Sociologists are engaging in a long-overdue reckoning about the place of the traditional canon in social theory courses and pedagogy. Instructors are revising their syllabi to include a more diverse set of authors while “provincializing” classics that have long been taught as universal. We confront the question of how to teach contested canonical works after an instructor has committed to this work. We argue that progressive reforms to theory syllabi can raise new problems associated with teaching “canonical” works and propose one way to address them with a flexible recipe designed to resolve tensions between pedagogical imperatives. An extended example from our experience teaching Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is employed to illustrate our proposal. Our aim is to contribute to an ongoing disciplinary dialogue that will maintain theory’s central place in sociology’s identity while constantly asking what, and whom, it is for.

中文翻译：

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所以你已经省去了佳能。怎么办？

社会学家正在对传统经典在社会理论课程和教学法中的地位进行早该进行的清算。教师正在修改他们的教学大纲，以包括更多样化的作者，同时“省化”长期以来被认为是普遍的经典。在教师致力于这项工作之后，我们面临如何教授有争议的规范作品的问题。我们认为，理论教学大纲的渐进式改革可能会引发与教授“规范”作品相关的新问题，并提出一种方法来解决这些问题，该方法旨在解决教学要求之间的紧张关系。我们在教授涂尔干的《宗教生活的基本形式》的经验中的一个扩展示例用于说明我们的建议。我们的目标是为持续的学科对话做出贡献，以保持理论在社会学身份中的核心地位，同时不断地询问它是为了什么和为谁服务的。