Teaching Social Inequality

The growing chasm between rich and poor, within societies and between nations, has enormous implications not only for people’s well-being and life chances but for the prospects for democracy throughout the world. From the interpersonal to the societal level, social inequality is the central feature of social life. Helping students appreciate and understand this is the most important task of social science instruction.

Garth Massey provides a down-to-earth guide to teaching and learning that emphasizes historically and comparatively the social construction and institutional maintenance of social inequality. It explores approaches to teaching big ideas and theories, along with the challenges raised by the notions and assumptions students bring to class. The author emphasizes how to unpack and make comprehensible the complexity of social inequality in society today and also how to explore the often quantitative understandings provided by contemporary research.

Highly attractive is the accessible style of this book, encouraging open classroom discussion and examination of sometimes contentious topics such as class and racial privilege, homelessness, gender preference and sexual identity, shrinking opportunities for social mobility, and global human migration. Its scope makes it a useful tool for instructors of social movements, globalization, race and ethnicity, gender studies, border studies and all courses that impart an understanding of social life.