Curated by the TRAILS editorial staff, Resource Collections highlight syllabi, activities and assignments around important topics in sociology. Click the collection titles below to see a hand picked set of TRAILS resources.
January 9, 2025
This resource collection includes syllabi and assignments for criminology and criminal justice courses. There are syllabi for courses on green criminology, sociology of murder, and mass shootings. Activities involve introducing students to content analysis, understanding crime data, doing book reviews, and more.
January 8, 2025
The Gender and Sexualities Syllabi and Assignments Resource Collection includes resources for a range of courses in the subfields of gender and sexualities.
November 7, 2024
The Social Theory Syllabi, Assignments, and Activtities Resource Collection includes resources for undergraduate and graduate social theory courses.
August 15, 2024
The Social Problems Resource Collection highlights a number of resources suitable to Introduction to Social Problems.
July 12, 2024
Using fiction is a great way to engage students. The Using Fiction in the Classroom Resource Collection includes syllabi and activities that use novels, television shows, and movies.
May 9, 2024
Pro-Palestinian protests are being led by college students. Worldwide, students have established encampments at nearly 100 universities and colleges demanding their campuses divest from Israel. Students have faced counter-protesters and violent and forceful removal by police with support from their campus administrators. These are not the first campus encampments or student-led protest. The Social Movements and Collective Action Resource Collection includes teaching activities to help you teach topics relevant to the current moment. Please note, many resources in this collection were published prior to the 2023-2024 academic year and may need updating to better reflect most recent events.
February 28, 2024
The Listening and Music Resource Collection pulls together assignments that ask students to apply sociology to the creation of playlists and analysis of lyrics and provides guidance on teaching students how to listen for learning.
November 17, 2023
The Race and Ethnicity Syllabi and Assignments highlights 20 resources for courses on race and ethnicity. This collection includes activities that use novels, streaming shows, and government data for instruction. There are syllabi for a fully online course and for a course on Black Sociological Thought.
October 26, 2023
Students enjoy playing games, and games are a good way to make abstract concepts sticky. There are numerous TRAILS resources that adapt games students are already familiar with (e.g., Monopoly, Life) and games that were created for the classroom.
May 31, 2023
Numerous assignments on TRAILS ask students to make photographs or collect pictures in the form of essays, presentations, or other formats. This resource collection of Visual Sociology and Photography Projects showcases the range of visual sociology projects available on TRAILS.
April 7, 2023
The climate crisis is a major contemporary problem that affects all of us. Some of us are teaching in places seeing direct impacts via more extreme "natural" disasters. While others may be located in places where the impacts are less direct or obvious. Regardless, sociology instructors should strive to incorporate climate change and environmental sociology more directly in our instruction. In the Climate Change and Environmental Sociology resource collection, you will find teaching modules, assignment instructions, and a syllabus to help you add sociological insight to the climate crisis.
February 23, 2023
This collection contains resources that are useful for teaching sociology on the high school level. It includes resources that were submitted by high school instructors, as well as 100-level college material that is easily adaptable for high school students. In 2022, ASA assembled a workshop with high school sociology teachers and sociology professors to develop resources specifically for a new “High School Sociology Toolkit.” These lessons and acitvities coincide with the four learning domains found in the National Standards for High School Sociology. The resources created from that workshop are also included in this collection and are titled with the prefix, "High School Workshop Toolkit."
January 13, 2023
Many of us seek to engage our students with our community. This resource collection includes activities that focus on service learning, social justice, and social change.
January 13, 2023
Few job ads explicitly say they want a sociologist or sociology major even though, sociology majors have a lot of the skills employers desire. Therefore, instructors are tasked with helping students make connections between what they are learning for their degree and what employers want. This resource collection includes materials for helping students with career planning and getting jobs. There are assignments and activities that can be used as part of a capstone course, but also that can be integrated throughout the sociology curriculum.
October 27, 2022
The MacArthur Fellows Program (“Genius” grant) provides support to outstanding individuals (not projects). Two of the 2022 recipients, Jennifer Carlson (gun culture) and Reuben Jonathan Miller (incarceration), are sociologists. One of the 2022 recipients, Steven Ruggles (statistics), is a historical demographer and created the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), used by many sociologists. The 2022 MacArthur Fellows Resource Collection includes resources related to their research areas: gun culture, incarceration, and statistics.
October 13, 2021
Proficiency with statistics is one of the many valuable skills sociology majors can gain through their studies. It connects students to the empirical basis of the discipline and represents a marketable job skill. Sometimes viewed with dread, the resources in this TRAILS Collection demonstrate that teaching statistics can be engaging, and even fun.
October 27, 2021
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many campuses are moving more of the sociology curriculum online. This resource collection highlights recent contributions of high quality resources designed for teaching online, with all of the unique pedagogical challenges that modality brings.
October 20, 2021
In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd on May 25 2020, conversations about racial disparities in policing surged in the news and on social media. This resource collection helps sociology faculty take those conversations to the next level, going deeper by giving students the opportunity to engage with relevant data, and going broader by considering how racial disparities play out across the criminal justice system, from crime victimization, to policing, to incarceration and re-entry.
February 23, 2023
TRAILS, the Teaching Resources and Innovation Library for Sociology, provides a way for you to easily locate peer-reviewed teaching materials, showcase your teaching ideas, develop professionally, and join a community of scholarly teachers. You will find great assignments, syllabi, lectures, and other teaching ideas at TRAILS. Please also consider submitting your great ideas for teaching. The Featured Resources include some of the newest additions to our collection.
-Stephanie Medley-Rath
TRAILS Lead Editor
May 31, 2023
Browse the entire collection of TRAILS resources here.
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