New England Sociological Association

NESA News, the newsletter of the New England Sociological Association, is published by the Executive Council of the Association. To offer comments or suggestions, email mwalsh@keene.edu.

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“Summer Research with Undergraduate Students: The SURE Program at Stonehill College” By Patricia Leavy, Associate Professor of Sociology at Stonehill College, Easton, MA.

Stonehill College has a unique undergraduate summer research opportunity that brings students and faculty members together in scholarly pursuits. This competitive program is called “The Summer Undergraduate Research Experience” (SURE). Students and faculty teams collaborate on short research proposals which should have scholarly benefits to the students (so students don’t simply end up as clerical assistants). Funded project provide students with the funds to work for 40 hours per week for an 8 or 10 week period and summer housing on campus as well as stipends for participating faculty. I view this program as a way to mentor students into the discipline of sociology—to give students experience conducting actual research, intended for presentation or publication. It is a terrific opportunity for students to gain real research experience and it allows faculty members with high teaching loads the opportunity to advance their scholarly agendas.

I have participated in the SURE program for several years. In the summer of 2008 I mentored two students on a qualitative research project about the relationship between body image and sexual identity among college-age students. Under my guidance my students compiled an extensive literature review, conducted in-depth interviews, transcribed the interviews, inductively coded the data, and interpreted the data. Based on their thoughtful and sophisticated interpretations of the data we together co-authored an article. We are now putting the finishing touches on our article which we intend to submit to a peer-review journal for publication. In the past, my SURE experiences have resulted in co-authored published articles, conference presentations, and credited research assistance on scholarly books. Students gain enormous practical experience, come to understand their disciplines better, and greatly enhance their resumes. Most of my former SURE students have gone on to graduate school.

“Using Arts-Based Research as a Teaching Tool in Sociology Classes” By Patricia Leavy, Stonehill College

I have spent the past several years exploring innovative approaches to research methodology. During this time I began working with arts-based research practices (ABR). These methodological tools, useful for data collection, analysis and representation, adapt the tenets of the creative arts in order to address social research questions in engaged ways. In qualitative research, ABR offers the following possibilities: unsettling stereotypes, building coalitions across difference, promoting dialogue, cutting through jargon and other prohibitive barriers, extending public sociology, building critical consciousness, raising awareness, and expressing feeling-based dimensions of social life (such as love, loss, and grief). As a sociology professor at an undergraduate college I wondered if ABR could be used in the classroom. I also considered if it would be worth the trouble to find out. Let’s face it, no professor has the time to learn a whole lot of new material or to fit new material into existing courses—most of us can barely cover the course content we’re already committed to. Despite these very real issues, I decided to incorporate ABR into two of my courses in order to evaluate whether it enhances existing course material or becomes an extraneous task.

I integrated ABR into a required research methods course and a 200-level sociology of popular culture elective. In both instances, it added enormously to student learning without diminishing other course content. In research methods, I spent one class period covering ABR after students read about two-thirds of an ABR book titled Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice (Guilford Press, 2009). This was towards the end of the semester after traditional quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods approaches were reviewed. The students’ final course project required them to conduct a small-scale content analysis, either quantitatively or qualitatively. In addition to their conventional research paper they were required to represent their findings using an arts-based approach (collage, poem, script) with a brief artist-researcher statement explaining their project. The resulting work was outstanding. Significantly, although some were initially apprehensive about doing something “arty”, the result was a much higher performance level on the traditional paper. I believe this is because students became more invested in their projects and immersed themselves more fully in their data. I could see creating a similar component to survey or interview projects. I had similar results incorporating ABR into my pop culture course called “Images & Power.” Students read about four chapters on ABR, completed for one class meeting in which the material was reviewed. Integrating this whole new subject area only required me to omit one short film from the class. In essence, I substituted passive learning for active learning. Students added an ABR component to their final mass media research paper. The results were again astounding. After teaching this course for about a decade I can say without hesitation that this produced the strongest group of traditional research papers that I have received. And they got a taste of a whole new subject!

With minimal effort on my part, and virtually no reduction in standard course content, the addition of ABR greatly increased student learning and engagement. I was delighted that students both learned “more” but also that they learned the regular material better. I suggest arts-based research can be a powerful teaching tool in a wide range of sociology courses.