The “Eyes” Are Watching You: Social Control in an Introduction to Sociology Classroom

Abstract

Students learn more when their minds are engaged, when abstract concepts become constructs they can see and understand in the context of their everyday lives. In this article, we present an activity designed to engage students to apply sociological concepts to their everyday experiences as college students. In this applied learning activity, we use the concept of “eyes” from The Handmaid’s Tale to teach students about deviance, social control, surveillance, and dramaturgical theory in a large (174 student) introduction to sociology class. We assign a portion of the class to be “eyes” and observe their classmates’ deviant behaviors. We measured students’ knowledge of and confidence in the content using pretest and posttest surveys. We found that students engaged in fewer acts of deviance when they knew they were being watched and the activity and lecture increased students’ confidence in the material and content knowledge.