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Participants in the 2007 American Sociological Association teaching workshop, “Innovative Teaching Practices for Difficult Subjects,” shared concerns about teaching statistics, research methods, and theory. Strategies for addressing these concerns center on building a community of learners by creating three processes throughout the course: 1) an ongoing active role for students; 2) mechanisms to establish a common language of discourse; and 3) a means of monitoring students' feelings. Examples are provided which introduce readers to ideas which can help in the creation and maintenance of a successful community of learners when teaching these difficult subjects. These processes can build student engagement and help to reduce student anxieties. More detailed information about specific exercises, examples, and bibliographic resources which were distributed at the workshop, can be found on the Teaching Sociology website.

Social scientists generally presume that a good reputation has advantages. Yet the Walt Disney Corporation, a firm that has long benefited from a reputation for producing wholesome popular culture, attracts more than its share of efforts to link it to various social problems. In particular, conservative moralists argue that Disney in fact produces morally questionable products, progressive critics claim that Disney's messages help preserve social inequities, and social scientists criticize Disney for fostering inauthentic and alienating entertainment. These claims are a form of blowback—negative reactions to the firm's positive reputation. While blowback makes it easier to construct social problems claims, a good reputation remains a significant resource in deflecting these criticisms.

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Colleges and universities face pressures from multiple stakeholders to attend to the labor market success of their graduates. In this article, we argue that it is in the best interests of sociology students and the discipline that sociology programs respond proactively to these pressures. We encourage sociology programs to design curricula that develop student skills in critical sociological thinking as well as explicitly connect skills to career-related interests. After reviewing research on what employers expect, what students want to learn, and sociology graduates’ first labor market experiences, we offer suggestions about how programs can respond to the requests for accountability for employment outcomes without substantially revising the traditional undergraduate sociology curriculum or expending excessive amounts of faculty time on new initiatives. We argue that integrating liberal learning and applied learning is the best way to serve students and the discipline.