RECLAIMING DEVIANCE AS A UNIQUE COURSE FROM CRIMINOLOGY RE-REVISITED: ENTERING DELINQUENCY INTO THE EQUATION* Some sociologists have wrestled with the problem of teaching distinct crimi- nology and deviance courses in the same academic department (see, e.g., Bader, Becker, and Desmond 1996; Kunkel 1999). Serious issues arise in course development, including course content similarity, theoretical overlap, and reading and writing assignment redundancy. What if we must teach delin- quency in addition to criminology and deviance? Sociology majors interested in crime and deviance are likely to take more than one of these sociology courses, and non-majors often take these courses as electives. In this paper, I offer ideas for developing distinct deviance, delinquency, and criminology courses, and discuss how to reduce theoretical and other content overlap, paper assignments, course readings, and departmental issues. NATHAN W, PINO Georgia Southern University I TEACH THREE highly related courses at a regional public university: deviant behavior, juvenile delinquency, and criminology. Among these three courses, there is a large amount of overlap in theory and other con- tent. Two recent articles (Bader, Becker, and Desmond 1996; Kunkel 1999) have attempted to tackle the problems of overlap among deviance and criminology courses (mainly concentrating on the development of the deviance course); however, the prob- lem I address here is more staggering. The issue of theoretical and content overlap may not be as rare as many would believe; a sizable number of sociology deparmients offer all three of the aforementioned sociol- ogy courses. One could argue that it would be better to compress these three sociology courses into *The author would like to thank William L. Smith and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Please address all correspondence to the author at Georgia Southern University, P.O. Box 8051, Statesboro, GA 30458-8051; e-mail: nwpino@gasou.edu. Editor's note: The reviewers were, in alpha- betical order, Scott Desmond, Karl R. Kunkel, and Susan Ross. one course. However, in my department we feel that these three courses, if developed correctly, are important pedagogically inde- pendent of one another. The field of crimi- nology, while influenced most heavily by sociology, is now an independent discipline with many sub-areas. Providing these three courses separately gives us an opportunity to offer students an extensive grounding in adult criminality, delinquency, and deviance in terms of key concepts, theories, the ori- gin of norms and laws, the adult and juve- nile justice systems, race, class, and gender issues with respect to crime, delinquency, and deviance, public policy, and so on with- out having to give short shrift to important issues within each topic. There are a couple of other reasons why one would want to keep these courses distinct. First, the courses attain maximum enrollment in each semester they are offered; and second, these courses attract many non-majors. This situa- tion gives us an opportunity to attract ma- jors, double majors, and minors. It is there- fore necessary to maintain a positive out- look when taking on the challenge of keep- ing these courses distinct. The pedagogical plan for the three Teaching Sociology, Vol. 31, 2003 (April: 182-194) 182