Emily Fairchild
Lieber Memorial Teaching Associate Award
Published April 06, 2007
Doctoral Student in Sociology
Department of Sociology
College of Arts and Sciences
IU Bloomington
A gifted sociology teacher demonstrates to students that concepts may seem abstract on the surface, but they spring from the real lives of actual people. In Emily Fairchild’s classes, students learn not only to identify social problems such as racial inequality and gender stereotypes, but also to measure and ultimately challenge these phenomena.
Fairchild’s students are not necessarily experienced researchers; they often are not even experienced college students. One of Fairchild’s most notable teaching successes has occurred in a 100-level class, Race and Ethnicity in Everyday Life: Learning and Doing Sociology. To investigate the fairness of local law enforcement practices, her students analyzed statistics on revocation of suspended sentences and related the revocation rates to offenders’ ethnic backgrounds.
“Working with the Monroe County Racial Justice Task Force, Emily obtained raw data from the city criminal justice system, showing a variety of characteristics for offenders (including race, but also length of sentence, for example),” said Thomas Gieryn, Rudy Professor and chair of the IUB Department of Sociology. “Then, rather than doing the analysis of these data herself, she turned them over to her students for analysis. Students coded the data, put them into a quantitative form, tested hypotheses and substantiated their findings,” Gieryn continued. “Emily created a project for her students that would be of political utility for the Bloomington criminal justice system and for the task force.”
Because the research was conducted in partnership with local agencies, it was more than just a lecture course with a demanding fieldwork component. It also gave students an opportunity to serve the community.
“I see these ‘community-based research’ courses as an important way of using sociology and course work at IU to the local community’s benefit, and Emily has been the key instructor in pioneering community-based research in the department,” said Robert Robinson, Class of 1964 Chancellor’s Professor of sociology.
Frequently reaching beyond her department, Fairchild has particularly distinguished herself in two campuswide teaching-improvement initiatives, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) project and the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program. She played a key role in a collaborative SOTL research project that investigated students’ consumerist attitudes toward higher education and co-presented findings on this research at several SOTL-affiliated events.
“Emily has invested even more time in our PFF program, now widely heralded as a model for getting Ph.D. candidates ready for careers in teaching,” said Gieryn. As a PFF Fellow, Fairchild chaired the steering committee for an annual conference sponsored by PFF that brings graduate students and beginning teachers to IU Bloomington to discuss pedagogical issues in higher education. In this capacity she also organized brown bag lunches, summer workshops and seminars for IU associate instructors. “She has done so much,” Gieryn added, “to help other associate instructors become better teachers.”
As part of her job as a PFF Fellow, Fairchild, who has completed a PFF training program that leads to a Certificate in Higher Education and Pedagogy, mentored 20 graduate students during their first year of teaching. She also served as a Faculty Fellow at DePauw University, shadowing a faculty member to gain firsthand experience in a liberal arts setting.
