Sociological Stories: Broken Windows Revisited

This attempt to create something a little different in PowerPoint expands on the first effort by being significantly longer, around 50 slides, split into three separate-but-related sections and dotted with a few choice bits of online video and hyperlinks (for which you will obviously need to be connected to the Internet).

Although it’s made in PowerPoint, it isn’t “A PowerPoint” in the conventional sense of both “sticking bullet points on a page” and being intended for teacher-led instruction.

Rather, it’s more a kiosk-type Presentation designed to be read by individual students as a kind of “sociological story” about Broken Windows. To this end the 3 sections are as follows:

1. Intro and Overview is probably the most-conventional section in terms of A-Level / High School requirements in that it covers a number of the broad strength and weaknesses of Broken Windows.

2. The Ecological Context delves into the theoretical background of Broken Windows in order to examine the claim that we can understand crime and criminality through the lens communal pressures to conform or deviate. As such, it’s a section that students can delve into if they’re particularly interested although, at A / High School level it’s probably not that important. It’s also an area teachers can summarise fairly easily and concisely if needed.

3. The Order Maintenance section deals mainly with Zero-Tolerance Policing and is mainly interesting because of the way it looks at Zimbardo’s “Anonymity of Place” in the light of new research on the experiment. It also introduces an interesting natural experiment recently (2017) carried-out in New York that not only casts grave doubt on the effectiveness of Zero-Tolerance Policing but also tentatively suggests it may be the cause of many of the problems it claims to resolve.

Because the Presentation is made for PowerPoint 2019 / 365 (If you try to load it into previous versions of PowerPoint it will not function as intended) it can only be downloaded in a PowerPoint Show (.ppsx) format. This means it will happily run independently of PowerPoint, whatever – or no – version of PowerPoint you have.