Abstract
This paper presents an adapted Socratic Circle as a feminist pedagogical strategy for teaching sociological social psychology. Unlike traditional Socratic methods that often privilege rapid recall, professorial authority, and dominant communication styles, this approach reimagines the circle as a collective practice of creating and applying knowledge. Students alternate between inner and outer groups, engaging both as discussants and evaluators, while formal assessment is distributed equally across professor, peers, and self-evaluations. This multi-source structure decentralizes authority, resists meritocratic norms, and affirms students as co-creators of knowledge. The feminist commitments of the activity are threefold. First, it centers process over product by valuing deep listening, inclusivity, and application. Second, it emphasizes accountability by shifting evaluation from vertical professor-student hierarchies to horizontal peer-to-peer structures. Finally, it highlights praxis by connecting theory to students’ own lives, relationships, and communities. Prompts encourage students to interrogate how sociological social psychology concepts help illuminate structures of inequality, while also offering tools for collective transformation. Students are invited to design plans, informed by sociological social psychology theory, that help repurpose institutional resources into infrastructures for student-led intellectual communities, resisting neoliberal individualism and cultivating the radical imagination required for liberatory education.
Recommended Citation
Huft, Justin
(2026)
"The Adapted Socratic Circle as a Tool for Learning Sociological Social Psychology,"
Feminist Pedagogy: Vol. 7:
Iss.
4, Article 3.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/feministpedagogy/vol7/iss4/3