As I prepare to teach my Sociology of Guns course for the 9th consecutive academic year (dating back to 2015), I am revisiting my syllabus as I do annually. The biggest variables in the course are the assigned readings and the core writing assignment. Here I provide details of the different writing projects I have assigned in previous semesters.
Note that one constant has been and will continue to be our field trip to the gun range and the reflection students write on that experience. This is a highlight of the course so not going to mess with it.
This fall I am going to borrow an “Op-Ed Assignment” my Wake Forest sociology colleague Hana Brown uses in her political sociology class. The assignment will be to write a research-based opinion essay akin to those published in newspaper editorial pages.
I think this assignment will meet my course objective of having students reflect on their personal views of guns in dialogue with scholarly research on guns. This objective underlies each of the earlier writing assignments you will find below.
