Despite the fact that these three courses worked in tandem, each course had its own syllabus, overall course expectations and grading structure. Over the four years, Victoria presented SOCI 101 from two thematic perspectives. For the first three years, the course was based on the concept of the sociological imagination, defined as the capacity to understand the interrelationships among an individual's personal biography and her/his time and place. The course was divided into three sociological themes, each with its own focus: Social Movements (indigenous people of the America); Social Roles (gender); and Social Institutions (education). Readings chosen to support these themes the first three years included I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Social Movements), Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement, College Culture (Social Roles), and excerpts from Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievement of America's Eductionally Underprepared and Savage Inequalities.

The fourth year, she based the course on the sociology of difference, to include race, class, and gender, still with the same focuses, using excerpts from The Sociology of Difference: American Constructions of Race, Sex and Gender, Social Class and Sexual Orientation. Victoria used writing in her course in two major ways: "writing to learn" assignments in which she provided prompts to help students focus/clarify their thinking about the sociological issues under discussion and "writing to show learning" assignments in which students wrote responses to readings and activities assigned outside of class.

The first of my two courses, ENGL 101 Composition, was based on the writing-process model. Students were assigned activities to help them become aware of their own writing processes as well as to expose them to ways of composing, revising, and editing to suit the needs of a particular rhetorical situation. Course readings, based primarily on those in SOCI 101, were used to teach close reading, focusing on such issues as genre, organization, and style. Students were also taught and expected to use such computer/information technology applications as email, word processing, the electronic bulletin board TownHall, and Mason's online catalogues and databases. In addition, Victoria and I co-wrote three formal writing assignments, one of which was a researched essay on an aspect of education as a social institution in the United States.