TSP 2021 Annual meeting – July 13, 2021, 2:00-3:30pm EDT

Attendees: Pattie Thomas, Diane McMahon, Ira Silver

Agenda:
I. Discuss ideas for sessions at the 2022 meeting in Los Angeles.
II. Consider planning special activities.
III. Brainstorm ideas for division newsletter.

I. Sessions ideas for 2022 meeting

We considered several ideas for sessions sponsored by our section:
* Community outreach within the classroom – solution-oriented focus.
* What going remote during the pandemic has meant to students. How remote learning has changed the ways we teach about social problems.
* How media are changing the ways we teach about and respond to social problems.
* Using open educational resources.
* Decolonizing the classroom by taking a global perspective.

Then, we mulled over possibilities for co-sponsored sessions with the following sections:
* Sport, Leisure, and the Body
* Crime and Juvenile Delinquency
* Educational Problems
* Social Problems Theory
* Sexual Behavior, Politics and Community
* Society and Mental Health
* Labor Studies
* Racial and Ethnic Minorities

Here’s the final list of sessions that evolved from the initial discussions at the divisional meeting:

***Sessions sponsored by the Teaching Social Problems section:

1. How to be More Solutions-oriented in the Classroom (Aligns with program theme, “The Sociological Re-imagination: From Moments to Momentum). Organizer: hephzibah v. strmic-pawl, hvsp@mville.edu and Abby Templer Rodriguez, ATemplerRodrigues@MissouriState.edu
2. The Power of Storytelling about Social Problems. Organizer: Diane McMahon, Dmcmahon@allegany.EDU and Morena Tartari, Morena.Tartari@uantwerpen.be
3. Drawing Upon Open Educational Resources. Organizer: Sydney Hart, shart9@ccc.edu and Pattie Thomas, Pattie.Thomas@CSN.EDU

***Co-sponsored sessions:

1. Sports as a Lens for Teaching About Social Problems (Co-sponsored With Sport, Leisure, and the Body) Organizer: Kaitlin Pericak, kait.pericak@miami.edu
2. Teaching CJ: Illustrating the Lived Experience of Criminal Justice Entanglement (Co-sponsored with Crime & Juvenile Delinquency) Organizer: Cynthia Zhang, baiqing.zhang@cwu.edu
3. Teaching About Social Inequality in an Increasingly Polarized Era (Co-sponsored with Educational Problems) Organizer: Linda Waldron, lwaldron@cnu.edu and Laurie Linhart, lclinhart@dmacc.edu 
4. COVID-19 and the Complicated Classroom (Co-sponsored with Social Problems Theory) Organizer: David Lane, dclane1@ilstu.edu
5. Teaching Sexualities (Co-sponsored with Sexual Behavior, Politics and Community) Organizer: Andrea Miller, andreamiller31@webster.edu

II. Consider planning special activities

We discussed running a workshop either before or after the 2022 meeting that demonstrates OER resources and introduce people to these resources. We could invite providers of OER (e.g., Open Stax) to do demos.

III. Brainstorm ideas for division newsletter

Material Pattie Thomas collected during her time as division chair:

* Essay by Randy Coates on decolonizing the classroom
* Interview with Donileen Loseke on how to teach from a constructionist perspective, about solutions, and about the natural history of successful solutions.

Ideas for new material:

* Drawing on solutions-oriented journalism in the classroom – inviting a submission from Jennifer Rosen and Alane Presswood (Solutions Journalism Network) based on their 2021 SSSP paper “A Solutions-oriented Approach to Teaching Social Problems.”
* Blurbs about books published in 2020 and 2021
* Useful articles from the popular press for teaching about social problems.
* Interview with a particular TSP member that highlights how they teach about social problems. Put out a call for people to be interviewed: “Are you interested in sharing what you’ve found to be effective strategies for teaching about social problems?”
* Compiling a chart of OER resources (Pattie Thomas)
* A new approach to diversity and inclusion – how we can create a community of belonging. Maybe ask the director of the Institute of Othering and Belonging at UC-Berkeley to submit something. https://belonging.berkeley.edu/johnpowell
* Using deliberative dialogue to teach about social problems (Diane McMahon, Dmcmahon@allegany.EDU)

Meeting recording: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/ceFWvuh8zrUweZdIH3GytqofpGl2PNEJtzKhFHSH4FrjmnK1YnZYco9nEqodCuD0.vnYTbWgVz_s6RUsb Passcode: *Sd0=58X