On the first day of school, there is a certain kind of silence that fills the room. Students are taking a look around the room and figuring out how much sleep and work the semester will cost them. And then Professor Dana Ellroy walks in. Before she even says hello, she puts a card on each desk. It’s not a syllabus. A card for theory.
Each card carries a name — Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Patricia Hill Collins, W.E.B. Du Bois — along with a core idea, two or three lines of context, and a question printed at the bottom. There’s never an easy answer. “What does this thinker assume about human nature?” or “Where would this theory break down?” Students pick up the card, read it, and before the first coffee of the morning has gone cold, they’re already doing sociology.
While this method may work for some professors, others may think it moves too quickly and builds on old ideas too soon. In most introductory classes, it is common practice to spend the first few weeks building vocabulary. This helps students get used to the subject before teaching them the complex ideas that hold it all together. Ellroy does not agree with that. Her view, shaped by more than fifteen years in the classroom, is that students rise to whatever level they’re introduced to first. If you lower the ceiling on the first day, you’ll have to fight it all semester.
The theory cards are simple things—they are laminated, printed in a clean sans serif font, and small enough to fit in the pocket of a jacket. It’s a whole different thing to watch students interact with them, though. The room changes for about two minutes into the show. Someone turns the card over to see what’s written on it. Someone else asks a neighbor what a word means. A girl in the back row holds the card out in front of her like she’s reading small print. Ellroy has said this many times: the cards make things move where they were still. This is exactly the point.
Sociology is based on the idea that people are not as unique as they think they are and that their actions are shaped by the situations they are in. Simmel’s ideas about how groups work are just as important today as they were in the early 1900s. He argued that the size of a group alone changes how its members interact with each other. Some dyads are strong and some are weak. A triad is more stable, but it also has some problems. A class of ten feels very different from a lecture hall of two hundred. Ellroy starts with the cards in part because she wants the students to feel how groups work before they try to describe them. Just seeing how people react in a room is a small sociological experiment.
There is also a democratic quality to the way it is done. Each student is given the same card, question, and point in the line. The person who came in having read Du Bois is just as ready to answer the question at the bottom as the person who has never heard of the name. In that first conversation, both people are on an equal level, which doesn’t happen very often in college, more often than most people admit.
It’s still not clear if this method works better for long-term retention than a more traditional structure. Ellroy is careful not to make too many claims. She does notice that students look at the cards again and again during the semester. Sometimes they even pull them out weeks later to settle a disagreement with a classmate. The cards serve as a shared language, a set of definitions that the class builds on to make its own sense.
Less obvious is the effect that students who handled a theory card on the first morning seem less afraid of theory in general. This is harder to measure. Early on, they touched it. They weren’t burned. When Simmel’s ideas about group conformity or Durkheim’s work on social cohesion are talked about in more depth, those ideas are already well known, which doesn’t happen very often with just lectures.
Some professors explain what sociology is all day on the first day. You can find Ellroy making his students do it. There is a small difference in the times. Things that happen next are very different after all.
