Writing Children's Books in Sociology Class: An Innovative Approach to Teaching Social Problems to Undergraduate Students
In this instructional article, we describe a non-traditional course assignment in which we ask students in our social problems courses to write, illustrate, and present a children’s book about a social problem as part of the process of learning. Over the course of the semester, students utilize guided handouts to create a children’s book exploring and explaining a social problem of their choice. Students are asked to explain the social problem, conduct basic research, apply sociological material, and explore possible solutions. Along the way, our students learn to apply the sociological imagination and improve their understanding of how larger social phenomena shape the decisions of individuals. Students also acquire basic research skills and methodological knowledge that follows them throughout their academic career. In our experiences, we find that this fresh, intriguing assignment helps students overcome common barriers to learning about sociology, allows them to invest in their work, and encourages them to employ their own unique skills to create both a quality project and an educational memory. Survey courses on social problems often fulfill humanities requirements in many majors because these courses help provide students with a greater perception of our shared society. This makes social problems courses a large (but welcomed) teaching burden for most sociology programs. At the heart of both our discipline and the study of social problems is a desire to instill in students a lasting impression of the sociological imagination: an understanding of how social phenomena shape the lives of individuals (Mills, 1959). Yet, teaching this concept to non-sociology majors on a brief timeline while overcoming student cognitive dissonance about social issues is a lofty task. To this end, we created an innovative, nontraditional course project designed to expose undergraduate students of any major to both the sociological imagination and social problems by completing a relatively innocuous assignment: writing a children’s book. Over the course of the entire semester, students write, design, and present to the class a children’s book exploring a single social problem. Students select a social problem early in the semester and are guided through the project using handouts that help them learn research skills while writing their book. This unique, fresh assignment provides an opportunity for students to engage with the learning process academically, creatively, imaginatively, and personally. Additionally, our project can easily be adapted to other courses and other disciplines, and therefore may also be useful to non-sociology instructors. In this teaching note, we outline our goals and objectives, implementation plan, and outcomes employing this project in our own classes. At the conclusion of the semester, we find that this project has instilled a lasting sense of the sociological imagination in the student mind. Our students leave the course with a deeper appreciation and understanding of social problems in our shared society, accompanied by a fond memory of the time they wrote a children’s book in, of all places, a college classroom.