Teaching Documents
This course covers some of the most exciting and controversial issues surrounding cognitive psychological research. Through the use of original texts, I hope to convey a sense of the changing nature of cognitive research. By gaining an intimate knowledge of the fundamental principles guiding cognitive psychology, I hope you will be in a position to make a creative contribution to a variety of important areas.
We will begin by exploring the historical foundations of the cognitive revolution. In particular, we will discuss how the advent of the computer radically altered the nature of psychological inquiry. Drawing on debates within Artificial Intelligence, we will explore the emergence of the information-processing approach to psychological explanation. Next, we will discuss challenges to the ecological validity of laboratory cognitive research. Some of the areas I will cover in this section include perception, schemata, frames, attention, cognitive maps, and memory. We will also discuss the role that language played in the rise of cognitive psychology as well as contemporary issues in psycholinguistics.
This material will lay the foundation for further inquiry into various modifications and challenges to traditional information-processing. Specifically, we will focus on J.J. Gibson’s ecological approach and situated cognition. Finally, we will explore critiques of cognitive psychology in general with a particular emphasis on the way these critiques can contribute to the trajectory of cognitive science. At the completion of this course, I hope you will have gained an appreciation for the role that cognitive psychology plays in modern psychological research.
LikeThis course is designed to introduce students to existential-phenomenological approaches to psychology. While a number of conflicting approaches are often given the name existentialism, nearly all of these approaches draw attention to issues at the intersection of human freedom, agency, alienation, and intersubjectivity. Phenomenology, or the study of human experience, is often utilized as a method for describing how we experience our everyday activities. Together, existential-phenomenological psychology focuses on the experiential foundations of psychological knowledge.
As you peruse the syllabus, you may notice that this course draws on a number of areas including literary theory, art, philosophy, and sociology. While modern psychology has typically modeled itself on the natural sciences, this course explores the way humanistic scholarship can inform psychological inquiry. By engaging in this form of interdisciplinary inquiry, I hope students will gain a greater appreciation for some of the complexities surrounding a liberal arts education.
Throughout this course, we will compare systematic conceptualizations of experience with our everyday understanding in order to illuminate various aspects of modern existence. The first part of the course is designed to encourage students to reflect on various aspects of their everyday experience. Some of the topics we will explore in this section include perception, language, psychopathology, and our experience of our body, space/place/time, and self/others. The last section of the course is devoted to existential philosophy with a particular emphasis on some of the most influential existential literature of the twentieth century.
Because this course focuses on YOUR experience, it is extremely important that you attend class on a regular basis and that you draw on course material in exploring your experience. By the end of the course, you should not only be able to articulate various aspects of your experience; you should also understand how this form of inquiry challenges traditional psychological research.
Welcome to Psychology 331: Creativity! This course is designed to introduce students to various aspects of the creative process and experience. While much of this course will focus on the psychological dimensions of creativity, you will also encounter insights into the creative process from artists, scientists, philosophers, and cultural theorists. By the end of this course you should have a greater appreciation for the wide range of approaches that contribute to our understanding of creativity.
Within psychology, creativity is a particularly fruitful area of investigation with psychologists drawing on the latest empirical evidence to make sense of the mental processes that have contributed to revolutionary changes in art, science, and technology. These investigations promise to shed light on the workings of the mind and facilitate the production of new creative individuals to deal with some of the most important challenges facing modern society.
Yet there is another way to approach creativity, one that views the interdisciplinary investigation of creativity as a means for challenging many of the basic assumptions that guide modern psychological inquiry. This approach suggests that psychological models of mental functioning represent a cultural interpretation of what it means to be an individual in modern society. Rather than engage in empirical investigation of psychological processes, this approach suggests that a new creative revolution may be required – one that views the psychological as grounded in the social processes of a cultural, historical, or political movement. From this perspective, it is the creative process itself that has important implications for the field of psychology.
In this course we will explore both perspectives through assigned readings, class discussions, and a creative project that you will work on for the duration of the semester. The latter will provide an opportunity to link your own experience of the creative process with many of the exciting topics covered in this course. I hope you will come to see creation as a tumultuous, often time consuming, but ultimately fulfilling part of the human condition.
This course introduces students to some of the most exciting and controversial issues surrounding holistic inquiry and psychological science. The primary focus of this course will be on the role that context plays both in psychological investigation and everyday experience.
So, what role does context play in psychological inquiry? Competing answers to this question have led to radically different forms of psychological research. For some researchers, the natural sciences provide an appropriate model for exploring human thought and behavior. Throughout your psychological studies you have typically been exposed to research grounded in experimental procedures and statistical analysis. Within such an approach, contexts become an important part of the explanatory matrix. By translating a context into discrete variables, psychological researchers hope to identify the causal factors that contribute to specific forms of human thought and behavior.
Yet a number of scholars have drawn attention to the contingent nature of this view of context. They suggest that the natural scientific view of context itself represents a particular historical and cultural interpretation of human existence. In this view, a context is not a collection of variables that cause thoughts and behaviors but is instead a set of social practices that make such thoughts and behaviors intelligible in the first place. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus has referred to the latter view as practical holism in order to emphasize the pragmatic character of scientific and everyday experience.
Within psychological inquiry, practical holism is closely aligned with social constructionism and postmodernism. In this course we will focus on the way social constructionism challenges many of our assumptions regarding identity, agency, self, relationships, language, culture, and ideology. By the end of the course, I hope you will have a greater appreciation for some of the issues surrounding postmodern culture and psychological investigation.
This course is the second half of a yearlong seminar on postmodern psychology and social constructionism. In Holistic Psychology I, we focused on various aspects of Kenneth Gergen’s approach to social constructionism. We also encountered short readings from a variety of scholars including Kuhn, Foucault, Butler, Barthes, Wittgenstein, Garfinkel, Sampson, and Shotter. At the conclusion of the course, we were left wondering how social constructionism could play a concrete role in psychological inquiry.
You may recall that one of the main issues we encountered throughout the readings centered on how particular descriptions of the world contribute to the way we understand social reality – from mundane interactions to scientific research. In many cases, descriptions are produced to privilege one version of reality over another. Disagreements regarding the description of a particular event often boil down to the competing interests on the parties involved. Yet it became clear that focusing exclusively on a description’s veracity often draws attention away from the role that descriptions play in human relationships. In this course, we will focus on many of the nuances that surround the production of factual descriptions as well as the social practices that rely on such descriptions. These investigations will bring us into contact with another approach to social constructionism – Discursive Social Psychology.
While there are a number of scholars interested in discursive approaches to social psychological research, we will focus specifically on the various approaches associated with the Discourse and Rhetoric Group (DARG) at Loughborough University. Throughout this course, we will draw on Jonathan Potter’s Representing Reality as we explore many of the complexities of human interaction and discourse. By the end of this course, I hope you will have a better understanding of different versions of social constructionism and a greater appreciation for qualitative approaches to psychological research.
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the most important issues in modern psychology. Throughout this course, we will explore the way psychology has struggled to assert its legitimacy against the tumultuous background of modern and postmodern thought.
Scholars often attempt to introduce a measure of flexibility into an orthodox domain by drawing attention to the various connotations of a particular word. In the very title of this course, the word critical indicates that the material you will encounter in this class is in some sense vital for understanding the development and trajectory of contemporary psychology. In other words, the issues we will cover should contribute to a more comprehensive and complex understanding of modern psychological inquiry. At the same time, critical also suggests that many of our discussions will challenge taken for granted assumptions about the discipline of psychology. I hope that both connotations convey the extent to which critique and reflexivity should be vital components of modern psychological inquiry.
In the first part of this course, we will focus on a number of topics including metaphor, modern society, and social constructionism. Through our readings and discussions, we will articulate a framework for a rigorous investigation of the concept of representation. From there, we will begin to explore the work of one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century – Michel Foucault. As we move through the course, it will become increasingly clear that Foucault’s work has profound implications for the way we view ourselves, our relationships, and the discipline of psychology.
! In this class we will explore the role that psychological understanding plays in our experience of the natural environment. Since psychology presents itself as the science of the subject, it will be interesting to see what sort of issues emerge as we interrogate the relationship between people and their natural surroundings.
A number of ecopsychologists suggest that the mechanistic and individualistic assumptions guiding modern psychological inquiry share important similarities with institutions that contribute to some of the most devastating environmental problems of our time. Rather than draw on psychological insights to address such problems, these scholars argue that a radical transformation of our understanding of the individual is in order. In this course, I suggest that a solution to the environmental crisis may require the development of a new form of psychological inquiry.
When students are introduced to a new area of study, there is often a tendency to emphasize continuity at the expense of conflict. The justification is that those who are unfamiliar with a particular topic need a solid foundation in the “basics” that will enable them to make sense of many of the complexities surrounding an issue. I am of the opposite opinion. In my view, there is nothing more valuable than recognizing the rifts, debates, and animosities from the very beginning. Indeed, I believe that such an approach places the emerging scholar in a better position to make important contributions to a particular area of study.
In this course, we will focus on some of the most controversial debates in deep ecology, social ecology, ecofeminism, and environmental activism. As you become familiar with these issues, I hope you will begin to develop a sense of the unique contribution you can make to the exciting field of ecopsychology.
This seminar is devoted to exploring issues at the intersection of cultural experience and psychological research. Because a variety of disciplines have contributed to our understanding of cultural phenomena, we will draw not only on the insights of psychologists but also anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and political theorists.
While students are often taught that psychology’s break with speculative philosophy and its birth as a scientific discipline occurred in a laboratory in Leipzig in the latter part of the nineteenth century, few are aware of Wundt’s “second psychology” and his warnings about the dangers of utilizing strictly experimental methods in the investigation of higher mental processes. Indeed, competing conceptualizations of the relationship between psychology and culture serve to highlight some of the most interesting and provocative controversies in contemporary psychological research.
In this class, we will begin by exploring some of the different ways psychology has approached cultural experience. While some researchers view culture as a factor capable of accounting for variations in social thought and behavior, other researchers draw attention to the way cultural phenomena appear to challenge some of the most cherished assumptions of modern psychology. We will discuss both positions particularly in the context of cross-cultural, cultural and indigenous approaches to psychology. Throughout this course we will reflect not only on psychology’s contribution to our understanding of culture but also on the implications of viewing psychological investigation as a cultural practice.
Because this is a senior seminar, you may encounter texts in the course that are a bit more challenging than what you have encountered in other courses. In some instances, it may be necessary to read a text several times before you feel comfortable contributing to a classroom discussion. This is to be expected as the selections sometimes challenge some of the basic assumptions that guide modern psychological research. Nonetheless, I believe the time you dedicate to interrogating the issues raised in these texts will ultimately enable you to make a creative contribution to a variety of domains.
The German playwright Bertolt Brecht spoke of the importance of making our everyday activities seem strange in order to transform the way we experience social reality. As we recognize the contingency of our ordinary habits and rituals, novel forms of interaction begin to come into view. So let’s begin the journey!
Welcome to Psychology 436: Media, Sex & Power! This course is designed to encourage students to reflect on the way an increasingly mediated society contributes to our understanding of gender/sexuality and to the exercise of power. While the discipline of psychology will inform many of our discussions, we will also draw on a variety of other areas including cultural studies, social theory, The Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, phenomenology, and feminism. By the end of this course, I hope you will have developed a greater appreciation for many of the complexities and contradictions surrounding late-capitalistic society.
We will begin by comparing psychology’s approach to these issues with the emerging field of cultural studies. Although there are important similarities between these two approaches, there are also a number of differences that make cultural studies a viable source for challenging the foundations of modern psychology. It is particularly vital that we spend some time exploring the relationship between cultural studies and psychology as the latter often sets itself the task of solving problems it may inadvertently play a role in producing. We will have much more to say about this throughout the semester.
The reading material for this course is composed of secondary sources and original texts. The early part of this semester is designed to lay a firm theoretical foundation for the investigation of a wide range of topics. In many cases, these readings are extremely challenging requiring significant study beyond the assigned reading. While I can assure you I will do everything I can to render these texts more intelligible, it is extremely important for each student to be prepared to struggle with these readings and ideas. Through this struggle, I hope you will begin to develop questions that have the power to shape the trajectory of psychology and the structure of modern society.
This course is designed to cover a number of perspectives on social psychological research. Specifically, we will focus on the difference between psychological and sociological investigations of social reality.
Because social psychology focuses on a wide range of issues relevant to our social interactions, it becomes exceedingly difficult to provide a comprehensive introduction to the discipline. Instead of providing a cursory introduction to many social psychological topics, I have organized this course so that we can explore in detail some of the most important issues. By providing greater depth, especially in terms of historical context and philosophical assumptions, this course should enable students to recognize that particular views of social reality have concrete methodological and conceptual consequences.
We will begin by focusing on the emergence of social psychology in the first half of the twentieth century. After a brief discussion of some of the methodological issues surrounding social psychological research, we will turn our attention to several classic experiments that have contributed to our understanding of interpersonal power dynamics. Next we will turn our attention to several alternatives to experimental social psychology, in particular, symbolic interactionism and social constructionism. Once we have a grasp of each of these perspectives, it will be possible to reflect on the way that competing conceptualizations of social reality lead to very different views of social cognition. Finally, we will explore how these different views inform social psychological investigations of gender and ideology.
The assignments in this course are designed to provide students with an experiential basis for exploring social psychological issues. By the end of this course, these assignments, readings, and discussions should help you gain a greater appreciation for some of the complexities surrounding our everyday social experience.
Add Comment