ABSTRACT
The movements toward service learning and public sociology, as well as the scholarship of teaching and learning, have advocated a more progressive pedagogical project linking research and teaching to community service, activism, and human rights. Sociology's earliest scholars and practitioners focused primarily on the standardization of course content and the formalization of departmental offerings. Articles relating to pedagogy and social justice were mostly linked to either social work or teaching outside higher education in prisons and other community settings. The implementation of methodological and analytical rigor in the work of research on teaching is long overdue, within the current context of institutional rationalization and conservative ideological attacks, a pedagogical focus on the social justice and human rights impact of our teaching may remain marginalized by our professional discourse. Sociology provide the analytical and political tools for a new generation of activists hoping to establish a world based on human rights and dignity.
