Posts Tagged ‘teaching’

Teilnehmende Beobachtung und visuelle Methoden: Soziales sehen.

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Im Sommersemester werden Lars Meier und ich zusammen ein Seminar an der TU Darmstadt unterrichten. Das letzte Mal, dass wir dort gemeinsam unterrichtet haben ist dann fünf Jahre her… Der Ausschreibungstext für das Seminar lautet folgendermaßen:

Die teilnehmende Beobachtung, also die bewusste und reflektierte Teilnahme des Forschenden an sozialer Interaktion, ist eine klassische Forschungsmethode der Soziologie. Sie findet Verwendung in vielfältigen Settings, die von Untersuchungen in Boxclubs oder Ghettos hin zu solchen an Arbeitsplätzen oder in Wohnungen reichen. Im Seminar werden in einem ersten Schritt die Grundlagen dieser Methode vermittelt, wobei ein besonderer Fokus auf die praktische Verwendung visueller Hilfsmittel wie Foto und Video gelegt wird. Im zweiten Schritt erstellen die Teilnehmenden dann eigene Beobachtungen und Aufnahmen, die sich auf für sie relevante Themenbereiche beziehen (oder auch auf Felder, zu denen die beiden Seminarleiter aktuell forschen). Die Schwierigkeiten und Ergebnisse dieser eigenen Kleinprojekte werden dann gemeinsam besprochen und in Hinblick auf mögliche Präsentationsformen (Text, Collage, Film, Internet, etc.) diskutiert.

Wir freuen uns schon sehr auf die Möglichkeit, zusammen mit den Studierenden der TU den Blick ins Feld zu wagen und mit visuellen Forschungshilfsmitteln zu experimentieren. Und darauf, alte FreundInnen und KollegInnen wieder zu treffen und gemeinsam Zeit im 603qm zu verbringen!

Essays zu Dingen.

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Dank der aufgeschlossenen Mitarbeit von den Studierenden, die im letzten Sommersemester in meinem Seminar Materialität & Dinge, Wahrnehmung & Handeln einen Schein gemacht haben, kann ich jetzt fünf Essays zu verschiedenen Dingen ins Netz stellen:

Es gibt auch eine Übersicht zum Seminar. Viel Spaß beim Lesen!

Seminar success.

Monday, July 18th, 2005

Last week Lars and I hosted the last session of our seminar Sehen, Hören Fühlen – Stadtethnografien erstellen (eng: Watching, Listening, Sensing – Doing Urban Ethnographies), which was – much to our relief and joy – a big success. Nine research projects had been performed by groups of up to three students. Almost all of them invested a substantial amount of time in their studies, they tackled with their position, impact, and responsability as academic observers, and they presented some really interesting aspects of the publicly accessible places they studied in Darmstadt and Heppenheim. They observed different plaza and park areas, a cafe, a cemetary, and a group of large-scale-chessboard players. Lars and I are now looking forward to getting the final results of the different studies in written form. All in all this seminar worked out at least as good as we hoped it would. Kudos to the students involved! It would be just perfect if one could teach more of these seminars, particularly if one could offer a two-semester practical seminar…

Teaching v. 2.0.

Saturday, April 17th, 2004

I’ve just been told that I will most likely be able to again teach a class on the history of sociology at the TU Darmstadt in the wintersemester 2004/2005. Although I liked the way the last semester worked out (still have to grade the student’s papers), I was a bit unhappy with the format and the web presentation of the class. Recently, I read about moodle, an open source course management system which seems to have quite a lot of features that might be nice to use for a class. I will try to get myself acquainted with this software package over the course of this spring/summer, and see if and what parts I could actually use and how easy/hard it will be to implement this stuff.

Finish in sight.

Saturday, February 7th, 2004

Another week’s work is done. This week I had quite a workload, as I had to prepare three different theory sessions for the History of Sociology class that I am teaching. The strike earlier this semester and my illness in the first week of this year made it necessary that we pack more stuff into the last sessions and even come up with an additional evening session. In addition, Lars and I had to do some conference-proposal related research which tightened the schedule even further.

However, it was a nice week. After wednesday’s History of Sociology evening session we went out to a pub with a significant percentage of people who participate in my seminar. It was my first teacher-drinks-cold-beverages-with-his-students experience ‘from the other side.’ It was very nice. I enjoyed the seminar itself, the students (most of them first semesters/freshmen) were better than I expected them to be, and going to the pub was nice too. If circumstances bring up the possibility of teaching this seminar again, I would be happy to do so.

Next week will be the last week of this semester. Only one more session remains to be prepared (Ulrich Beck on Globalization), and a final friday meeting of the college’s members lies ahead. Yeah!

Tomorrow I will be teaching.

Thursday, November 6th, 2003

Excitement starts to build up. Tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. I will teach my first university level class. “Geschichte der Soziologie” (“History of Sociology” – es gibt auch einen Seminarplan). The class was originally offered by Sybille Frank alone and will now be split in two since there were almost one hundred people in it. I will do the class with one half, Mrs. Frank with the other. I guess it will be an interesting experience. Hopefully also a good one–

And yes, 8 a.m. is too early.