Joey Sprague has always tried to teach her students different ways of seeing the world. Last year, she tried something new: Teaching them to change the world.

Sprague, an associate professor of sociology at Kansas University, had been confronted by a student who finished her “Introduction to Feminist Theory” class feeling frustrated.

She told Sprague: “You people at the university teach us all these things that are wrong with the world. And you teach us to be good citizens. But you don’t teach us how to fix what’s wrong with the world.”

So Sprague set about revamping the class. And last spring she brought in women from the worlds of politics, nonprofit agencies and community planning to tell the class how they had tried to make the world  or their little corner of it, at least  a better place.

In the months since the class ended, Sprague said, students from the class have gone to work, volunteering for agencies and political campaigns.

“They’re so empowered,” Sprague said.

Sprague has been at KU since 1985. But she nearly didn’t come to Kansas.

“I thought it would be a good experience to interview for a job,” she said. “Then they offered me the job.”

And Sprague nearly didn’t choose sociology.

“I went through five majors as an undergrad,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in human subjectivity. I started out in theater, as a way to get into other people’s heads.

“Then I got into anthropology, because it fascinated me that people in other cultures thought about things differently than I do  there are different ways of organizing family, or religion.

“It helps when your own society is one of many possible choices  and if you don’t like it, you can make different choices,” Sprague said. “A lot of what I’ve done is look to see how where you are in a society shapes how you interact with it.”

Her early research explored the “gender gap.” Starting in 1980 presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, there have been marked differences between the voting habits of men and women. In that election, for instance, men gave 54 percent of their vote to Reagan compared to 46 percent of women, creating an 8-point gender gap. In 1996, 54 percent of women voted for Bill Clinton compared to 43 percent of men.

But Sprague said her research showed it wasn’t a person’s sex that helped determine their vote so much as it was their responsibilities. People who had more of the housework and child-care duties in a household tended to vote Democratic, she said, regardless of gender.

“Where you are in a society shapes what you know about society and how you look at society,” she said.

Now Sprague is looking at how knowledge is organized, and how that affects society. She’s been writing a book called, “Seeing Through Gender: a Feminist Methodology for Critical Social Research.”

“What feminists have been saying for the last 30 years is, ‘There’s another way of looking at things,'” she said.

For instance, she said, society might be different if it treated so-called “women’s work” such as household duties like other jobs, complete with health care benefits.

“How would society be different if we valued that work as much as work in a factory?” she said.

Back in her feminist theory class, she was trying to help her students see how society can be different  and how to make it that way. And Sprague is pleased that students from the class seem to have used it as a spur to make a difference.

Sprague had each of the students write a letter about what they learned in the class and how they could use it. She plans to mail it to them in a year.

“They took it seriously. It was personal  sometimes I felt like I was eavesdropping,” she said. “I like it that so many students took action.”