I’ve rotated through a number of courses over my time at UBC, and I’ve got an old post here offering up some of my past syllabi. But I figure it’s about time for an update! So here are my course syllabi for the 2022-2023 academic year.
As a housing demographer, I’m on the lookout for various ways to explain basic aspects of how people and housing fit together. A recurring theme is that this stuff is not obvious to most people. For example, people tend to associate new housing in a metro area with new people coming to a metro area. In fact, most new housing houses people already living within a metro area. But their moves free up other housing, which often incorporates newcomers.
Most years I take my students on a tour around City Hall, with a focus on showing off various aspects of how City Hall is working (or not) upon the landscape around it. This year, of course, I can’t do that with my classes! So I’m moving the tour on-line, where anybody can come along if they like. Also I’m making the slides linked below available as a PDF document, in case anyone wants to download them and bring them along to walk the route.
I’m archiving my syllabi for current and recent undergraduate courses here on the blog, both for (ungated) student use and for public consumption. My courses all combine interactive lectures with student-led reading group discussions and some form of sustained research or building project.
Built Environments (2018) UBC SOCI 364: Syllabus-BuiltEnv2018
Sociology of the Life Course (2018) UBC SOCI 324: Syllabus-LifeCourse-2018
Urban Sociology (2017) UBC SOCI 425-A: UrbanSoc-Syllabus-2017
In the recent past, I’ve also taught graduate level courses (especially in Urban Sociology) and our undergraduate course in Research Methods. For other teaching scholars out there, please send me any suggestions for improvement! I’m especially interested in keeping my readings updated and interesting.
Today I inquired of my Sociology of the Life Course (300-level) students: How many Canadian adults (ages 25+) have University degrees (Bachelor’s or higher)?
Their starting estimate was close to 80%. From there I took descending bids, like a backward auction, until I had guesses of 72% and 60%, with one brave soul going as low as 40%. Then I revealed the estimates from Statistics Canada. And that’s when I heard an audible *gasp!* (it made my day, really).
As of 2009, the figure was THIRTY-ONE PERCENT. And that’s only for 25-39 year olds (it would be much lower if we included older folks).
I can sympathize with my students here. I actually have kind of a hard time absorbing this figure myself. I keep checking and re-checking it against census records. Why are my students so wrong? Why am I so skeptical? I’d suggest it pretty much comes down to exposure. When me, you, and (almost) everyone we know has a university degree, we tend to take the next step of generalizing to all of Canada. “After all, if everyone at UBC has or is getting a degree…” Yeah. It doesn’t work that way.
The Statistics Canada estimates are also cool for another reason. They contain information about parental degree attainment. And it really, really matters. More than half of children who have at least one parent with a university degree will also earn a university degree. Fewer than a quarter of children without a university graduate for a parent will earn a degree.
This (in conjunction with reading the much-cited work of American sociologist Annette Lareau), helps establish how social reproduction works. And the students get it. They just don’t necessarily get, until it’s put in front of them, how small the university educated middle class is. Or how exceptional their own experiences are. And why should they? They’re surrounded by other people just like them – at least in the key respect of educational attainment. What’s more, me, you, and everyone they know also usually extends to their parents. Most of them have university degrees too.
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