Walter Allen

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Professor Walter Allen has been at UCLA since 1989 and in that relatively short time, he has had a major impact on the curriculum of the sociology department. He has introduced and taught a number of undergraduate courses that are central to the teaching programs of the African American Studies Center as well as the department. His courses address timely issues in ways that directly engage and involve students. In conveying the expectation of the highest standards of performance to his students, he has shaped, in profound and supportive ways, the intellectual, personal and career choices of many of those with whom he comes into contact.

Together with a departmental colleague, Allen created a course jointly listed with Afro-American studies and that program’s only course to qualify for social science general education credit. Titled “the Social Organization of Black communities,” it provides students with a general introduction to African-American studies and to the sociological studies of black communities. For a number of students, this course produced a major change in their academic futures. Says one student: “I never seriously considered a career in academics; I now know that there is nothing that I would rather do than go on to teach graduate school and hopefully teach.”

Allen combines an insistence that students take education seriously and work hard in his classes with a willingness to employ unconventional pedagogic techniques to make intellectual issues alive and directly relevant to students’ lives. While he is an accomplished and insightful lecturer, the core of his pedagogy lies in arranging and directing classroom discussions in which students advance and argue their own ideas and opinions. For example, he often uses either a “great debate” or “mock trial” format to encourage active participation as well as to stimulate outside research. “He totally involves the students in discussion and enables them to carry their thoughts and discussions outside the classroom.”

Allen has offered “an astonishing variety of courses” in the time he has been at UCLA, ranging from introductory sociology courses at the lower division level to upper division courses. On the graduate level, he frequently teaches urban sociology as well as courses in theories of ethnicity. He also teaches in the UCLA School of Medicine.

Allen is clearly a classroom instructor who reaches and motivates many of the students with whom he comes in contact exactly by expecting and drawing forth their fullest effort.