Reflexive Pedagogy and the Sociological Imagination

Introduction Some fifty years after the publication of The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills, students of sociology often have difficulty grasping the interplay of man (sic.) and society, of biography and history, of self and world (Mills 1959:4). In this paper we suggest that in part this is due to our inability to publicly model our own sociological imagination given the compartmentalized demands that are all too often placed upon us. Michael Burawoy suggests that our professional lives as academics are divided into four separated compartments: public, policy, critical, and professional (2005). The tendency is for these areas to remain distinctive, with little to no interchange between them. In what follows, we begin to demonstrate how the theoretical and methodological understandings derived from our 'critical' lives--that of our research work--can be incorporated into our 'professional' lives as instructors, and how the practice of what we call 'reflexive pedagogy' can students up to fully grasp and cultivate the sociological imagination. Our own research work has exhibited the importance of 'reflexivity' for our qualitative methodological practices and we have chosen to integrate this into our own pedagogical practice in order to introduce students to the sociological imagination. This occurs through the purposeful positioning of ourselves in relation to the materials we choose to instruct, the university locations of our instruction, and, most importantly, as a purposeful process of educating our students. It is this dual process of self-reflection as instructor and engaging students into self-positioning within their own sociological learning that we describe as reflexive pedagogy. In this article we draw upon some of our experiences teaching Canadian undergraduate students at both Memorial University of Newfoundland and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, to demonstrate an orientation toward reflexive pedagogy. These are two very different universities with distinctive student bodies and ethos, yet we believe our reflexive relation toward course instruction at these universities drew students into a mode of reflexive learning. The paper describes modes of interrogating qualitative data by Jennifer Mason (2002) as analogous to modes of sociological learning. Tailoring courses to integrate popular culture, questions of social identity, and relevant local concerns into sociology courses, is part of the distinctiveness of what we are referring to as reflexive pedagogy. Though this certainly happens to varying extents in sociology classrooms, we believe the modes of sociological learning outlined in what follows provides for a compelling pedagogical practice, specifically as it draws on an increasing centralization of the notion of the self and emphasizes both individual and collective identity. Though there are a number of alternative views of pedagogy within sociology, we believe that issues of individualization (see Bauman 2000) and the concept of reflexivity (see Beck, Giddens, Lash 1994) provide the tools necessary for a new generation of sociology students to acquire the sociological imagination. This may open up new and previously unsuspected possibilities of living one's life with others with more self-awareness, more comprehension of our surroundings ...[,] and perhaps also with more freedom and control (Bauman and May 2001:10). Reflexivity and Instruction Reflexivity has been a fairly prominent term in sociological literature for the past twenty-five years, seen as the capacity of people to be both subjects and objects to themselves (Weigert and Grecas, 2003:280). It is also a core concept within the sociological theory of Anthony Giddens (1991), who with Ulrick Beck and Scott Lash brought the term its most prominence, specifically in relation to identity and social institutions. There has also been an increased awareness and call to use reflexive methodology when doing qualitative research, particularly with post-structuralist critiques of qualitative methods that made explicit the need for researchers to situate themselves within their data (Brewer, 2005). …

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