In most sociology classes, there comes a time around week four or five when you can sense the classroom becoming uncomfortably quiet. The hollow kind, in which students are copying words from a slide without actually hearing them, is not the contemplative quiet of intense concentration. Durkheim. Anomie. stratification of society. The words appear on the page and remain there, lifeless and flat, unrelated to anything a twenty-year-old has truly gone through.
It’s difficult to ignore how long this has been taken for granted by educators.
Because of this, the increasing use of theory trading cards in sociology classes is both fascinating and unsettling to some traditional academics. A small but growing number of lecturers have begun using physical trading cards with sociological theorists, important ideas, and practical applications in place of or in addition to traditional lecture content in recent years. The cards resemble sports memorabilia. They work somewhat like a game. They are also reaching students that months of lectures just couldn’t, according to those who use them.
The concept is not wholly novel. Since at least 2009, when a group of researchers at Athabasca University, including Maiga Chang, investigated how card-based reward systems could sustain student motivation in ways that symbolic grades simply don’t, research into trading card games as learning tools has been making the rounds in academic circles. They essentially argued that a star sticker on an assignment never has the same value as a card that a student can hold, trade, and use. The reward is incorporated into a living system that has repercussions outside of the classroom.
The direct application of that reasoning to sociological theory, one of the dullest areas of the undergraduate curriculum, has changed recently. Even though the research is still in its early stages, there is a sense that something genuine is happening here as it develops in practice.
For some students, trading cards work in part because of the social interaction that initially makes them feel carefree. According to a 2011 study that was published in the Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies, playing trading card games almost naturally fosters empathy and communication skills. Players must bargain, compromise, and adjust. They must comprehend the values of the other person. When you apply that to a sociology class, Weber’s idea of social action becomes more than just a passage to commit to memory; it becomes a tactic you employ against the person seated across from you.
Nevertheless, declaring the lecture hall dead would be too simple. Some students actually learn theory through formal instruction and prolonged reading. The lecture format is flawed for more students than most departments are willing to acknowledge, but it isn’t flawed for everyone. Undoubtedly, attention spans are shorter, but more significantly, some learners have always had a longer journey from abstract concepts to felt understanding than others.
Whether cards are superior to lectures is not the deeper question. It’s whether teachers are prepared to acknowledge that not every student responds to the same delivery style. Since at least 1978, when researcher Mary Bredemeier wrote about simulation games’ ability to link sociological abstractions to lived experience, this argument has been made in sociology. The discipline is still debating it decades later.
The resistance itself has an almost sociological quality.
