Ahead of the launch of Trinity’s new curriculum, the Department of Sociology is aligning its course offerings with the evolving needs of today’s Duke students.
Department faculty have been examining their course offerings with a keen eye toward incorporating innovative teaching practices that blend practical skills with experiential learning and real-world applications. Undergraduate students have been directly involved in many of the implemented improvements, providing faculty with input and ideas.
“Duke is synonymous with excellence in undergraduate education and as undergraduate students evolve, so must our programming,” said Professor and department Chair Jen’nan Read. “Over the past five years, we’ve updated, upgraded and innovated our undergraduate program to match students’ passion for addressing contemporary societal concerns.”
Below is a snapshot of three Sociology courses that embrace the values underpinning Trinity’s new curriculum: connection, curiosity and humility.
You cannot learn if don’t recognize what you don’t know. In his classes, Professor of Sociology Christopher Wildeman is encouraging students to recognize the limitations of their own knowledge about mass incarceration and engage in epistemic humility — one of the foundational values of Trinity’s new curriculum.
Crime, Law and Justice is a core concentration area of Duke’s Sociology major, and Wildeman’s course, Incarceration Nation, teaches students about the causes, consequences and potential transformation of U.S. carceral centers.
Over his years of teaching, Wildeman noticed a significant knowledge gap around carceral systems. He decided to redesign the course for the fall of 2024, with the aim to build a strong factual base through which students could engage more effectively with the subject matter.
“A lot of people talk about the ethics and politics of mass incarceration, but few can actually define mass incarceration, or even how mass incarceration came to be,” Wildeman said. “Many students I encounter state that mass incarceration is driven purely by the War on Drugs and that's, factually, wrong. A lot of factors have driven big increases in incarceration in the U.S.”
To address the lack of foundational knowledge about mass incarceration among students — which includes definitions, statistics and experiences — Wildeman deployed what some might consider an odd innovation: an exam.
“It’s very much a throwback,” Wildeman said. “But I decided to structure the class grade based exclusively on in-class, fact-based exams because I want to make sure that, before students go off and do anything else related to the criminal legal system, they have an incredibly accurate base of knowledge and can articulate several hundred facts that most people don't know.”
“Most people” in this case also includes many leading criminology experts, 10 of whom agreed to take Wildeman’s exam. Their test scores are used as a datapoint for Wildeman’s students to gauge how their base knowledge stacks up against top criminologists in the field at the start of the term and the end of the course.
Wildeman’s gateway course is expected to be part of a Trinity’s new curriculum Constellation, with a pass/fail grading system to reduce stress related to the weight of the exam.
Associate Professor of the Practice of Sociology Jenifer Hamil-Luker wants to combine practical skill development with real-life experiences — and what better way to gain real-life experiences than venturing into the real world?
Hamil-Luker’s course, Just Laws: Inequalities in the U.S. Legal System, introduces undergraduate students to the study of law as a social institution and the different ways legal rules create and maintain hierarchies of privilege and disadvantage.
In 2023, Hamil-Luker’s students researched and developed policy papers and websites to educate North Carolina lawmakers on pending legislation in the NC legislature, transforming their classroom learning into resources for stakeholders and decision-makers. The students then visited the NC General Assembly and hand-delivered their recommendations to state representatives.
“The experience was invaluable,” said student Maia Wenger (T’26). “We were given the opportunity to select a topic that was meaningful to us and propose a policy recommendation for an existing law, which not only provided us with the chance to delve deeply into policy, but also gave us the opportunity to deliver our recommendations directly to lawmakers in Raleigh. It was my first experience working firsthand with policymakers through a course at Duke and it was eye-opening and empowering.”
“The goal is to move beyond an abstract understanding of the legal system that we read about in textbooks,” Hamil-Luker said. “We’re living it.”
This term, Hamil-Luker’s students are exploring the ways historical activism applies to contemporary challenges, curating an online and in-person museum exhibit about Duke student activism and legal change over the past century.
“Many students feel unsure of how they can make an impact. They say things like, ‘I can’t end these wars or solve the climate crisis,’” Hamil-Luker said. She hopes that by studying the archives and learning how Duke students from over the past 100 years had similar concerns — and still found ways to act and create change — her students will connect with that history and envision new possibilities.”
Through workshops with Duke archivists, museum curators and web builders, Hamil-Luker’s pre-law students are investigating areas of student activism including workers’ rights, gender equality, free speech, divestiture and racial desegregation — all while learning how to design websites, find primary sources and tell complicated stories.
The exhibit, Duke Student Activism and Legal Change, 1924-2024, will be on display from December 6 through Spring of 2025 on the first floor of the Reuben-Cooke Building.
Trinity’s liberal arts education aims to bridge classroom knowledge and real-world applications while creating opportunities for students to form purposeful connections with peers and faculty.
Ed Tiryakian of Markets & Management Studies is building those connections by using gamification models in his Managerial Finance class. The class is part of Sociology’s Certificate in Markets & Managements Studies — a signature Duke undergraduate program offering a business concentration.
In the course, Tiryakian — whose moniker with students is “Ed T”— uses the application of typical elements of game-playing, such as team competition, point scoring and rules of play, to create engaging and practical experiences for students to learn the fundamentals of corporate finance.
“It's hands-on learning that makes finance feel accessible and relevant in our daily lives,” said student Cody Schiffman (T’26).
In one game called “Hook or Crook”, a student team presents an investment idea, and the other teams must decide whether to invest in it, determining if the pitch is real or a scam. Raising capital investment is the key to winning the game. This interactive, collaborative approach provides students with important business acumen skills while also developing their connections with peers.
“Team presentations are a fun way for students to learn practical aspects of how to raise money for a startup,” Tiryakian said. In the ‘Hook or Crook’ exercise they must give a good presentation to potential investors, and they have to decipher what questions to ask as potential investors themselves to determine if the idea is a solid investment.”
Another course innovation is a game platform developed by Tiryakian and students — based on a student idea — called Fandex.edu, which allows students to trade mock shares in NFL teams based on fictional events, bringing a gamified approach to understanding financial concepts.
“It’s not just about memorizing theories in textbooks,” Schiffman said, “but applying them in real-time as we analyze how NFL team performances, player injuries and future seasonal outlooks impact the NFL team's stock value,” he said. “This approach has deepened my grasp of how to value assets, assess risk and make informed investment decisions.”
In addition to Sociology’s substantive pre-law and pre-business concentrations, the department also trains pre-health track students interested in medical sociology.
“Our core courses give students theoretical and methodological skills that are needed across professions,” Read said. “We are committed to providing students the best experiences possible, in and out of the classroom.”
Hamil-Luker agrees: “We want to be a department that says, 'Our students are learning differently, they need a different type of skillset for the future ahead, so let's adopt some new ways to teach them.’”