Week 4 Discussion — Who Taught You to Be You? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Hook

Think of one habit, joke, or worry you carry that you did not have at ten years old. Somebody taught it to you, a parent, a team, a feed, a boss, and this week gave you the tools to say who, how, and through whose eyes.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Pick one real lesson about who you are that you learned from an agent of socialization (family, friends your own age, school, media, religion, or the workplace). Walk it through Cooley's three steps of the looking-glass self: how you imagined you appeared, how you imagined others judged you, and the self-feeling that followed. Then take a position: which agent shaped that part of you most, and would a sociologist who stressed a different agent see it differently?

Option B: A short-video feed rewards some posts with likes and ignores others. Take a position: is a feed's like-and-follow system now a stronger agent of socialization for young people than the family, or does the family still set the frame the feed works inside? Use the looking-glass self or Mead's generalized other, and run your position through at least one of the three perspectives, naming its level of analysis.

There is no single right answer. A family rule, a team ritual, a first job, or a feed can each be argued well as the agent that mattered most, and the three perspectives will read the same lesson differently. Pick one you actually care about, and tell us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, describe the lesson, walk it through Cooley's three steps, and say which agent shaped it most; for Option B, state in one clear sentence whether the feed or the family is the stronger agent.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (socialization, nature and nurture, agent of socialization, hidden curriculum, looking-glass self, preparatory stage, play stage, game stage, generalized other, the "I", the "me", resocialization, total institution, anticipatory socialization, life course) correctly.
• Give your reason, and name either the agent a different sociologist might stress (Option A) or the perspective you used and its level of analysis (Option B).
• Share only what you are comfortable sharing about your own life.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: name an agent a poster left out, check whether a theorist is credited correctly, or read their example through a different perspective and name its level. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option A. On my first shift at a grocery store, I pictured how I looked to the manager while bagging (imagined appearance), guessed the manager thought I was too slow (imagined judgment), and went home embarrassed (self-feeling). That is Cooley's looking-glass self. The workplace shaped my sense of being a "good worker" more than my family did, because nobody at home had ever watched me work. A functionalist would add that the job was teaching me the routines a store needs, a macro-level point.

Notice how it names the agent, walks Cooley's three steps in order, takes a position, and names a perspective with its level. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

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