Benign Disruption in the Classroom: A Case Study

The college classroom provides a unique opportunity for fieldwork (Hughes, 1970). This routine workplace of desks and chairs can be transformed into a research arena for analyzing the social processes of teaching and learning. This article describes an episode in which the classroom becomes an outpost for observing subtle ways of transmitting and receiving academic knowledge. By experimenting with the reading and writing requirements of a social problems course, I learned much about the normative structure of sociology classrooms. This descriptive