crime
The course closest to my own research, and the one I am building for spring. Readings are articles and primary documents rather than a textbook, and the recurring work is a set of crime labs built on real enforcement records, from OSHA fatality investigations to the EPA's compliance database to federal deferred prosecution agreements. Each student carries one real case through a five-part project across the semester.
Sociology of Deviance
How conduct comes to be classified as deviant, who does the classifying, and what the classification then does to the people it lands on.
Organizations, work, and technology
Formal Organizations and Bureaucracy
A joint sociology and management course on organizational structure, control, and the gap between what organizations say they do and what they do.
Sociology of Organizations
Technology in Society
Theory
Sociological Theory
Classical and contemporary theory taught through the arguments themselves. Students read the theorists rather than summaries of them, and each session works toward using a theory on a case rather than restating what it claims.
Theories of Social Interaction
Research methods
Research Methods
A design-first methods course in which students build one study across the semester, with a parallel sequence of hands-on lab sessions covering measurement, sampling, causality, survey construction, interviewing and transcription, qualitative coding, observation, and content analysis.
Teaching materials for other instructors
Every lab I have built is free to use, adapt, and assign. They are plain web pages with no accounts, no tracking, and no server behind them, so they work from a projector, a phone, or a learning management system link.