Doing sociology: Connecting the classroom experience with a multiethnic school district

This article describes an innovative undergraduate sociology course in which college students helped develop and teach multicultural lesson plans to high school students in a district of metropolitan Los Angeles currently undergoing rapid demographic change. As a response to specific incidents of interethnic conflict in the public schools as well as to the call for more courses engaging students in sociological participant-observation research, this project provides one model of undergraduate education in which the classroom and the community are linked. The authors describe the origin and organization of the Fitter College project in the Alhambra School District and address a number of structural and substantive challenges that emerge in teaching a community-based course of this kind.