This piece appeared in the May 2022 edition of ACJS Today. Download my assignment guidelines here. I probably shouldn’t admit this so openly, but: as a criminal justice student, I really didn’t ‘get’ theory. My theory course seemed like a semester-long exercise in memorizing an endless litany of rival explanations for the same observations, all…
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Teaching Materials: Research Methods starter pack
There is so much about academia that is grounded in competition and opportunity-hoarding. Doctoral programs can be cutthroat, pitting students against each other to compete for funding and opportunities. The job market is… well, let’s not even go there. And then there’s the mad race of the tenure track, if you can get on it…
Creative Science Communication: Student-Centered Project Development and Assessment
The following essay appeared in the Spring 2022 edition of the Division on Women & Crime newsletter, available HERE. You can find my guidelines for my science communication project HERE. “So, you let students choose their own project and make their own grading rubric?” I could hear the note of incredulity in my friend’s voice,…
Creating Mock “RFPs” for Undergraduate Research Methods
This week I tweeted a few thoughts on my approach to teaching our undergraduate “Research Methods in Sociology” and the positive response encouraged me to do a slightly more detailed write-up here. Before I launch into that, a bit of background. I teach at small university that feels more like a SLAC. We are primarily…
Community-Based Participatory Research and Feminist Criminology: Some resources
At the November 2019 meeting of the American Society of Criminology, it was my pleasure to work with Dr. Julie Yingling and graduate student Danielle Haverkate to deliver a brief workshop on community-based participatory research (CBPR). This workshop was sponsored by the Division on Women and Crime (DWC). In proposing the workshop, we argued that…
Real-world writing assignments: Resources for instructors
My little department is at a point of inflection. We have seen many retirements in the last few years and a couple of new hires — myself included! We also decided to turn our criminal justice concentration into an entire major and change our department name. We are now the Department of Sociology & Criminal…
New report: “A Pilot Workshop for Developing Early Career Scientists’ Communication Skills”
[I’m about to emulate those recipe blogs I hate by giving you an entire personal backstory before finally giving the details of the report. If you want to skip that — and I don’t blame you — you can find the report right here.] ser – end – dip – i – ty noun…
Just a thin excuse for eating a whole lotta chocolate: M&M sampling exercise
This year I finally got around to doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: a sampling demonstration with candy! It went really well, so I figured I’d write it up in case anyone else needs a bit of motivation. First, I want to recognize the two “pushes” that finally encouraged me to…
A Summer Syllabus
I admit it: I am not very organized. I am definitely a planner, but these plans usually exist in my head, on my Google calendar, or on various Post-Its scattered across at least three different working spaces in two cities. I have a lot of big ideas, but very rarely sit down and actually plot them…
Crime Mapping
Like many (most?) PhDs, I did not receive any formal training in teaching during my graduate studies. The teaching preparation in my program, at the time, was pretty much trial-by-teaching. Once we had completed our non-dissertation coursework, we could teach a course as a graduate instructor. We were paired with a supervising professor, given a…