Sociology students are seeking to enrich, enlighten and empower local nonprofit groups through ETSU’s new Community Sociology course.
“The Community Sociology course is going to become a capstone class for our undergraduate students,” Associate Professor of Sociology Dr. Martha Copp said.
The basic premise of the course is “to teach students ways to positively and powerfully impact their community,” said Dr. Leslie McCallister, who teaches the course.
Students in the class work with a community, in a neighborhood, with a shelter, agency or a group of disadvantaged people to help remove the dependency that the group has on volunteers that help them. “Many students do volunteer work and are involved with service learning and I think that’s great,” McCallister said. “But sometimes these groups benefit more when people show them how to do something.”
The class is meant to complement the service-learning program at ETSU, Copp said. Unlike service learning, this class focuses on “empowering” local nonprofit groups by teaching them sociologically based skills, such as research techniques, McCallister said.
The focus of this class is for students to learn how to work with the community, McCallister said, not for it, and teaching communities how to enact positive change on their own. Research can provide the information an organization needs to evolve and better meet its audience’s needs.
For example, last semester students worked with Safe Passage, a domestic violence shelter, helping employees modify the client satisfaction survey and create a focus group questionnaire. “Safe Passage relies, in part, on grant funding and it must show that its programs and services are effective,” McCallister said. “The client satisfaction survey is one way to show this, but it needed to be modified to collect more useful, meaningful data.”
This class is crucial for sociology students. “Ideally, this class should be a culmination of the sociology major’s experience,” she said. “Students should be able to apply the skills that they learn in their core classes to an experience or situation on the community. What’s the point of learning how to conduct a community survey if you never get that experience?
“If students feel comfortable working with communities while in school, they’re more likely to continue working with communities once they graduate. That’s beneficial to all involved.”
All students are encouraged to take the class because “everyone, regardless of major, can benefit from learning about their community,” she said.
For more information about the class, contact the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at (423) 439-4370.

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