Alex Briesacher: Giving students intellectual freedom

Professor of Sociology, 2018 Alden Award Winner

The course titles may stay the same from year to year, but Alex Briesacher never teaches the same class twice.

Briesacher, professor of sociology, uses an experiential, student-centered approach he developed as a graduate student teaching courses at Kent State University. “It means every class is new and exciting and different,” he said. “I don’t even do a lot of prep anymore. I just show up and ask them what they want to do, and we go from there.”

Briesacher said he likes to create a supportive space for students and provide guidance on how to gather information for their research questions, but then he takes a step back.

“I tell them, ‘I’ll show you how to do it, but you’re going to be the one who does it because I don’t know the answers to the questions you’re asking,” he said.

With that much intellectual freedom, students often surprise him.

“They come up with very interesting things, and some pretty weird ones, too,” he said. “One semester I had a student doing research on the scholarship structure at Worcester State, one doing research on the high school debate community, a student doing research on Black African identities, and another student researching funeral ceremonies. I’m there saying, ‘Let me show you how to do it, and you can apply it however you want.’”

Among the more creative concepts he encountered was the student who wanted to study paranormal sociology. Briesacher has no experience with the paranormal, but his open class structure allowed the student to pursue her offbeat interests, which involved studying attitudes about houses where a murder had taken place. That led to a class discussion about how one might effectively interview people about their belief in ghosts.  

That discussion helped the student come up with an interviewing approach and turned the project toward a social psychology focus that led to surprising answers about the enduring allure of haunted places.

Briesacher knew his unstructured teaching approach would be a good one several years ago when he tried it out and student response was overwhelmingly positive. “They showed up half an hour before the class began. Some of them stayed an hour after the class, all talking to each other,” he said. “It was a great class, and I started it with, ‘We’re just going to do this, and we’ll see what happens.’”