These days, a sociology classroom at a community college in Texas may resemble a hobby shop rather than a lecture hall. Students gather in pairs and exchange tiny, glossy cards with pictures of Michel Foucault, Patricia Hill Collins, or Karl Marx printed on the front and statistics and theories listed on the back like a batting average. At first, it’s a strange sight. Then it makes sense.
There is a reputation issue with critical theory. It is complex, abstract, and frequently taught through lengthy readings that presume an academic language familiarity that many first-generation students haven’t had the opportunity to develop. In Texas, a significant portion of these students—working adults, parents, and individuals balancing two jobs while pursuing a degree—attend community colleges. Time is of the essence. There is less tolerance for jargon.
The trading cards are useful in this situation. The idea is partially inspired by an old classroom assignment known as “sociologist player cards,” in which students investigate the life of a theorist and distill their contributions into a few striking facts, akin to a baseball player’s stats on a card. Some educators have taken that concept a step further, using whole decks as study aids that combine a theorist’s biography with the main ideas of their work—such as symbolic interactionism, conflict theory, critical race theory, and standpoint theory—reduced to a few lines that students can truly recall.
The effectiveness of this is almost unyielding. On paper, a theory that seems untouchable suddenly has a face. When a student who is having trouble understanding the concept of “cultural capital” finds out that Pierre Bourdieu was born into a working-class family in rural France and dedicated his professional life to researching the exact type of social marginalization he personally encountered, their eyes may still light up. Although it’s a tiny narrative hook, it usually sticks.
When asked about the practice, instructors characterize it more as a bridge than as a gimmick. Students must still struggle with primary texts and write essays using these frameworks to address actual social issues; the cards do not take the place of the readings. However, the cards serve as a sort of scaffolding, giving students something to cling to before the more difficult reading starts. It’s difficult to ignore how much more eager students appear to interact with a challenging idea after they’ve met the person who created it.
Since students must locate reliable biographical sources and correctly credit their facts, the assignment itself teaches research and citation skills, which is another subtle but easily missed advantage. That is not insignificant. Since many of these students are unfamiliar with basic source evaluation or APA citations, completing a low-stakes, almost lighthearted project seems to reduce their anxiety about it.
It’s still unclear if this strategy works in more than one classroom. In some parts of Texas, critical theory courses that address issues of race, gender, and class have become politically contentious, and any teaching strategy associated with those subjects is scrutinized regardless of its pedagogical value. However, the instructors who use trading cards appear less interested in the politics of critical theory and more concerned with a more focused, pragmatic objective: getting students who might otherwise tune out to actually read Du Bois, Foucault, or Hooks and come away with something they can explain in their own words.
It’s a small solution to a serious issue. Not ostentatious, not groundbreaking. Just a deck of cards, doing what effective teaching aids have always done: adding a human touch to the abstract.
