Academic Courses & Programs
Honors Programs
In the Spring of 2012, I created and taught a special version of my Introductory Sociology course, It's Not Rocket Science, for the Honors Program at SUNY-Orange Community College. Since the course met on the Middletown, NY campus, the curriculum featured a series of materials and assignments rooted in Robert and Helen Lynd's classic community study Middletown (1928), including all of its subsequent updates. Students documented and compared the socio-history of their hometown to Muncie, Indiana, the real life field setting for Middletown, as well explored the rhetorical power and limits of sociological theory versus data. The also created their own collaborative version of Middletown, albeit one we fictively located and titled as "Muncie."