KINS137 Sociology of Sport

Team-Based Learning, Whole Self in Learning, Collective Power

Course Description

Analyzes sport as a social institution and the inter-relations between sport and societal subsystems. Consideration of the attitudes, values, and behaviors associated with sport. Analyzes contemporary problems associated with sport: race relations, traditional and emergent roles of women, leisure behavior, aggression and violence, and political and economic concerns. Analyzes a sociological problem within the context of sport.

Enrollment - 40 students (fills every time; I typically teach 3 sections of KINS137 each semester)

Format - Lecture

Curricular Sequence - Required in all concentrations for the Kinesiology major (not the Exercise Science major); Faculty advise students to take the course as rising juniors or seniors

Overview of the Redesign Project

The need for community-building and realizing one's ability to make meaningful contributions in society is all-too-obvious in the current historical moment. In the KINS137 course, we learn about and develop the skills to apply a Sociological Imagination (Mills, 1959) in our thinking about access, atmosphere, and power and control in physical activity settings. Attention spans are shrinking, we are all multi-tasking, and we all need reasons to fully show up and fully engage with each other - this is what motivated me to more intentionally integrate TBL throughout the KINS137 course.

1. 1. Commit more fully to Team-Based Learning (TBL) throughout the semester
  2. Activate more fully the belonging and accompaniment that often can be enhanced with TBL
  3. Clarify the peer-to-peer learning components of assignments

Assessment of the Redesign Project

This table shows three ways I assessed my course redesign.
Team-Based Learning	Whole Self in Learning	Collective Power
Collaborative claims on knowledge.	Facilitating self-reflection; linking self to society	Re-imagining how we "do" Kinesiology

Reflection

The KINS137 Sociology of Sport course content is intellectual content that I have been working with throughout my academic career. Teaching sociological concepts and analytic skills through a focus on the cultural space of sport requires a sort of Soc101 approach to unit one in order to build foundational knowledge that will inform applied work in unit two. Thanks to guidance in the TI workshop in Summer of 2025, I finally made the leap to TBL throughout the entire course, not only in unit two. I reduced readings and reading quizzes in unit one, established base groups in unit one rather than waiting to establish in unit two, replaced about 40 minutes of lecture each week with base group discussion and report out, and I introduced the applied assignments for unit two as incentives along the way in unit one. Based on learning from the TI workshop, I made reading quizzes and exams a base group effort, allowing conference and use of notes to collectively consider best-response to quiz and exam items. More than ever before, in the KINS137 course, students were checking in with each other, engaging in intellectual dis/agreement toward clarified understanding, and sharing about their own lived experience as they developed deep conceptual knowledge. A challenge with TBL right now is the increased incidence of precarity and isolation that many of us feel as world events unfold in increasingly inhumane ways. For those students who are able to show up most of the time, this revised version of KINS137 is not only preparing academically-informed KINS professionals, but also inviting a commitment to accompaniment, intellectual curiosity and collective problem-pondering (see images above for student work that illustrates this multi-layered, agentic knowledge).

Faculty Biography

This table includes my faculty biography.
	I am a King, Chavez, Parks Fellow, and Doctoral alum from the Department of Kinesiology at Michigan State University. My current academic appointment is that of Professor in the Department of Kinesiology at Sacramento State University. I am a thoughtfully engaged Senator in the CSUS Faculty Senate, an Executive Board Member of the California Faculty Association - Sacramento chapter. Recently, I have been a co-creator on the Committee for the Emergent Scholars of Color Pre-Conference for the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, and a collaborator with two amazing guest editorial teams for separate special issues in the Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal and Women's Studies International Forum. My peer-recognized teaching and research interests are focused on issues related to sport, power, and social stratification. I continue to value and enjoy teaching and learning while also managing increased workload and diminished support for the full array of demands that come with facilitation of high quality teaching and learning. Having served as Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies (UNC, Greensboro) and Chair of Kinesiology and Health Science (CSU, Sacramento), my academic leadership has evolved into an intentional focus on faculty support, mentoring and advancement. Always a student of human movement, I am currently re-learning how my 60-year-old, menopausal body moves now.

**Program Sponsors**
	This work was supported by: Sacramento State Academic Affairs - Center for Teaching and Learning