Random Acts of Kindness: A Teaching Tool for Positive Deviance

Abstract

Instilling in students a sociological imagination while introducing them to the study of deviant behaviors, which many of them have never encountered, is a difficult task. Students inevitably seem to get caught up in the weirdness of certain deviant subcultures with which they are unfamiliar. In addition, they arrive with established notions of deviance, which the popular media and political rhetoric create and maintain. Our challenge in teaching the sociology of deviant behavior is to help students understand why there are behaviors considered deviant, and why it is important to understand these behaviors from a sociological point of view. In other words, one goal of the Sociology of Deviant Behavior course is to banish ethnocentric points of view regarding deviant categories of individuals and groups through the development of a clearer understanding of how deviance is created and defined.