Classes and Registration

Dear Sociology Students,

As you are hopefully aware, we are scheduled to start Phase I registration for Fall tomorrow, Wednesday, June 17. The following notes are designed to help you navigate registration in this challenging situation.

1. There will be major restrictions in place for the first 4 days of Phase 1 registration. In other words, only majors can register for upper-division Sociology courses for those first 4 days (with the exception of Soc 330 and Soc 356 - these two courses are open to majors and non-majors who have met the prerequisites at the start of registration). Registration will be open to minors and other non-majors (for those that meet the applicable prerequisites) for all 300 level sociology electives starting on June 23rd.
2. Some of you may have already checked Classfinder. When you do, you'll find that there are new search parameters in place to help students identify the different ways in which courses will be offered Fall quarter. And when you look at classes in the department, you'll find that some have additional explanatory notes about their hybrid approaches to the quarter. You will see on Classfinder that we've created five different categories for the ways courses are being offered this Fall. I do want to stress that the university is identifying as "hybrid" both courses that will mix face-to-face and online components and courses that mix different online approaches (synchronous and asynchronous).
3. A few notes on Sociology's schedule for Fall. Most courses in the department will be offered entirely online and asynchronously. Some will be entirely online but will have real-time (synchronous) meetings. This is noted in Classfinder, so be sure to check if a course has a required meeting time or not.
4. Seven Sociology course sections will be offered in a hybrid (part online, part face-to-face) or face-to-face format: the two FIG-linked sections of SOC 271 "Immigration" (Fillingim), open only to first-year students; one section of SOC 304 "Statistics for Sociology" (Anderson); and four 300-level electives -- 354 (Anderson), 361 (Osborne), 362 (Osborne), 381 (Ten Eyck). Please register for those courses only if you plan to be on campus this Fall.
5. Both capstone courses will be offered online. If you have already requested a spot in a Fall quarter capstone, you should have received an email from Andrea Osborn this past Friday. And most of the core courses (302, 304, 306) will be offered online. One section of Stats (304; Anderson) will be face-to-face, but there will be two other sections of 304 (Cunningham, Zaidi) online, so please be attentive to those differences in registration.
6. We know that this registration period might be particularly confusing for all of us; and we understand that students will also, as they register, likely be thinking through many complex decisions about their plans for the Fall. If you have specific questions, please first email the departmental advisor Andrea Osborn, so that we can maintain a coordinated approach to Sociology advising in these challenging circumstances.

Finally, I wanted to also explain some of the considerations that led to this decision to hold nearly all fall classes online.

The most obvious reason is, of course, that life will not be back to normal by September in all likelihood, and so our face-to-face classes would also be a dramatically different experience. When deciding on whether to opt for online or face-to-face teaching, these were some of the concerns that faced us:

• Classroom space. Western, to its credit, has very few large classrooms – this reality reflects a value of offering smaller classes. To hold classes safely in person, we have to maintain 6 feet of distance between all students in a classroom. Unfortunately, this makes a lot of campus classroom space unusable for our classes. For example, many classrooms that normally can fit 18-50 students, now can only fit 6-18 students per room under social distancing guidelines. And in fact there are only 35 classrooms across all of campus that can hold 20 or more socially-distanced students. In addition, rooms will be cleaned after each class, so that also adds further limitations to the amount of courses that can be scheduled on campus.
• Disruption and uncertainty. Observing social distancing in the classroom in the Fall -- for those classes with an in-person component -- is likely to involve retaining 6 feet of distance from other students and faculty, and wearing masks. The university is doing an enormous amount of planning and preparatory work to take all necessary health and safety precautions for face-to-face classes across campus in the Fall. But it is important to understand that if the public health situation worsens this Fall, that in-person classes may immediately go online, and that students who become ill or need to isolate may also need to be out of the classroom for a period of weeks in the Fall. It is important that we all prepare ourselves for some degree of added flexibility and uncertainty this Fall.

I hope this finds each of you well. The Sociology department's faculty and staff have been working very hard to adapt to changing circumstance, since the end of winter quarter, and to support students. And we are very well aware that our students have been dealing with a multitude of challenging events and circumstances over these past months.

Please do not hesitate to reach out with questions or concerns; we are all learning to navigate this changing situation together!

Take good care,

Kimberly Lynn

__________________

Kimberly LYNN, Ph.D.

Western Washington University Professor of Humanities | Affiliate Professor of History Early Modern Europe and Iberian World Chair, Department of Global Humanities and Religions (Formerly Department of Liberal Studies) Interim Chair, Department of Sociology (Spring and Summer Quarters 2020)

Kimberly.Lynn@wwu.edu
Global Humanities and Religions
(360) 650-4869