Teaching-infused Graduate Seminars: Incorporating Pedagogy into Substantive Courses

Even though pedagogy courses in sociology are on the rise, many departments do not offer or require a course on teaching sociology or a teaching proseminar series. However, faculty in such departments do have other options for incorporating and integrating pedagogical issues into their standard curriculum. In this note, I offer one suggestion for incorporating teaching and learning into the curriculum: integrating pedagogy into substantive seminars. “Teaching-infused” graduate seminars are a great way to transmit norms, values, and common practices of the department to graduate students, and they allow for discussions of particular substantive challenges that graduate student instructors may face when teaching undergraduates about privilege, inequality, discrimination, and social structure. I describe my approach and present qualitative evaluations of this approach from two semesters of graduate students who have taken one of these seminars.