Personal Socioautobiography - Coursework Example

My Socioautobiography As I see the world around me, I try to find the deeper, more insightful meaning to everything that I notice; one way I perform this is by drawing upon my knowledge of sociological explanations. In my opinion, there is a greater significance to the way life is ordered in society; things do not just happen without a reason. Using sociological explanations, I am able to understand why things work the way they do and what is their impact on other individuals, institutions, and so on.

This ability to reflect on events and try to analyze them is what C. Miller Wright called the "sociological imagination”; it involves "the ability to see the relationship between large-scale social forces and the personal actions of individuals" (Dhavale, 2011) and this is exactly what my socio autobiography will be about. I will try to think outside the square and try to offer sociologically-informed explanations for the social phenomenon that I have noticed around myself. A major social incident that recently caught my eye is that there are many billboards in my city that advertise products and services with very obvious gender roles.

For example, in all the advertisements, I saw for washing powders and dish cleaning liquids, shampoos and clothing, and baby food, I found that there were always women present in these ads. These portray the view that women should focus on doing domestic chores, should take care of maintaining their appearance, and should take responsibility for taking care of their children respectively. The billboards on which I saw mostly men posing were the ones for insurance policies, banking, and investment opportunities, and for sports and athletic wear.

Such ads, in my opinion, promote the view that men should be the breadwinners and focus on securing themselves financially, and that they should be athletic and strong. Such ads, I think, are integral in shaping society's view of what the appropriate forms of femininity and masculinity are, since these billboards are in open view for everyone to see. These ads also help reinforce conceptions of gender norms that the society has; in my society, women are, in fact, expected to take care of domestic chores and the babies, so it makes sense that the ads for dishwashing liquids and baby food featured women in them.

Another interesting thing I noticed is the abundance of signs all across the city. These include road signals, signal lights, STOP signs, and even the symbols on the road that prohibit things such as driving over 50km/hr, that ask bikers to ride their bicycles on the side of the road, that do not permit parking, and so on. When I look at these signs and symbols, all I can think of is how we constantly need to be told how to live our lives. Civilized life in a society depends on rules and regulations, and a mutual acceptance of these rules otherwise these symbols and signs would not make sense.

For instance, if someone from a rural mountainside in Tibet comes to my city and sees the traffic signal flashing a red light, he will not know that he is meant to stop and may walk into a road and get hit by a car. This shows how chaos can result from not following the rules that society has agreed upon. I also noticed that my peers from a non-English speaking background seemed to have trouble following some of the classes in my school where English is the medium for teaching and learning. One of these peers is from a Chinese-speaking background; when he was asked to read an English text in one of our classes, he struggled with the pronunciation and took a long time in completing sentences.

This got me thinking that students who do not know the language used at schools will face a great disadvantage in learning; consequently, I feel schools should take all their pupils' backgrounds into consideration before deciding what language to teach. There is also a large number of nuclear families that I noticed coming into the restaurants, shopping malls, cinemas, and other recreational areas that I visited. This made me realize that small families are the norm in my society since having a larger, extended family means more expenses on housing, education, eating, and so on.

In school, I noticed that many teachers rewarded pupils for being on time to class, for submitting work before the deadline, and for quietly listening while they were teaching, by verbal acknowledgments and also through smiles and nods of approval. Pupils who were disruptive and not on time were often punished. For me, this indicated that there is some kind of "hidden curriculum" and informal learning that takes place alongside formal academic classes; as students, we are being taught to be punctual and responsible and listen to those in authority.

Lastly, I found it interesting that the process of socialization varies from household to household, and every individual learns norms and beliefs that are seen as appropriate by their parents and family. For instance, whereas my parents taught me to value money and to spend it cautiously, my peers are not familiar with this value. Also, while most of my peers and I were taught to value school and education, there are some people, as far as I know, who were not socialized in a way to value education.