201. Viewpoint: Why bother with Durkheim? Teaching sociology in the 1990s.
- Author
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Parker, David
- Subjects
- *
SOCIAL sciences , *MODERNISM (Christian theology) , *TEACHERS , *HIERARCHIES , *AUTHORS , *SOCIOLOGY - Abstract
This article presents an author's viewpoint on teaching sociology in the 1990s. A staunch defender of the Western canon poses the key question well: "who reads must choose, since there is literally not enough time to read everything, even if one does nothing but read." Time constraints are even more pressing in designing courses, given that not everything can be taught. If the role of the teacher is to encourage students to have productive relationships with texts; it is imperative that these relationships are not confined to a handful of authors held to represent all sociological thinking. Instead, the following three lines of development should be pursued: A retrospective enlargement of the entry point into sociology; A re-interpretation of the implicit hierarchies underlying choices of classic authors and canonical texts; and A re-periodisation of the narratives organizing the understanding of sociology to correct the myopic focus on modernity. Teachers should distinguish more clearly between saying what sociology has been and what it might become.
- Published
- 1997
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