Selected Research Papers in Social Change, Education, Labour Market, and Criminology Volume II

3 Theoretical aspects

The idea of drive-by sociology is based on theoretical aspects on two levels: teaching-learning methods and sociological models. We are going to focus on both levels in this chapter.

As a teaching-learning method it is obvious that the drive-by method does not spill abstract premises and ready-to-adopt answers to sociological questions. In this respect the method is a counterpart to mere repetition and reproduction as provided in classical behaviorist learning models. Instead, the method clears a space for free and explorative student learning. As a consequence, students’ answers to one specific question can be quite different and subjective. Nevertheless, it is possible and necessary to discuss subjective perceptions, derived interpretations, and discovered theoretical explanations.

In this respect, drive-by sociology allows the students to make their own experiences with the social world and its relation to sociological thinking and theory. According to the focus on free experience and individual creativity the drive-by method is based on the ideas of humanistic education (Patterson, 1973; Simpson, 1976) like Gestalt pedagogy and Confluent Education (Brown, 1971; Brown, 1975; Goodman, 1964; Goodman, 1994; Dennison, 1999). Compared to simple repetition and reproduction, decisive advantages of experience-based teaching-learning methods are that these methods allow a more sustainable learning and train directly the students’ competencies.

On the other hand, drive-by sociology reflects parts and steps of an important theoretical model of sociological thinking: the micro-macro model, often used – yet not invented – by Coleman (1987, 1990: 6 ff.). The micro-macro model connects variables on the macrosociological level like social conditions and social effects with microsociological aspects like a concrete actor with his knowledge, possibilities, aims, decisions, and actions. As Coleman (1987: 154) frames it, a

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complete explanation should connect macrosociological proposition with individual variables. An example is his reconstruction of Weber’s (1958) argumentation about the rise of capitalism in protestant regions.

Generally spoken, according to Coleman collective effects can not be explained only by social conditions. Instead, a sociological explanation has to show how sociological conditions affect the relevant decisions and actions of the actor. Compiling actions of several actors together leads to a transformation back to the macro level with collective effects and social results (Wippler/Lindenberg, 1987). In a dynamic analysis this can be the starting point for the next macro-micro-macro cycle.

The micro-macro model can be an important tool for visualizing the theoretical concept of methodological individualism in sociology (Boudon, 1987). Also it can be seen as a basic framework for the students’ task in drive-by sociology. The students make their observations on-site at the drive-by location for data collection. When the students arrange and reflect their observations – explicitly or implicitly – deal with the question on which level the observations can be reconstructed: as social conditions or social effects? Did the students perceive individual actors and/or their individual action results?

Composing observed and not observed (but hypothetically expected) variables together can be seen as drawing a complete micro-macro model. When the students try to explain their observations by adopting a sociological theory, they eventually reach the stony path of connecting empirical findings and theoretical propositions with the important insight that sometimes theory fits and sometimes not. In this respect, drive-by sociology can lead to a better understanding of micromacro relations.

4 Getting the most out of the seminar – Teaching strategies and methods

As pointed out, the seminar is supposed to be a creative combination of pedagogical methods and sociological research. It is based on exploratory sociological research, which investigates social phenomena and looks for sociological research starting points. We applied this research method within an open teaching-learning framework. But how could such a seminar be designed to overcome all the challenges regarding the student achievements and particularly the student participation, involvement, creativity, and enthusiasm for the academic topics?

Academic courses and seminars are usually carried out in the form of frontal lectures: The teaching staff presents different subject matters in front of the students who should listen carefully in order to take notes. The students receive their final grades at the end of each semester. Even seminars and small courses often do not succeed in establishing learning environments that truly support students’ development because they do not encourage the participation of students in the course and the lively discussions among students and thus do not enable the students to reach their fullest creative potential.

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Ex-cathedra teaching, as a passive teaching approach, seems to be completely inappropriate not only for our seminar purposes, but also for the whole modern teaching-learning process. The abilities of tomorrow's students widely depends on the education they receive (Grant, 2009: 7). In a world suffocated by the rapid production and distribution of information, it is no longer sufficient for the academic staff to impart knowledge and academic content to their students. The wide offer of different types of information, for example knowledge products of various quality, the possibility to have access to different information sources, and the rapidity of the knowledge transfer, requires enforced rethinking and procedural readjustment of teaching and learning processes. To link the education to the challenges and changes of our modern knowledge society, the academic staff must not only identify what is important for the students to learn and what kind of competencies they need in order to overcome the challenges posed by our society’s transformation, but also find out how we – as teaching staff – can design appropriate teaching methods and strategies that support the students’ development (Prosch/Alilovic, 2009). In this regard, we attempted to shape an open teaching-learning framework by implementing the different kinds of teaching methods in the concept of drive-by sociology.

As the main focus of the seminar lay on the application of the acquired knowledge in the area of sociological theory and exploratory social research, we put special accent on the following content issues and scientific methods:

• Performance of successive sociological observations in short sequences which took place in public spaces.

• Construction of sociological hypotheses and research questions based on the observed “daily life” social activities. The students referred to this during our discussion sessions at the university and in the short essays that they composed.

• Sociological interpretation and explanation of the observed social phenomena, using sociological theoretical approaches learned by the students in the former semesters.

• Writing of scientific reports in the form of short essays and term papers.

In addition to the conduct and practice of the exploratory sociological research, we used different kinds of teaching strategies and pedagogical methods (Hassard, 2005; Grant, 2009) in order to cover all seminar tasks that encouraged the full participation, involvement, and enthusiasm of the students:

• Open discussions represented one of the central aspects of the seminar. The discussions followed the drive-by observations and allowed an intensive exchange of ideas, information, and points of view among the students. Most of our discussions took place in plenum, but the students were sometimes asked to work in pairs too: One student reported and interpreted sociologically what she/he observed; her/his partner put to her/him only why-questions which the partner had to try to answer. This kind of partner interviewing allowed a very intensive discussion and reflection on the observed social phenomena.

• Evaluation and feedback from both sides followed regarding all the aspects of the seminar: The students expressed their opinions in the feedback

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chapter of their term papers or at the last seminar meeting where they filled out anonymous feedback flipcharts on three issues: the positive, the sustainable, and the negative features of the seminar. The students also sent us their opinions by email. We, as teaching staff, had the following ways to evaluate the students’ work and to give feedback during the seminar: Individual feedbacks to the essays written by the students after every seminar meeting; overview feedbacks at the beginning of our seminar meetings – we emphasized the typical errors and also the special interpretations in the essays; final feedback to the seminar papers; final conclusions at the last meeting. A detailed overview of the students’ feedback follows in Chapter 7.

• Interactive exercises for repeating theoretical basics. Due to the fact that our seminar was designed for advanced students, who were already familiar with the basics of social research and sociological theory, we spent only a little time on the recapitulation of some theoretical topics in the form of interactive and “self-doing” exercises in small groups with subsequent joint discussions and explanations from our side. One example for the interactive exercises is a reflection module regarding the starting points of empirical social research (Graziano/Raulin, 2009). The students were divided into small groups. Each group received flipchart paper on which a field “Hypotheses/Research questions” was drawn in the middle. It was surrounded by several other fields pointing at it. The students were asked to fill out the blank fields. Each field was supposed to indicate a starting point or a reason for empirical social research. Finally, the groups presented their ideas to each other and controversially discussed the results. Our role as teachers was to moderate the discussion and to perfect the students’ results.

Another exercise was to classify and describe the different types of sociological research. In an illustrative way we depicted explorative social research as an integrative part of the typology of social research methods. On large posters we wrote the types of social research, namely exploratory research and descriptive, explanatory, and evaluation studies. For each of the categories we prepared several slips of paper. On each slip was described a feature of one of the four categories. The students were again divided into small groups and each group got a large poster and a bundle of notes. Their task was to allocate the slips of paper to the corresponding category according to the features written on them. Finally, the groups compared their results, discussed, and corrected their mistakes. We carried out similar exercises regarding other topics: We defined the main steps to conduct an empirical sociological research or formulated different types of hypotheses. These exercises and the short recapitulative sequences found a positive resonance among the students (for details see Chapter 7).

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5 Particularities and organizational barriers to the driveby concept
Moving toward alternative ways of thinking, experimenting with new teaching methods, or implementing changes leads necessarily to different kinds of developments such as fruitful outputs as well as undesired obstacles. Due to the specific characteristics of the drive-by sociology concept, we also had to face some difficulties during its implementation.

At first we experienced problems with financing the seminar. Because we planned to visit different public places in the town, we had to buy tickets for the public transport for the whole group of participating students. After successful negotiation with the local transportation company, we received sponsored tickets for our driveby destinations. Furthermore, we were not able to plan exactly our seminar schedule and our drive-by destinations because of the unpredictable weather changes. We preferred to undertake outdoor activities in good weather conditions, because some of the locations that we intended to visit were open-air. Thus, we had to make some short-term changes to our seminar schedule. Managing the unexpected organizational matters required a flexible planning of the entire seminar.

Both teaching staff and participating students experienced difficulties during the seminar. On the one hand, to develop and test new methods demands different teaching skills from the teachers, for example: • Achievement orientation and commitment to the development and continuous improvement of the seminar • Energetic preparation of the courses that results in flexible individual and periodic student assessment and the design of interesting exercises • Variation in teaching methods • Utilization of appropriate teaching techniques • Ability to act in unscheduled contexts: The students confronted us every session with a wide spectrum of sociological topics – more than those which we planned to discuss in advance On the other hand, the students had to actively participate in the seminar, to synthesize their impressions writing short essays after each meeting and to be creative in applying the acquired knowledge and in interpreting the social phenomena that they observed.

To sum up, the overall seminar framework and teaching-learning activities was a rewarding experience for both teachers and students and also led to positive developments, especially effective communication and intensive exchange of ideas among the students. The fact that we were allowed to participate in pedagogical decision making, to experience and put into practice new teaching concepts, gave us an opportunity to recommend new methods at universities and high schools, to offer examples of good practice, and to give an idea to other teachers and staff members of how they can better design the teaching process.

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6 Example for hypothesis generation a drive-by location
To show how the process from the observation to some simple hypotheses can work, one very easy example can be given from the trip to the airport departure hall.

• Examples of observations: There are two counters, people are arriving there, they start queuing. After there is a queue at the first counter, people also go to the second counter. One man changes from queue one to queue two. At the same time, a woman arrives; he lets her pass. She says thank you.

• Interpretation: People have concerns, therefore they go to the counter. Queuing seems to be a known solution to get what you want, if there are many people at the same time. There seem to be some rules regulating behavior when men and women meet.

• Hypothesis 1: If people have the same concern at the same time in the same place they will form a queue.

• Hypothesis 2: If there is a new possibility at the same time in the same place to have your concern settled, then the queue will split into two queues of nearly same length.

• Hypothesis 3: If a man is well-educated and wants to be a “gentleman”, he will yield to a woman. Of course, the students observed different aspects and developed different hypotheses. Nevertheless, all students had the task to connect their hypotheses with all known theories and methods. As this very simple example shows, it is very easy to get from a tiny bit of observation to some questions which are touching basic sociological issues. Starting with this observation it is possible to reach topics like social behavior, gender roles, different aspects of organizational sociology, social rules and norms, and many more sociological subjects.

7 Empirical evidence – Evaluation of the seminar from the students’ point of view

For us as teachers it is very important not only to give feedback to the students but also to get feedback from them. The students had the possibility to express their opinions in the chapter “Reflection” of their term papers, as they were free to write about their impressions of the organization and the content of the seminar and to make possible suggestions. Additionally, there was a feedback module during our last seminar meeting, where the students gave anonymous written responses to the following subjects concerning the seminar:

• Positive aspects of the seminar • Critique and improvement suggestions

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• Personal benefit from the seminar

Based on their anonymous written responses we extracted the following opinions on the three subjects:

Positive aspects of the seminar (question: “Which aspect of the seminar was most positive?”):

• Linkage to real-life situations: “The seminar was closely related to practice”, “Theory meets practice”, “Suitability of sociology for daily life”

• Training of the sociological imagination: “Forming a wide view on the interpretation of everyday situations”, “Seeing trivial things from different perspectives”, “We were motivated and we had the opportunity to reflect upon things that we had never noticed before”

• Organizational and other aspects: “Open air sessions”, “Action”, “Varied activities during the seminar”, “No presentations” Critique and improvement suggestions (question: “What else could have been done better?”)

• Regarding drive-by locations: “Other location instead of the airport”, “Other location instead of the graveyard”

• Other answers: “No term paper”, “Relocate the discussions to the third floor”

Personal benefit from the seminar (question: “What did I take from the seminar?”)

• Sociological key competencies: “Awareness of sociological topics”, “New approach to specifying sociological topics”, “Development of sociological skills”, “Improvement of the observation talent”

• Thinking in an open-minded way: “Development of different points of view especially regarding the neighbourhood Nuremberg-Langwasser”, “To diminish prejudices”

• Other answers: “2 credit points”, “Get to know other corners of the city”, “Realizing that one should remember the visited places” In their term papers in the chapter “Reflection” the students evaluated the seminar and described in detail their opinion about it and their learning effects. To get a picture of the students’ views we documented the variety of the opinions elaborately. We classified the topics of the messages into the following six main categories:

• Alternative conceptualization of the seminar • Development and training of the sociological key competencies • Written essays • Theoretical inputs • General conclusions • Critique and improvement suggestions

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Alternative conceptualization of the seminar: • “Contrast to most of the courses and seminars at the university, which usually take place in lecture halls or seminar rooms and cover theoretical subject matters”

• “Because of different places and little time spent in seminar rooms, we had an enjoyable and diversified seminar program”

• “Relaxed atmosphere very agreeable and advantageous for our interactions and also for the teaching of theory”

• “Exciting free feeling to experience sociology with our fellow students outside the lecture halls”

• “Seminar allows students to experience that sociology does not only consist of theory, but can be experienced and applied in our daily lives”

• “Important chance to exchange our opinions on the observations we made, because the different participants interpreted the same observation in different ways”

• “The discussions in pairs, which took place at the last meeting, achieved in my opinion the most positive effect”

Development and training of the sociological key competencies: • “Observations in the public spaces and the discussions during and also after the seminar enabled us to comprehend the core of the everyday phenomena and situations”

• “Research questions can arise not only in the course of literature researches but they can be formulated on the basis of everyday life situations”

• “I learned how sociology works in practice. I widened my own view on the sociology application in everyday life situations”

• “First of all we have to train and practice our ability to observe, interpret and describe social systems”

• “Before the seminar I was not really aware of the fact that current events can be a background for sociological theories”

• “Since I had previously experienced sociology only from the theoretical perspectives, the insights that everything out there in front of my own doorstep can be explained and described by sociological theories or hypotheses was totally new to me.”

• “The lecturers managed in a wonderful way to open our eyes, to sharpen our senses and arouse our concern for our own personal environment”

Written essays: • “Essays made me aware of the progress I made during the seminar. It was extremely hard for me to write the first essay, but every next one I wrote was easier”

• “By writing the essays we practiced the formulation of hypotheses” • “It was advantageous to write several essays rather than one at the end of the semester in a short time. Thus, we were much more involved in the topic and it was easier to participate in the discussions”

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• “The perception and observation of social phenomena was not just a waste of time, because we had the responsibility to express it in our essays. This implied a careful observation of the locations” Theoretical inputs: • “Although the focus of the seminar lay on practical experience, we also discussed some theoretical topics. I found the recapitulation of theory that we had learned in former semesters very useful”

• “The theoretical overview of the empirical sociology was of great help to me even in other courses. Such refreshing sessions are welcomed in advanced semesters because many things that we learn fade over time”

• “I liked in the seminar that the theoretical parts were kept short and were carried out in the form of group work. Working in teams too rarely happens in the academic context”

• “Theory should also play an important role in practice-oriented seminars, as it helps us to work systematically”

General conclusions: • “To sum it up, I found the seminar very successful” • “All in all, I liked very much the seminar and I would recommend it any time” • “I would assess this seminar as a very interesting and positive one, as it affected my perception and interpretation of social life. In my opinion, this was only possible due to the practice relevance of the seminar”

• “To summarize it, the seminar had for me a relatively high learning effect”