Marcia Hernandez

All of my courses are organized around the belief that student-centered learning is an avenue towards student empowerment. Sometimes the class day entails a formal lecture, other days include student debates or presentations, analyzing social media sites, viewing a documentary, or students working in small groups on a project. In my courses I assign a variety of "texts" including academic books and journal articles, opinion pieces, documentaries and autobiographic pieces for analysis. I ask that students take ownership of their educational experience by thinking critically about race, gender and class privilege and inequality, across groups and within individual relationships. For sociologists, critical thinking means more than being critical of an author's position or disagreeing with a speaker because their experience is different from one's own. Critical thinking is the skill of asking difficult questions about stratification, power and privilege, and being open to hearing answers that might make one uncomfortable from a variety of sources. I ask students to think critically about whom most often benefits from living in a society structured on social inequality and which groups are likely affected by the current structural arrangements. To this end students are encouraged to use their sociological imagination to consider alternatives to the existing structures of power, privilege and entitlement in the United States.