Program

The Center for Learning and Teaching Newsletter Teaching News

Author's Department

Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT)

Document Type

News Article

Publication Title

New Chalk Talk

Publication Date

9-24-2004

Abstract

Despite the fact that I taught for several decades in a sociology department and believed that I had attained a degree of professionalism in this field, it was Gilly Salmon, a leading British pedagogist who teaches at the Open University (UK) that recently drew my attention to the importance of the work Emile Durkheim, a leading French sociologist, in respect to my quest to enhance quality learning in my classes. Writing more than a century ago, and with reference to his seminal work on collective representation, “Durkheim showed that a sense of security and progress depends on broad agreement both on the ends to be pursued and on the accepted means of attaining them.” (Salmon, 2000: 28) Thus, it was Durkheim’s work, a sociological account of the consequences of socialization and its implications for human behavior that motivated me to explore the benefits to be derived from perceiving my class as a “learning community” with its own distinct learning culture, formal and informal rules and norms and behavior.

Share

COinS