Engaging college student interest through a "novel": The Dancer's Gift as a review of core concepts

College Student Journal, Sept, 2004 by Michelle Lieberman, David Knox, Marty Zusman

College students today show a preference to be entertained as well as informed. While the debate on whether academia "should" be entertaining continues, this study sought data from one-hundred and fifty-six undergraduates enrolled in four Courtship and Marriage courses at East Carolina University who completed a 24 item questionnaire on their reaction to reading The Dancer's Gift: An Introductory Sociology Novel (Kennedy, Zusman, Schacht and Knox, 2002) as a supplement to the main text (Knox and Schacht, 2002). Over three-fourths of the respondents reported that the novel was both entertaining and instructive. A similar percentage reported that the novel helped them to learn sociology terms/perspective and they recommended that other faculty use the "novel approach." The MapMaker: An Introductory Psychology Novel (Kennedy et al,2002) is also available for psychology courses.

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Students prefer to enjoy their courses as well as learn from them. While students look for enjoyment, one of the greatest challenges confronting teachers of upper division courses is ensuring that students know the basic terms/concepts of the discipline in which they teach. Instructors also have a concern to review such terms/concepts in a way that is time efficient for instructors as well as instructive/entertaining to students. The Dancer's Gift is a paperback novel which engages student interest via a story (developed and written by a professional writer) about Samantha and Marcel who meet on campus their first semester and experience the escalation of a new love relationship, parental divorce, racism, and homophobia. The Dancer's Gift also provides a review of 200 basic sociology terms that are embedded in the story and presented in bold print and defined.

Innovations in teaching are not new and include using bingo (Coco, 2001), rock music (Ahlkvist, 2001), media events (Sobieraj, 2001), television (Donaghy, 2000), feature films (Tipton and Tiemann, 1993) and video (Fails, 1988) to elicit student interest and involvement. Novels have been used to teach English (Lewandowski, Green, Hart, and Schreck 1999), history (Bunch-Lyons, 2000) and economics (Gavin, 2000). The value of such novels has been to spark class discussion (Bunch-Lyons 2000), teach a particular principle such as ethics (Satov, 2001), or bridge the gap from abstract theories to real life events (Bumpus, 2000).

The Dancer's Gift is a first attempt to introduce the "novel" format as a teaching mechanism in sociology. The goal of doing so was to provide an entertaining format for introducing students to core sociological concepts and the sociological perspective. A previous study examined student reactions to the novel in introduction to sociology courses (Moore, Holt, Knox, Zusman, 2001). The current study assessed student reaction to the novel in courses beyond introduction to sociology.

Data and Sample

The data consisted of 156 students enrolled in four Courtship and Marriage courses taught in the Sociology Department at East Carolina University (Fall, 2002) who voluntarily completed an anonymous 24 item questionnaire including, sex, race, class standing, grade point average, and feedback about The Dancer's Gift. Frequencies and difference of means tests were used to analyze the data.

Of the 156 respondents, 66% were female; 34% were male. In regard to class standing, about a third (32.9) were sophomores, a quarter (26.5%) were freshmen and about 20% each of juniors (19.4%) and seniors (21.3%). Students identified themselves as predominately white (78.1%) with 16.8% reporting black and 5.2% identifying themselves as multiracial.

Over half (54.3%) of the respondents reported that their overall grade average in their college classes was a B with about a third (32.3%) reporting C; 12.3% reported A and 1.3%, D. Half were taking this as their first and only sociology course; 28.8% had taken one other sociology course and 21.2% had taken two or more sociology courses. While some reported completing the novel in two hours, 6.3 hours was the median length of time the respondents noted that it took them to read the novel (the mean was 8.6 hours with a standard deviation of 6.3). One student reported that it took 40 hours to read the 222 page paperback. Slightly over forty percent (41.3 %) of the respondents reported reading the novel at the beginning of the course before reading the textbook with over half (56.7 %) reading the novel along with the text. Of interest, almost a third (31.4%) admit to not reading every chapter. Of those who did read the entire novel, Chapter 9 on "The Family" was identified as the most interesting.

Results and Discussion

Table 1 reflects the percentage of student responses to basic questions about the novel. The categories of "strongly agree" and "agree" have been combined and presented as "agree"; the categories of "strongly disagree" and "disagree" have been combined and presented as "disagree."

Data analysis revealed no statistically significant differences in regard to sex or race. However, a statistically significant difference (p <.001) was found when comparing the enjoyment evaluations of those students who had had introductory sociology before taking the marriage course (86.6%) and those who were taking the marriage course as their first course (61.6%) The former were 25% more likely to report enjoyment of the novel if they had had introduction to sociology.