WORK IN PROGRESS
Heath Hoffmann was an undergraduate sociology major at Western Washington University when his professor and mentor had asked for a volunteer to facilitate the class discussion around a book, and Hoffmann raised his hand.
After class, his professor pulled him aside: “You were born for this. You should be a professor.”
“That was really the first time I felt validated,” says Hoffmann. “That was a very pivotal moment for me – not just him believing in me, but that feeling of trying to figure out how to engage students in discussion. So that was a great experience for me and was what set me on this path.”
That path led him to the College, where he’s been teaching sociology since 2003. And he’s been trying to find new ways to engage students ever since – something, he says, that requires continuous reflection, flexibility and openness.
“It’s really a selfish thing of just trying to keep things interesting – I need to do something different to make it unique so that it feels fresh and so my energy is bringing the students in along with me,” says the 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award recipient. “If I’m bored with it, the students aren’t going to be engaged.”
To be fair, Hoffmann’s classes cover some pretty engaging topics: alcohol and drug use, prison and prisoners, crime and deviance – all issues that are multifaceted and therefore hard to exhaust.
“Deviance was really always something that was just fascinating to me, in part because we have all these rules and all these penalties – whether they’re formal legal sanctions or informal sanctions, like people ostracizing you or criticizing you, or informal punishments like being grounded – yet we still do things that are illegal or antisocial,” he says. “Even serial killers follow the rules most of the time, so even people who are the most antisocial follow a lot of rules. I just think that’s interesting.”
It’s not just the subject matter that resonates with his students; it’s Hoffmann’s approach to relating sociology to the real world in a way that gets students thinking differently.
“I don’t really care if students remember factoids from my classes, but I want them to carry with them that sort of ability to think critically about the world,” says Hoffmann, who also wants his students to come away with compassionate empathy. “Empathy is actually one of the course objectives in most of my classes – to be able to walk in the shoes of others, you don’t have to agree with them, but you’re able to see the world through the eyes of other people and to understand where they came from and how they ended up where they are.”
Hoffmann is always willing to help – and not just his students. He is also an invaluable resource for his colleagues when it comes to teaching online courses, something he has been doing since 2013. In fact, in January Hoffmann was named the College’s inaugural faculty development online education coordinator. The goal of the position is critical: to enhance the quality of online education at the College and continuously keep things fresh, engaging and innovative.
It is, and always will be, a work in progress – just like everything else in life, says Hoffmann, who just wants to keep improving – both in his teaching so that he can better engage his students and facilitate their learning and growth, and in his personal life so that he can better himself.
“I just think there’s experience that gives you some wisdom if you’re willing to reflect on it and learn,” he says. “I would like to reach that place of sort of Zen and peacefulness and wisdom that comes with age.”