William Du Bois
I feel the most important things are to be interesting, enthusiastic, and relevant. I believe as a teacher, you are under a moral obligation to be interesting. If you are interesting and enthusiastic, everything else important takes care of itself. If you are relevant to people's lives, you stimulate conversation and discussion. I use the sociological imagination to provide examples that are right in the middle of people's lives and personal problems. I manage to create discussion even in very large lecture classes of 350 people.
I believe ideally students should be co-producers rather than passive consumers in the education process. In my upper division classes including Advanced Criminology: Prevention & Alternatives and Applied Sociology, I encourage students to synthesize their knowledge combining significant research findings, meaningful theoretical insights, and borrowing from the best of existing programs to invent new solutions to social and organizational problems.
It is exciting to be an applied sociologist in this day and age. I strive to take the academic enterprise, translate it with the student, and together work in what is often called a "student-centered learning environment." This does not mean that the student assumes responsibility for the academic process, quite the opposite ... the student shares with the teacher the excitement of discovery. In this process the application of academic sociology takes on meaning for the student of today who has the responsibility of inventing social things that will make the world a better place in which to live tomorrow. I think we should be training sociologists as artists, as thinkers, as persons able to take the knowledge and experience of the field and set about inventing solutions that will help make this a better place for humans to live. To make this happen, students need not only to understand significant research findings and meaningful theoretical insights, but must also be able to apply them in practical ways. It is only with such practical application that we can actually talk of someone mastering a body of knowledge.