By Claudia Mei Theagene and John McMahon, SUNY Plattsburgh
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“Butler uses African American history… as a synecdoche for the cycling of racism and sexism throughout all of human history. Butler offers the story of Lauren Olamina and Earthseed as a parable for how we might avoid the "boomeranging" of history. Thus, she teaches us as readers both important lessons about history as well as techniques we might use to survive through the impending environmental, societal, and economic crises that are destined to evolve as a result of our current actions (or inactions)” – Marlene D. Allen
 
​What does Octavia E. Butler’s Afrofuturist novel Parable of the Sower offer to teachers and students of interdisciplinary legal studies? In this post, we draw on our experience as student and teacher in an African American Political Thought course at SUNY Plattsburgh in Fall 2020 in order to articulate how Butler’s novel can be an animating text for studying law and justice. It is not new for many of us to consider the relations between law and literature, law and narrative storytelling, or law and lived experience. With these dynamic discourses in mind, we claim that Butler’s apocalyptic yet utopian speculative fiction is a unique text for legal studies students in its ability to compel readers to reimagine their understanding of and relationship to structures and experiences of oppression, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, climate catastrophe, religion, the state, and ultimately of visions of a more just future.
 
The late scholar of African American literature Gregory J. Hampton summarizes the novel thusly:
Parable of the Sower is both a travelogue narrative and a sort of bible all in one. … In the first section of Parable, entitled "2024," we learn that America has developed new drugs, colonized Mars, and deteriorated into some kind of capitalistic by-product, where "politicians and big corporations get the bread," and the proletariat gets close to nothing. Middle-class people have been forced to surround themselves with protective walls, and the unskilled masses are left as scavengers on the streets of what was once thriving metropolitan areas. It is through [protagonist] Lauren [Olamina’s] observations and opinions about the state of her world and its gods that she begins to construct Earthseed: The Book of the Living. Earthseed is Lauren's formulation of parables that outline a religion that identifies God as change and seeks to propagate itself and humanity throughout the stars.
In this post, we elaborate how this untimely world and ethical journey created by Butler proves edifying for students of law and justice.  

Parable of the Sower will challenge students to think beyond their personal beliefs and what they know. In the long run, it can prepare them for their fight for justice; this is important for any individual looking to enter the legal field and seeking that laws should be applied fairly. Furthermore, the book expands its readers’ interpretation skills through the way it provokes deeper evaluations of daily circumstances. The novel engages numerous topics, such as religion, climate catastrophe, police brutality, racial capitalism, and so on. Discussions involving these issues often cause an individual to automatically turn towards their own views, but Butler implements them in a way that pushes readers to question how close their reality is to the dystopia presented in the novel. 

Interpretation plays a vital part within law, and specifically in constitutional law. For example, precedent refers to previous court cases and rulings that have been made to set the authoritative standard for future cases dealing with the respective dispute. When looking at major landmark Supreme Court cases and the development of the Court’s interpretation of certain amendments (i.e. the commerce clause, necessary and proper clause, enumerated powers, scope of the Fourteenth Amendment, etc.), it is essential to be able to analyze the interpretive frameworks used by successive Justices and track change over time. As time progressed and societal views started to develop, the justice’s interpretation of constitutional laws began to change as well and it was evident within the court decisions. Parable of the Sower challenges readers to decipher, analyze, and acknowledge how society has fallen into a chaotic dystopia. When engaging in judicial interpretation and analysis, those skills can be applied in order to determine whether or not there has been a significant change to the conditions leading to earlier rulings, and to the anticipated consequences of future rulings. 

Alongside building the ability to interpret different ideals, the novel will also expose the reader to oppression in a different light. As stated before, the novel addresses numerous social issues in a non-traditional--at least for many legal studies classrooms--manner. By basing the genre of the novel around science-fiction and placing the setting in the late 2020s, it opens the reader to receiving the social critique the novel presents. When issues such as racism, political corruption, and so on are presented in speeches, essays, journal articles and other non-fiction methods, people who are in a place of privilege and structural power are likely to automatically become defensive and can thus misinterpret, downplay, or ignore the message and purpose of the piece of writing. Fiction may allow a reader to reimagine their reality. For those who are privileged (i.e. males, whites, heterosexuals, able-bodied persons, etc.) reading fiction will assist in the process of acknowledging the different layers of oppression that prevail within the justice system and society overall.

To take one example of the way Butler opens up her readers to interrogating forms of oppression and exploitation, in the novel, racism and economic exploitation constitute one another. We suggest that Butler’s novel elaborates and illustrates the dynamics of racial capitalism, a theory that Georgetown philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò—drawing on the foundational work of political theorist Cedric Robinson, among others--articulates as analyzing how capitalism “came tethered to a wider set of social arrangements that tended to organise populations into sharp, vertical hierarchies.” These hierarchies “were cemented and maintained by material relations of domination” and by global “forms of social organization,” and continue to operate. Butler challenges her readers to consider how racism and disaster capitalism function together in her projection of 2020s America, a projection that reanimates past forms of oppression.
 
Here, a central moment in the first half of the book is Lauren’s diary entry about the buying out of the nearby town of Olivar by an international firm and its transformation into a privatized, hyper-securitized company town, in which people labor for room, board, and miniscule salary, with labor stratified by race. What makes Olivar’s privatization—a system Lauren calls “debt slavery” and her father calls “half antebellum revival and half science fiction” (122) possible? Lauren tells us that “labor laws, state and federal, are not what they once were” (121). 

Later in the novel, Lauren’s emergent community is joined by a multiracial woman and her daughter, at which point Lauren narrates their experience escaping from a system of debt slavery more extreme than that in Olivar (287-88). Twice, Lauren makes explicit connections between racialized economic oppression in her time and American chattel slavery (218-19; 292). Near the conclusion of the novel the members of the fledgling community discuss how there are increasingly only two kinds of labor: slaves and slave drivers; one of the only alternatives is factories on the US-Canadian border featuring terrible pay and dangerous working conditions (323-24). More broadly, Butler’s novel illustrates the ways that economic, social and environmental collapse disproportionately endangers and exploits BIPOC, and how the logics of these large-scale crises are racialized; this is especially significant for thinking through the racialized impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel asks us as readers to consider all of this on both a structural and experiential level, provoking us to consider how we see racial capitalism operating in our own world.

Butler connects her interrogation of racial capitalism with a critique of policing as practiced in the context of deregulation and privatization. Lauren narrates police in the universe of Parable as responding late to any calls from impoverished areas (71); as requiring payment to perform even perfunctory investigations of crimes (19; 71; 316-18) as planting evidence in order to “solve” cases (114); as stealing from crime victims (246); and as at best doing nothing to redress—and frequently exacerbating—the ever-present violence committed against poor and racialized communities (51; 229; 236-37). The way Butler ties police violence to broader socioeconomic collapse resonates with analyses in the framework of racial capitalism. The novel thus offers the reader a speculative standpoint on our contemporary debates about race and police violence, a standpoint offering both a systemic critique and an experiential literary account of racialized policing.

These are not the only ways that Parable of the Sower speaks to issues we are likely engaging in our classrooms. The novel also provides routes of entry into considering Black feminist analyses of ecology and environment, intersectional perspectives on disability, migration, race, and capital, feminist theories of power, the gendered and racialized body, and other pertinent questions. More broadly, Butler’s critique of the present and of the future draws on histories of racialized and gendered oppressions to examine time as cyclical, thus “denot[ing] the violent nature of the spiraling of history, especially for African Americans and other marginalized groups.” This has the effect of compelling us to question received notions about constant progress and linear development, and to wonder what dynamics, institutions, and oppressions in our present are leading us to catastrophe. Crucially, however, through Lauren’s cosmology-as-ethical-community Earthseed, Butler also articulates a vision of a just future that breaks out of historical, sociopolitical stasis to imagine what an intersectionally-minded human and environmental flourishing might entail, and what new worlds might (or must) be possible.  

Amid the discussions we are having in our classrooms about racism and racial justice, COVID-19, climate catastrophes, demagoguery, the supposed breakdown of liberal democracy, inequality, individual rights, and the state, it enriches the analysis and critique of students and teachers alike to think with Octavia Butler.  
 
 
Claudia Mei Theagene is a senior at SUNY Plattsburgh, majoring in Political Science and minoring in Africana Studies and in Legal Studies; John McMahon is Assistant Professor of Political Science at SUNY Plattsburgh and a member of the CULJP Board of Directors.

This semester, I am teaching a virtual course titled Law, Power, and Inequality. The course is part of the General Education program and a required writing-intensive course for the Law and Society major. The class draws students from majors across campus, including Accounting, Biology, Business, Communication Arts, Computer Science, Music, Nursing, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Law and Society. While the academic diversity in the classroom brings important vantages to examining socio-legal issues of our times, it is a tightrope in terms of balancing the width and depth of materials. The assigned readings, class discussions, and assignments focus on structural inequality and power in society using historical and contemporary cases; readings for the class include Marx, Weber, Foucault, the1619 project, Judith Lorber, Kimberley Crenshaw, Dorothy Roberts, Ta Nehisi Coates, and case law such as Craig v Boren, US v Virginia, Loving v Virginia, Brown v Board of Education, Shelby County v Holder, and the Affirmative Action cases.
Transitioning this course to the virtual delivery mode, as one would expect, has been challenging, especially amid the pandemic and deepening inequities, civil uprisings following the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the campaign for Defund and Abolition, RBG’s death and the nomination to the Supreme Court, and the Presidential election and disinformation campaigns. In preparing for the virtual class, I meticulously reviewed teaching blogs and best practices in online learning to create an active student learning environment in the virtual context. I front loaded the course with readings and assignments, with the hope of providing structure and organization to our everyday uncertainties. As much as I have enjoyed the well-organized structure, what I have learned over the semester is the importance of reflexive pedagogy, which is premised on providing students with agency and active learning outside the classroom. At the same time, I have found inviting students to apply theoretical questions to address a social problem, can be particularly supportive.

The reflexive teaching strategies that I have adopted in this course have been open conversation time before class, engaging with news, and discussion posts on the readings on Perusall. The open conversation time has been beneficial as it has enabled me to create informal office hour conversations and get to know students outside of class and their interests. Students have often brought their reflection about news and their lived experiences to these open conversations, which has helped create a community. I have used the open conversations as a starting point for class, summarizing it for those who missed. Among the many online tools, I decided on Perusall to annotate the text and add reflection on the readings. This format has enabled students to engage with the text and share their analysis and reflection on the reading. The annotation assignments, in addition to reading reviews, helped build a community as students engaged with peers in unpacking complex ideas. It has generated an ongoing conversation among students on the readings and their observations, in ways that cannot be captured only in class discussions. Besides, based on student reflections and interests, I have occasionally set aside time to discuss the elections (most of my class voted for the first time) to build connections with the readings and policy debates. These conversations resulted in the class designing their assignment in the second half of the semester, in lieu of my preplanned class debates.

Intrigued by the New Jersey ballot on recreational marijuana, students suggested that they would like to do a class-project to examine the ballot’s implication on student life. The question of race and criminalization of drugs has been part of an ongoing conversation in class, especially in the context of BLM and policing, and detentions. Students had enjoyed a guest lecture by a detention attorney from the American Friends Service Committee on the precarity of immigrants’ rights and the detentions due to drug possessions. Given the approved ballot measure, it naturally caught students’ attention, and they had many questions that came up in our open conversation time before class. Even so, I was hesitant to change my preplanned debate assignment, I relented because I saw this as an opportunity to build connections with readings and their environment, teach about race, ethnicity and the law, and policy-making process the college, state, and federal level.
I have been most impressed by this demonstration of student agency in designing the assignment and the enthusiasm for research. The collaborative assignment, as it developed, has been scaffolded in stages. The first stage was a phase of exploration- we invited the Director of Student life to our virtual class to speak about college-level policy-making process. I created a  discussion forum for students to share their thoughts and generate questions about federal, state, and college policy on recreational marijuana, criminalization of weed, implications of college policy on student life, ballot measure and the weed economy, etc. Students worked collaboratively to assort questions into different categories and worked in teams to focus on different jurisdictions. Based on the discussion posts, I drafted the assignment on the New Jersey ballot on recreational marijuana and its implications for student life and created teams to focus on specific areas. I used this opportunity to invite students to apply the theoretical framings we had learned in class to the ballot measure and create recommendations for college.
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The second stage of the project was research. Student teams have conducted primary research on federal policies, marijuana bills in NJ, the ballot measure, interviewed student club exec. members on campus, interviewed administrators and public safety, etc. Students reviewed the literature on the criminalization of marijuana and policing of minority communities and have also read college policies in states where recreational marijuana has been legalized. Students have followed lobbying groups in New Jersey and also considered the demography of the college. Given the limited time and scope of virtual research, they have been cognizant of the research process’s limitations, which has led to interesting reflections on why access to some data is complicated.

The final phase of the research is writing the report for the Office of Student Conduct on campus. This is ongoing, but from drafts that I have had a chance to review, it is promising. What I have enjoyed in this exercise is active learning and collaborative exercise. It has encouraged critical reflection within their academic and personal lives and also given students agency. Student posts have led us to consider legal pluralism, criminalization, construction of legality and illegality, etc. Given the class’s demography, the insights from different disciplinary perspectives that students bring and their lived experience have enriched the research process, no doubt. Although they are still working on the report, the enthusiasm, research, teamwork, and ongoing reflection is impressive. Admittedly, this process has its success and limits—but it has undoubtedly allowed for us as a class to analyze patterns of exclusion and inclusion and an opportunity to create academic knowledge to be shared outside the classroom.

Sanghamitra Padhy is an Associate Professor of Law and Society at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Her teaching and research focus on law and public policy, environmental justice, human rights, international law, and sustainability. 

Written by: Luciana Batkay, Alexa Barisano, and Luis Rodriguez
Current Research Assistants: Luciana Batkay, Alexa Barisano, Yara Chabchoul, Stephanie Diaz, Rachel Kuong, Yodelsi Marti, Luis Rodriguez, Brenda Salas, and Elizabeta Syku​


The Legal Disruption Project (LDP), previously known as Food for Thought, has been in progress for almost two years. The project is a research study dedicated to learning about the problems in the communities and everyday lives of John Jay Law & Society (LWS) students, often perpetuated through legal institutions (law enforcement, lawyers, federal and state-level legal framework, etc.). Data is collected by LWS student research assistants through interviews with other LWS students in small focus groups. These interviews are then transcribed and coded, all by students. Legal Disruption, at the beginning, was first run by four paid research assistants.

In the Fall of 2019, LDP became a class that students could take for credit, resulting in additional assistants. Since then, multiple focus groups have been run but some changes have been made. Through the fall of the 2019 school year, we found that enticing students to come to focus groups during their free time was extremely difficult. In order to solve this for the Spring 2020 focus groups, we planned to hold the focus groups in LWS 225 classes, as this is the research methods course for the major and could provide them with a learning experience as well. However, this plan did not come without its own set of obstacles, including finding spaces to reserve, figuring out how to give students a choice to participate in our study, and how to disperse the time and location to those students. We managed to overcome all these obstacles, but unfortunately, because of the COVID-19 outbreak, no focus groups were run. Now, with the transition to distance-learning, we have managed to not only schedule our focus groups during LWS 225 classes, but on Zoom as well. We’ve been working the kinks out of online focus groups, but anticipate them to run smoothly in the next upcoming weeks.

We hope to find common themes throughout the disruptions people are mentioning. These themes could help the project in the long run, when understanding the gaps between the law on the books and the law in action. Laws are created to help and support the same people we are interviewing, yet many of the disruptions in their lives are caused by the same laws created to protect them. We hope through coding and gathering more interview data we can find a reason for this gap. Some of the codes we currently use come directly from LWS 200; Intro to Law and Society course. With the data gathered we form connections; themes that allow research assistants to further understand the problems students face. We hope through coding, our project will become more than just a data set of interviews, but instead a project to truly help explain the reason laws are disrupting citizens' lives.

Our experiences have varied during this time. Many of us have tried to find our niche in the process -- from learning to balance how much we talk in relation to how much we listen, deciding whether to be the lead or secondary RA, to discovering if we can efficiently transcribe after each focus group. Nonetheless, it’s also been a learning experience in its own right. Research assistants have found textbook ideas such as gentrification come to life. We’ve learned new levels of empathy as we hear different stories of immigration and LGBTQ+ experiences. The idea of intersectionality becomes real as different identities overlap in each interview. With interviews done in Spanish and Albanian, we expand our context and understanding through students with unique experiences with systems of law (cultural/federal). Terms like legal pluralism manifest themselves, especially with the enhancement of the question allowing for more experiences to be gathered. The biggest experience for us as research assistants has been seeing the relationship between law and society come to life as we lead The Legal Disruption Project into new territories as undergraduate students.

​Additionally, from LDP, a student club at CUNY John Jay has been born. The idea of Legally Conscious as a club at John Jay was thought up in the Fall of 2019 by Luciana Batkay and Joshua Rodriguez-Valenzuela. Both students are Law and Society majors who were inspired after spending a semester as research assistants on The Legal Disruption Project. The Legal Disruption Project inspired them by showing them first hand the different socio-legal issues that other students face, as well as how little representation Law and Society has in schools where the content of the courses are beneficial. They decided that our community at school needed an informal space to talk through these topics and problems with peers, in hopes that conversations would not only create a community amongst Law & Society students, but also create a better understanding of how law and society actually interact in real spaces and lives. In the Spring of 2020, Legally Conscious was officially made a student club on campus. It has created a community among Law and Society students and produced a space that allows for collaborative conversations. Around the same time as its conception, Luciana and Joshua began bouncing around the idea of making a more encompassing Legally Conscious. It was then that they, with help from Professor Jean Carmalt, contacted CULJP with the idea of creating a national society for Law and Society students, modeled after Legally Conscious. The goal of this would be to bring Legally Conscious to other schools and create a network of Law and Society students and mentors, something that has yet to be accomplished. Among a variety of recreational activities like game nights and movie nights, Legally Conscious has already had discussions on topics such as the morality of gentrification and the history of police reforms in New York City. We find that it’s educational in it’s own way to hear other people’s points of view and to tell a story that might help others understand a new concept or interaction. The goal of Legally Conscious National would be to expand these collaborative conversations to other areas in order to continue educating each other and create a network of Law and Society students, scholars and teachers. 



Luciana Batkay is in her senior year at CUNY John Jay. After graduating with a undergraduate degree in Law & Society and a certificate in Dispute Resolution, Luciana plans to go to law school and pursue a PhD in Economics. Alexa Barisano is currently a sophomore at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is actively pursuing a Law and Society degree and a possible English minor. After graduation she also plans to attend law school to be a criminal defense lawyer. Luis Rodriguez is a Dominican immigrant in the Bronx. His inspiration are the women in his family who inspire him to be free, happy, and wise.

This blog presents teaching strategies that are conducive to creating community and cultivating learning in both face-to-face and online courses.  In mid-March 2020, many instructors found themselves scrambling to convert their in-person courses to an online format.  This blog post suggests a blueprint that is conducive to either in-person or remote instruction; such a blueprint is particularly important given that the 2020-2021 Academic Year will likely require instructors to pivot to online instruction at some point in the coming months.
 
Clear Structure
 
            All courses benefit from a clear organizational structure.  This goes beyond having a clear syllabus and grading rubrics.  This entails leveraging your institution’s learning management system (LMS), typically Blackboard or Canvas, in such a way that each week of the course is clearly displayed. For example, my Blackboard course creates separate modules for each week of the course.  When students enter our Blackboard course, the left-hand menu shows the following tabs: Syllabus, About the Instructor, Watch Me First (which contains a Kaltura video overview of the syllabus), Course Reserves, and then a module for each week of the course (e.g., Week 1, Week 2, etc.).  Moreover, each weekly folder contains the following sub-folders:  Read, Watch / Listen, Lectures, and Assignments.   This blog post will circle back to the information that is contained within those sub-folders within the following paragraphs.
 
Blackboard / Canvas
 
            My syllabus mirrors my Blackboard course structure. For example, within Week 1 of my course, my syllabus has the following sections:  Read, Watch / Listen, Lectures, and Assignments.   The first sub-heading, “Read,” is self-explanatory.  Within the “Watch / Listen” folder, I assign YouTube clips, podcasts, movie trailers, music videos, and other multimedia that align with that week’s learning content.  The “Lecture” folder contains a PDF of the Google Slides for that week’s lecture; for online courses, the “Lecture” folder also contains a video of that week’s lecture. Finally, the “Assignments” folder contains a place where students can submit a Discussion Board post or complete an assessment, such as a quiz, test, essay, or other assignment.
 
Encourage Dialogue
 
            One of the biggest challenges many instructors encounter when pivoting their courses from in-person to online is how to create community and encourage dialogue in an online setting.  This section will discuss three methods to encourage dialogue in either in-person or online courses: PDFs of slides, Reflection Questions, and Discussion Boards / FlipGrid.  
 
            PDF of Slides
 
            All my courses use slides, regardless of whether they are online, in-person, synchronous, or asynchronous.  The slides meet four pedagogical and practical goals.  First, the slides enable me to institutionalize course content. This is particularly helpful for instructors who have high teaching loads and thus have to pivot from one course to another. However, it is also helpful for
instructors with lower teaching loads, who might be asked to teach a course they have not had for several semesters.  Second, the slides facilitate pedagogy that draws from the Socratic method and from active learning; for example, in addition to drawing from the “Watch / Listen” content on a syllabus, the slides can also feature additional multimedia content that allow students to dive more deeply into certain topics on their own time.  Moreover, if students are less talkative in a particular class, the multimedia slides can provide built-in activities that instructors can leverage to spark discussion in meaningful ways. Third, the slides make it easier for a course to be taught either in-person or online, as instructors can use their slides to record and upload lectures to Blackboard / Canvas.  Fourth, students can use the slides as a study guide; I give students PDFs of my Google slides for this express purpose.  The below paragraphs address how I structure my slides to meet the four aforementioned pedagogical and practical goals.
 
First, I choose a different template for my slides for every week of the semester. Many students love this, as it adds excitement and variety to the course.  As one of my students once told me while preparing for an exam in my Western Legal Tradition class, “I visualized the information on the slides during the exam; in my mind, I thought, “Rome is Red” (because the slides are red), and I could see the answer.”  For visual learners, having slides with different color schemes for each course units can be very useful. I find that Google Slides performs this role in both my online and my in-person classes; this is even true for my asynchronous classes.  Google Slides has a wide variety of templates available online; many individuals even share their own, self-made templates, which you are welcome to use as long as you give credit to the original source. 
 
Second, my slides are built upon the Socratic method.  The first slide will contain a few open-ended questions, and the second slide will contain a short answer to those questions.  I use the first slide as a way to spark conversation; the second slide then gives a brief answer.  I will bold, highlight, and underline key words on each slide; students with different visual abilities may not be able to differentiate the highlighted text from regular text, but they can see the bold or underlined information.  This method not only encourages students to answer questions in class, but it also assuages anxiety around exam time, as students have a study guide built into the course.  I repeat this format of “question slide, answer slide” for the first six slides, before I move on to a “multimedia slide” (discussed in the next paragraph).
 
Third, my “multimedia slides” incorporate the “Watch / Listen” items on my syllabus.  For example, the movie trailer “Marshall” features a clip where then-NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall says, “We’re not slaves now, are we? We’ve got weapons we didn’t have before – we’ve got the law.”  I then ask students if they agree or disagree with this statement.  Is the law a weapon? If so, who has the authority to use it, and who is oppressed by it? Sometimes I revisit the same movie trailer multiple times a semester, pulling different themes from course readings, such as “the law and social change,” “critical race theory,” or “legal consciousness.”  I often include two or three “multimedia slides” after each set of six “question / answer slides.”  The multimedia slides can also highlight content that is not in the syllabus, but that is relevant to the course content; for example, I might include a link to an online documentary with several reflection questions that students can choose to watch on their own time as a way to deepen their knowledge in a particular area.  By organizing my slides in this manner, I am able to respond to different learning styles, while also covering the course content; moreover, the slides allow students to deepen their knowledge in different areas, should they choose to do so. 
 
Reflection Questions
 
Each week of my syllabus features “Reflection Questions” based on the assigned readings and multimedia content.  This gives students guidance about what to focus upon in the required weekly materials, and helps them identify important themes across different units of the course.  As an added incentive, I tell students that Reflection Questions might be a future exam question or reflection paper topic.  In addition, my Google Slides often include a few of the reflection questions, which gives students the opportunity to prepare for class discussions in advance.
 
Discussion Boards / FlipGrid
 
Online asynchronous courses are perhaps the most challenging instructional format for purposes of creating community and encouraging discussion.  I find that a mixture of discussion boards and FlipGrid posts help to meet these objectives.  Both of these tools have different pros and cons.  Discussion boards allow students to practice their writing and critical thinking, while reflecting upon the thoughts and views of their peers; however, they can be time-consuming and anxiety-inducing for students who struggle with writing.  By contrast, FlipGrid is a sort of academic TikTok; students can choose to post a video or audio-recording of themselves responding to reflection questions.  Students tend to have fun with FlipGrid, which has multiple filters, stickers, and other effects.  Since FlipGrid allows you to make audio-only recordings, it allows students to decide whether or not they wish to disclose their home environment.  Moreover, some learning management systems, such as Canvas, have FlipGrid built into them as an optional instructional tool.  By alternating between discussion boards and FlipGrid, you can encourage students to practice their writing and critical thinking skills, while also having them practice their verbal articulation of course concepts, just as they would in a live classroom setting.  In addition, for both discussion boards and FlipGrid, you might consider having an optional “student space” that is ungraded for students to communicate with one another.  
 
Worksheets
 
            Worksheets can be a powerful tool to encourage in-class discussions and to help students prepare for exams or papers.  For my in-person courses, I have students pick up a worksheet as they enter the classroom.  For my online courses, I post worksheets in their own folder in Blackboard’s left-hand menu.  For my in-person courses, I arrive to the classroom a few minutes early so that I can play a Spotify playlist with songs chosen by students.  This creates a welcoming environment; students know that their “jam” might be playing, and the worksheets prepare them for some of the questions that will be in the lecture slides.  This allows students to refresh their memory about that day’s course content, and to think about their answers to particular questions.  This is a particularly powerful tool for students who may be shy or for whom English is not their first language, as it allows them to write down their answers to in-class questions, making them feel more prepared and empowered to speak up when the class officially starts.  My worksheets occasionally have sections where students can propose exam questions, giving them agency and control in the course.   At the end of the class, I collect all of the worksheets; I do not grade them, but instead, I skim them to see how well students have grasped that week’s course content, and whether I need to review anything in class for a second time.  I then return the worksheets to students for them to use a study guide. 
 
Conclusion
 
            The above-listed teaching strategies can be leveraged in either in-person or online courses.  They are conducive to different academic disciplines and class sizes.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these instructional strategies likely prompted a response from you, the reader – you may have thought of additional pros or cons to these strategies, or you may have thought of entirely different strategies.  If so, then this blog post has served its purpose;  it has sparked conversation about best pedagogical practices, and has hopefully opened avenues for additional dialogue on creating community and cultivating learning.

Hillary Mellinger is an instructor in the Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology at American University. Her research focuses on issues of social justice and inequality, particularly as they pertain to immigration policy. She can be contacted at hillary.mellinger@american.edu.

Hillary Mellinger is an instructor in the Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology at American University.  Her research focuses on issues of social justice and inequality, particularly as they pertain to immigration policy. She can be contacted at hillary.mellinger@american.edu. 

It is possible to get undergrads to fall in love with “no PowerPoints”. It is also possible to get them to grow as writers in a content course. For the Fall of 2019, I was teaching Law and Society, a 300-level sociology class at the University at Buffalo, SUNY (UB). The 70-student section primarily consisted of juniors and seniors. On the first day of class, I polled the students to see who had the intention of going to law school or graduate school. Over 80% responded “Yes,” and there were a handful of “Maybes.” This reaffirmed my decision to structure the course as a “mini grad class,” both in terms of content delivery, and as an opportunity to improve their writing.

With 22,000 undergraduates, UB is similar to other large, R1 institutions. Lecture halls, PowerPoints, and Scantrons are the default for much of an undergraduate’s time here. Writing assignments may be completely absent from many classes, or if assigned, graded quite liberally. These assignments usually do not offer much by way of feedback or growth opportunities for students. To my mind, churning out underprepared, incoming graduate or law school cohorts is a royal disservice to both the students and the programs.
I opted for a grad-style course approach, which used no PowerPoints, no exams, and no textbook. And, no laptops or tablets were allowed (yes, you can probably hear the groans on the first day of class in your mind). I provided articles and scanned chapters to Blackboard. I was forthright with the students on the first day; if they wanted to go to – and succeed in – law school or grad school, they had better get used to this style of class. Instead of a single term paper, I opted for an incremental paper scheme, to both assess their content comprehension, and help them grow as writers.

This incremental paper approach is a hybrid of growth and proficiency models, and loosely based on Vygotsky’s (1978) Gradual Release of Responsibility. While still assessing their understanding of the material, the papers themselves increased in length and point value, and were graded more stringently each time. There were four short papers throughout the semester, and one final paper due at the end of the semester. Paper 1 was 1 – 1.5 pages in length; Paper 2 was 1.5 – 2 pages; Paper 3 was a firm 2 pages in length; Paper 4 was 2 – 2.5 pages; and the final paper was 6 pages, plus a reference page. The grading was 50, 75, 100, 150, and 500 points respectively. The prompts for each paper varied, but allowed students choice or flexibility in their responses. Paper 1 allowed for ungraded/low-penalty feedback, and also provided me with a baseline for their individual and collective writing aptitude. As long as they put forth solid effort responding to a prompt that gave them lots of free space to connect course material to their own lives, they received full credit. However, their papers were marked heavily with corrections and notes about spelling, grammar, and structure. I used a “two ink” strategy: green ink for positive comments, blue ink for neutral or corrective comments. Paper 2 saw point reductions for major or repeat grammatical errors, and so on, and so forth with each subsequent paper. The final paper was held to very high standards for spelling and grammar, format and structure, and content comprehension.

Because the course material was delivered through peer-reviewed journal and law review articles, and academic book chapters, holding a discussion-based and paper-based semester allowed immediate engagement and clarification on complex concepts (i.e., their first exposure to legal consciousness, or the disputing pyramid). While a PowerPoint-style lecture class may drive recall and rote definitional regurgitation, is an undergraduate who has never encountered legal mobilization before really going to have an “a-ha!” lightbulb moment in that setting? By the time they completed the first paper, students’ responses showed that they were on board with this style of class; and that they understood and appreciated how our discussions and writing assignments were opportunities for them to explore their own thinking. Since the papers allowed students some flexibility in their responses, or required them to connect concepts to their own interests/experiences, the discomfort with new or difficult material was softened.

In addition to the assignment format and schedule, certain classes were designed as workshop days. In one class I covered how to efficiently extract information from peer-review or law review articles; another was a half-class overview of ASA and APA citations; another session was dedicated to an in-class write and ask questions day for their final papers. These were the moments where I overheard the, “I really like getting to write like this,” or, “This is actually a fun paper idea.” Paired with mid-semester and end of semester evaluations, it was clear that the students came around to the no PowerPoint, “mini grad class” environment.

I was utterly impressed with their growth by the end of the semester. While grading their final papers – a prompt requiring them to take a stance, formulate an argument, and provide evidence for the course throughline question, “Does law shape society, or does society shape law?” – I was so proud of how well their skills had developed. Their writing was noticeably stronger and sharper, and their ability to make claims and incorporate concepts stood out. It is important to note; this model may not be appropriate for every institution or situation. 70 students are about the maximum I would feel comfortable getting away with this as an unassisted solo instructor. However, if anyone teaching undergraduate Law and Society or Sociology of Law wants to use this approach, please do. There is a bit of a “rip the band-aid off” curve at first. But, when presented as a way to prepare students for the rigors of graduate or law school, and that you are actively committed to helping them grow as writers, the approach was successful in my experience.

Zaque Evans is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His interests include all realms of public policy, urban/spatial sociology, political economy, and media. His current research projects are focused on media framing of the 2017 Tax Cuts, and where urban and economic redevelopment funds are distributed across Western New York. He can be reached at zacharye@buffalo.edu.

I joined the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence (ACE!) as a master’s student in Fall 2017 and was immediately intertwined into my advisor, Dr. Danielle Rudes’, nested mentoring model. For the first year at ACE!, I worked closely with Dr. Kimberly Meyer on a variety of projects, including a project in collaboration with a probation department assessing their risk assessment tools, and on her dissertation that considered turning points in and out of crime for juveniles. In many ways, I believe that I survived and thrived during my first year of graduate school because of Kimberly. She helped me in indescribable ways – whether it was navigating a class I struggled with, editing a scholarship narrative, or giving me recommendations on project management. I am incredibly thankful for everything I had learned from Kimberly during my short time at ACE!. When I expressed this to her as she prepared for her position as a professor, she explained the value in “paying it forward.” These three words are now the foundation of my work as a mentor.

Dr. Rudes developed an Undergraduate Research Laboratory at ACE! over ten years ago that gives undergraduate students the ability to work alongside doctoral, and masters’ students, and faculty to enhance their research experiences. I co-direct the lab and get to work with an incredible team of undergraduate research assistants (UGRAs) every day at ACE!. For example, GMU undergraduate, Khanh Nguyen, joined ACE! as a UGRA in January 2019 to assist me with my thesis research. I spent the first few weeks deeply orienting Khanh to the project – explaining the background and development of the project, the data collection process, and preliminary findings. I wanted Khanh to feel like she had been a part of the project since it originated; like she was in the field collecting data with our team. Khanh was an instrumental part of my thesis from the time that I finished data collection throughout my defense. She assisted with data entry, qualitative coding and analysis, and helped with editing and proof-reading as my defense approached.

Another GMU undergrad, Zachery Zaborowski, joined ACE! in June 2019 because he was interested in participating in research of consequence. Zach originally worked on transcribing interview data, and then accompanied us to a prison data collection trip in August. I taught him qualitative research methods and prepared him for the trip; however, I had no expectation for Zach to be an exemplar field interviewer or observer. In fact, I suspected that he would spend the week observing the data collection process. However, I distinctly remember the moment that I knew that he would someday be an excellent researcher. I was interviewing an individual who was living in restricted housing. He mentioned that he sometimes decides not to go to yard/recreation. I, not being a curious qualitative researcher, was more focused on getting through the interview protocol. However, Zach asked if he could ask a question. Of course, I said yes. Zach inquired, “How do you make the decision whether or not to go to yard?” This simple question yielded an intricate discussion of the unit staff offering showers and particular groups during that time because there is not enough space to accommodate a large group.

Toward the end of this interview, this individual shared with us that they were in the process of transitioning from female to male and his desire to transfer to a male institution. After the interview concluded, Zach asked if he could go back to ask a few questions. When Zach returned, he shared with me that he asked him to talk about his experience being transgender while living in restricted housing more generally. This individual expressed his frustration with others’ unwillingness to call him by his preferred pronouns and shared details about the process involved with hormone therapy and obtaining a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. From that moment, Zach was intrigued by transgender inmate’s experiences in restricted housing, and even did a solo interview with another transgender individual on the unit.

Sometimes, when I leave prisons, I feel guilty in that I only “take” from interviewees, and I have nothing to immediately “give” back – sure, we send a final report with recommendations and thoughtful thank you letters, but there is no guarantee that the recommendations will be implemented. In many ways, having UGRAs can feel similar in that we take their (sometimes) free labor, but may not be able to give them something back in equal comparison. This realization is why I ensure that the relationships that I build with my UGRAs are symbiotic. I believe this is the foundation and most beneficial part of having a nested mentoring model, and that this is how I pay it forward.

While I am incredibly grateful for the help UGRAs provide on my research, it is my mission to encourage and provide the opportunity for my UGRAs to pursue their own research endeavors at ACE!. After Zach demonstrated his passion for LGBTQ+ issues in prison, I suggested that he begin his own project to understand living experiences among LGBTQ+ individuals living in prison. After the data collection trip, Zach spent the following semester working with a team of graduate students to openly code two years of interview data, and is now currently working on a manuscript that he will be presenting at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) conference in March 2020. Additionally, Khanh is preparing to do an undergrad thesis project and will be using portions of my MA thesis data for her project. Throughout the next year, I will be working closely with Khanh on her project with the goal of helping her submit a manuscript for publication.

I not only assist my UGRAs in gaining research experience, but also in meeting their personal goals and objectives. I work closely and at length with each of my UGRAs on their professional development – including preparing and editing their resumes/CVs, cover letters, personal statements and narratives, and job, scholarship, and graduate school applications. Throughout my time co-directing the lab, I have celebrated graduate school acceptances and admissions, job offers, and numerous scholarship awards with my UGRAs.
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In such a short time, I have learned so much from my mentor, Dr. Rudes and also from these remarkable students, whether it was a learning technique that worked particularly well (or not so well), or some seemingly nonchalant technological shortcut that I had no idea existed (most notably, learning that I can split the screen on my laptop). Working with UGRAs is by far the most rewarding aspect of being a graduate student. I have had opportunities that are unheard of for doctoral students. Every day, I get to teach and train UGRAs about research. I develop training to teach UGRAs new skills. I assist UGRAs with their professional development, and help them secure jobs, internships, scholarships, or admission into graduate school programs. But most importantly, I get to have my mentor and our UGRA team by my side in every aspect of the research process – learning from Dr. Rudes and the UGRAs as they learn from me. Paying it forward is an amazing gift!

The Legal Studies Undergraduate Board (LSUB) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a student run organization that helps familiarize, support, and network fellow students in the Legal Studies major at UMass. While there are many benefits to an organization like LSUB, three major features of the board stand out in particular.

First, LSUB members are able to talk with upperclassmen about their courses, helping them figure out which classes and professors may best suit their learning styles and pique their interests. This is a valuable opportunity because it allows underclassmen the chance to ask questions that they may not feel comfortable asking a professor, or those that cannot be answered by a professor, such as how the class feels from a student’s perspective.

Second, LSUB is particularly focused on networking with UMass and Legal Studies alumni, both in the legal and non-legal worlds. By holding workshops and events with attorneys and judges, but also non-legal professionals who have majored in Legal Studies, the students are able to gain insight to the real life application of the Legal Studies major. In this way, LSUB is a great means for people to connect in an intimate setting, which allows for very positive networking experiences. One event that gained a lot of attention this year was the presentation given by an admissions committee member at a nearby law school. This event received a great deal of positive feedback, and underclassmen found it particularly useful as it exposed them to the law school admissions process and how that fits with different career paths.

Finally, LSUB facilitates discussion between the students and the faculty in the Legal Studies Program. During our meetings, we are constantly asking for feedback on classes, including meeting times, workloads, the types of assignments, and the like. In addition, we discuss internship, networking, and research assistantship opportunities, and meet with faculty job candidates. We then provide feedback from students as a group to faculty in the Legal Studies Program, including routine meetings with the Director of Legal Studies. This feedback has resulted in several notable changes to the Legal Studies major, including offering new classes and increasing the times at which courses are offered.

As a whole, we feel that LSUB is a great organization that helps foster community within the Legal Studies major that could be replicated at other colleges and universities with law and society majors, minors, and concentrations.

I have been teaching undergraduates since 2001, and in an interdisciplinary undergraduate legal studies department since ’06. I’ve had the chance to work with hundreds (a thousand?) of students over the years and honestly delight in helping them see connections between courses, among authors, and between their lives and the readings. I know that helping them learn about reproductive justice, American Indian survival, and – yes – the gap between law in the books and law in action – is important work.

That doesn’t mean that, some days, I don’t wonder what the point is.

There are times I leave the classroom completely jazzed because the discussion was SOOOOO good – and yet, I hear a voice in my head asking “Why did we just spend 75 minutes in conversation about legal pluralism, or class action law suits, or systems of oppression that they are – individually – powerless to change?” What’s worse, I have a fantasy that my colleagues in math and pharmacy, the business school, and the physical sciences never feel this way – that each lesson they teach is obviously and clearly relevant to the next, and to the work their students will do when they are young professionals.

Many of my students go on to law school. I know that I am preparing them well for the work of reading closely, thinking analytically, and writing clearly. But I also know that law school will change their understanding of law, their relationship to linguistic and professional power, and their view of the same systems we’re learning to understand and occasionally critique. Many of our students will go directly into the workforce – some as political campaign workers and advisors, some to policy analysis groups, some to governmental affairs offices. Yes; they’ll know how to meet deadlines, how think about ways to evaluate the impact of policy on different groups of people, and how to – yep – write clearly. But how will their understanding of the 5th Amendment’s Takings Clause factor into their work? How will their ability to talk about the novel An American Marriage and its relationship to mass incarceration be meaningful to their professional life at MidAmerican Energy or in the legal affairs department at Meredith Corporation?

I will readily tell you that I don’t think a college degree is necessary for everyone, nor is it necessary for success. I will also tell you that going to college changed me so profoundly I am still, 25 years later, learning from the experience. My desire is to provide my students with the kinds of meaningful experiences and opportunities that I had during those four years, but I also know that the most important thing I learned in college was how to learn. It wasn’t until my fifth year of graduate school that I understood how what I was studying could lead to a career – and let’s be honest, that’s only because the only career for a nonquantitative PhD in Political Science in the late 1990s was “being a professor.” We send only one student every three years or so to doctoral programs (hi Phoebe! hi Richard!) – replicating the field isn’t where my colleagues and I find meaning – no matter how much joy I feel in being part of a field/discipline.

Increasingly, honestly, I feel an ethical responsibility to provide students with a shot at an education that offers opportunity for both material and cognitive growth and betterment. In a field where we often critique the transactional approach to education, I still feel an ethical responsibility to make sure the transaction is a beneficial one to the folks who come into my classroom.

A new opportunity has come my way – probably just in time, given that these end-of-semester musings tend to creep in as early as February, now. I’ve just been named the Herb and Karen Baum Professor of Ethical Leadership in the Professions at my home institution (Drake University). The three-year professorship comes with two primary obligations: to host a Symposium in the second year on a topic of my choosing related to ethical leadership, and to teach a course once a year on that same topic. I’ve decided to focus on the issues that I’ve been pondering lately: the role of higher education in developing capacity for ethical decision-making and leadership in our students – simultaneous to our role in helping them develop cognitive capacities around core subject matter; the ways that a liberal arts education is pre-professional education, and appropriately so; and the ways that universities themselves have ethical obligations to our students around issues of access, equity, diversity, affordability, and job readiness.

I’ve put together a team of undergrads (hi Jaime, Gabrielle, Rae Ann, Jackie, and Marisa!), and we’re spending summer and fall reading together from a nice list of books on higher education in the present age; and I’ve put together a reading list for myself, on finance in higher education and the ways our ‘business model’ operates (and fails).

I’d love help from readers here, in particular, in developing a list that also understands how how undergraduate legal studies and sociolegal faculty have thought about the university and the professoriate’s role in creating lawyers, scholars, citizens, and ethical humans.

Please reach out: comment here, send me an email (renee.cramer@drake.edu), find me at LSA or the WPSA. I want us, as a community, to find meaning in the work we do, beyond the tremendous, real, important and fun it is to think and write and teach about law and society J - I invite a conversation about how what we teach our students really does matter, and how we can continue to teach them things that will serve them throughout their professional lives.

Renée Ann Cramer
Professor of Law, Politics, and Society
Drake University

​For the past two years, I have taught an experimental course in the undergraduate Criminology, Law and Society (CLS) Program of the Sociology Department, University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). Under the title “Research Projects in Criminology, Law and Society” (SOC440), this is an unusual course in several ways. Instead of meeting weekly for a semester, it meets every other week over a whole academic year. Although some academic articles are assigned as course readings, the focus is not on the substantive topics they cover, but on their research designs and writing styles. Most importantly, students spend most of their time during the year designing an empirical research project, collecting data, and writing up a research paper by the end of the year. It is not a thesis course, but an opportunity provided for fourth-year undergraduate students in the CLS program to explore the fun and complexity of social science research before graduation. For most students who took the class, it was their first hands-on experience with empirical research in the four years of undergraduate education.
 
I greatly enjoy teaching this course as it enables me to get to know the students well and guide them through some exciting projects. From the pedagogical perspective, however, the course is unlike anything I had taught before in my teaching career. About half of the sessions are co-taught with a parallel course “Research Projects in Sociology” (SOC439), when the two classes meet together with two instructors. As a result, I was able to learn much from my UTM sociology colleagues Hae Yeon Choo and Kristin Plys on research methods and student mentoring. Selecting the right readings, however, is a difficult task as the purpose of the readings is different in every class. As a strong believer that the best academic writings speak for themselves, I did not use any textbook but assigned 2-3 journal articles in those sessions that focus on how to frame a research question, how to write a literature review, how to discuss data and methods, etc. Some readings are in the area of crime and law, while others are more general articles in sociology to accommodate the co-teaching needs. Students are told to pay attention to the form rather than the content of the readings and asked to write a reading response reflecting upon the topic of the session. As the class size is limited to no more than 15 students, class discussions are informal and focus on situating the readings in the context of the topic of the day (e.g., literature review).
 
But the most exciting and enjoyable part of the course is to guide students into the field. Many students were interested in the criminal justice system and thus they picked research topics such as racial profiling in policing, attitudes towards capital punishment, the production of space in prisons, job satisfaction of correctional officers, gender and racial discriminations in the police force, and so on. As a sociologist of law, I was also delighted to see some students study classic sociolegal topics such as lawyers and the jury. While a few students used archival research, survey, or experiment as their primary methods, the majority of them conducted in-depth interviews and/or participant observation for their projects in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
 
Fieldwork presents many challenges. Some parts of the legal system are simply inaccessible to undergraduate researchers. For example, one student originally thought she could go into prisons for interviews or at least speak to prisoners on the phone. Not surprisingly, she had to adjust her research design and focus on ex-prisoners and family members instead. Another student tried hard to contact police officers in multiple offices, including the campus police, for interviews without much success, as most police officers were very busy when on duty. Eventually, through her contacts in the police force, she complemented her small number of interviews with a survey via email, which enabled her to reach a larger sample of officers.
 
There is also the issue of research ethics. While a course-based ethics approval is obtained for the whole class every year, due to the large variety of student projects, how to make sure undergraduate researchers stick to their ethics protocols in the field is a major challenge. This requires not only introducing the ethical requirements of human subject research to students as a group, such as the importance of informed consent and confidentiality, but also many one-on-one consultations on specific issues arising in the process of research. There were even two occasions when I, as the faculty supervisor, received complaints from community organizations or residents about student behavior – fortunately, both turned out to be misunderstandings.
 
After fieldwork, data analysis and paper writing present additional challenges. Like in any class, there is a range in the students’ ability in research and writing throughout the year. One student conducted a survey smoothly, only to realize that she forgot most of her statistical training and did not know how to analyze the data. In this situation, I asked a classmate of hers, who was the stats wizard in the class, to help her out. Another student did some extraordinary ethnographic work, but the first draft of his paper was mostly theoretical and philosophical discussions and presented little data from the field. I had to walk him through some of his field notes to figure out how to tell a good story and be truthful to the research subjects. These surprises kept reminding me of a general weakness in our undergraduate education, that is, the curriculum often gives the social science majors very little hands-on training in both empirical research and writing. This Research Project course is one of the few opportunities for some of them to develop these practical research skills.
 
As this course is part of UTM Sociology Department’s Peel Social Lab (PSL), a research platform aimed to develop a repository data on the Peel region (where the UTM campus is located) that can be used by researchers and the community, students are encouraged to write a blog post for the PSL’s blog in addition to their final papers to disseminate their findings. I was delighted to see some creative and thought-provoking essays written by my students posted on the PSL’s blog Peel Urbanscapes and reached the general public in the past two years. It was a great way to showcase the quality and potential of undergraduate student research in UTM’s Criminology, Law and Society Program and the Sociology Department.