Trails: The ASA's Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology

08/13/2026

Congratulations to our most recent TRAILS author, Jinhyuk Kim, who has been recognized with the ASA's Section on Teaching and Learning Graduate Student Contribution to the Sociological Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award! The resource is linked in the comments.

08/13/2026

Did you know that TRAILS resources have won awards? I just put together a resource collection to highlight them:

The items in this collection are award-winning resources. They have each been recognized by the ASA's Section on Teaching and Learning in Sociology and recieved their Graduate Student Contribution to the Sociological Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award.

08/04/2026

This activity, created by Dakota Dougherty, is designed to help students strengthen their understanding of key sociological theories and concepts through analysis of the 2004 film Mean Girls.
https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/learning-social-processes-through-mean

07/28/2026

Trenton Ellis and Michael Hollingsworth created an activity that facilitates critical investigation of theories that explain the causes and experiences of disability in society and can be completed by individual or groups of students via in-person or online class modalities.
https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/grocery-run-teaching-the-social

07/21/2026

Chengguang Hu created this activity to teach students that politics are not limited to elections or public protests but also appears in everyday conversations, decisions, and moments when people choose to speak or stay silent.
https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/between-voice-and-silence-political

07/14/2026

In this activity, Hannah Judson designed it to help students learn core sociological concepts through analysis of and application to a short game show TV episode
https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/what-are-the-rules-of

06/04/2026

In this assessment, Beatrice Waterhouse challenges the normative
assumptions present in students’ existing definitions of violence by asking students to confront ambiguous cases individually, see the divergent opinions within their classroom community, and begin to seek sociological explanations for the sanction or approval of different kinds of violence in society at large. https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/polling-to-interrogate-students-lay

06/02/2026

In this class activity, Reginald Byron enables students to make connections between race and space on their own campuses. https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/teaching-about-racialized-space-on

05/26/2026

In this syllabus, Ellen Meiser created it for a 17-week long, upper-division in-person Sociology of Food course designed with an interdisciplinary Food Studies approach. The course touches on topics ranging from food systems, access, identity, (de)colonization, gentrification, and consumerism. https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/sociology-of-food-syllabus

05/19/2026

In this class activity, Reginald Byron has undergraduate students engage with multiple interactive maps using a sociological/criminological lens and tries to convey an understanding of how the social structure of neighborhoods spatially coincide with U.S. fatal gun violence. https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/4332