Assignment 2 – Sociological Imagination and the Future of Work/Education. Due the end of week 7. Assignment should be a minimum of 700 words, not including the reference list. Worth 16% of final grade.
This assignment assumes that you have studied the Learning Resource materials for week 6. It may help you to go back and review your Discussion post and the Learning Resource materials for Week 1. Please structure your assignment as an essay, not as a list. Be sure that your assignment has an introduction and a conclusion. Your assignment should be structured as follows:
Part 1: Introduction
In a single paragraph, provide the reader with the key points you will be addressing in this assignment.
Part 2 (300-400 words): Sociological imagination
Briefly discuss and define the sociological imagination, which you learned about in Week 1 of this course.
Identify and explain at least two broader social condition(s) related to education, the workforce, and/or the economy that might affect your personal future plans for work and/or education. You might find a relevant social condition in your Week 6 Learning Resources. Some examples of social conditions are automation in the workplace, polarization of the workforce, globalization, and the wage gap between men and women.
Then go to the “Future of Work” page or the “Education” page of the Pew Research Center and find an article related to one of the social conditions that you identified. What three key research findings in the article do you find most relevant to this social condition, and why are they relevant?
Part 3 (200-300 words): Sociological perspectives
Use one of the three main sociological perspectives (functionalism, conflict theory, or symbolic interactionism) to analyze one of the social conditions that you chose.
First, briefly explain the perspective.
Then answer the question: How might you use that perspective to explain/analyze the social condition? For example, if you choose the condition of a wage gap between men and women, how might a conflict theorist explain why this gap exists in society?
Part 4: Conclusion/Reflection
In a final thorough paragraph, explain what you learned from this assignment. Based on what you have learned about sociology and social conditions, how might you modify your plans for future education and career? Please explain one key aspect of your plans for the future that you might change because of what you learned in your sociology course this term. If you wouldn’t change anything, explain why.
Part 5: Reference List
Your Reference List should include all the resources that you have cited in your Assignment. At the very least, it should include the reference information for the Week 1 and 6 Learning Resources, as well as the Pew Research article that you discussed.
Reference 1: The term sociology was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836) in an unpublished manuscript (Sieyès, 1999). In 1838, the term was reintroduced by Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte originally studied to be an engineer, but later became a pupil of social philosopher Claude Henri de Rouvroy Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). They both thought that social scientists could study society using the same scientific methods used in natural sciences. Comte also believed in the potential of social scientists to work toward the betterment of society. He held that once scholars identified the laws that governed society, sociologists could address problems such as poor education and poverty (Abercrombie, Hill, & Turner, 2000).
Reference 2: Conflict Theory
Conflict theorists do not believe that public schools reduce social inequality. Rather, they believe that the educational system reinforces and perpetuates social inequalities that arise from differences in class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Where functionalists see education as serving a beneficial role, conflict theorists view it more negatively. To them, educational systems preserve the status quo and push people of lower status into obedience.
Education is closely linked to social class. Students of low socioeconomic status are generally not afforded the same opportunities as students of higher status, no matter how great their academic ability or desire to learn. Picture a student from a working-class home who wants to do well in school. On a Monday, he is assigned a paper that is due Friday. Monday evening, he has to babysit his younger sister while his single mother works. Tuesday and Wednesday, he works stocking shelves after school until 10:00 p.m. By Thursday, the only day he might have available to work on that assignment, he’s so exhausted he can’t bring himself to start the paper. His mother, though she’d like to help him, is so tired herself that she isn’t able to give him the encouragement or support he needs. And English is her second language, so she has difficulty with some of his educational materials. They also lack a computer and printer at home, so they must rely on the public library or school system for access to technology. As this story shows, many students from working-class families have to balance priorities of helping out at home and contributing financially to the family with their studies, with the extra barriers of poor study environments and a lack of support from their families. This is a difficult match with education systems that adhere to a traditional curriculum that is more easily understood and completed by students of higher social classes.
Such a situation leads to social class reproduction, extensively studied by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He researched how cultural capital—cultural knowledge that serves (metaphorically) as currency that helps us navigate a culture—altered the experiences and opportunities available to French students from different social classes. Members of the upper and middle classes have more cultural capital than do families of lower-class status. As a result, the educational system maintains a cycle in which the dominant culture’s values are rewarded. Instruction and tests cater to the dominant culture and leave others struggling to identify with values and competencies outside their social class. For example, there has been a great deal of discussion over what standardized tests, such as the SAT, truly measure. Many argue that the tests group students by cultural ability rather than by natural intelligence.
The cycle of rewarding those who possess cultural capital is found in formal educational curricula as well as in the hidden curriculum, which refers to the type of nonacademic knowledge that students learn through informal learning and cultural transmission. This hidden curriculum reinforces the positions of those with higher cultural capital and serves to bestow status unequally.
Conflict theorists point to tracking, a formalized sorting system that places students on tracks (e.g., advanced, low achievers) that perpetuate inequalities. While educators may believe that students do better in tracked classes because they are with students of similar ability and may have access to more individual attention from teachers, conflict theorists feel that tracking leads to self-fulfilling prophecies in which students live up (or down) to teacher and societal expectations (Education Week Staff, 2004).
To conflict theorists, schools play the role of training working-class students to accept and retain their position as lower members of society. They argue that this role is fulfilled through the disparity of resources available to students in richer and poorer neighborhoods as well as through testing (Lauen & Tyson, 2008).
IQ tests have been attacked for being biased—for testing cultural knowledge rather than actual intelligence. For example, a test item may ask students what instruments belong in an orchestra. To correctly answer this question requires certain cultural knowledge—knowledge most often held by more affluent people who typically have more exposure to orchestral music. Though experts in testing claim that bias has been eliminated from tests, conflict theorists maintain that this is impossible. These tests, to conflict theorists, are another way in which education does not provide opportunities, but instead maintains an established configuration of power.
Source : University of Maryland Global Campus. (n.d.). Week 7. Education, work, and the economy. Document posted in UMGC SOCY 100 online classroom, archived at https://learn.umgc.edu.
