Emerging from the first week of classes, I find myself reflecting on my class preparation and the anxiety I often feel around demonstrating “mastery” of the texts I assign each week. After years of being a student myself, I feel pressure to make sure I understand every element of the text clearly so that I […]
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Reflections on Developing a Critical Syllabus for an Intro-Level Course
Classes start in two weeks, and for the past month, I have been searching every corner of the internet, every research database, for academic articles that are critical of mainstream psychology that are accessible to undergraduate students. As a PhD student in critical psychology, I have been lucky enough to be exposed to critical race […]
The Importance of Pausing: How Check-Ins Create A Classroom Culture of Openness
Last week, I observed my colleague in the Humanities Alliance Fellowship teach their class, which taught me a great deal about developing my pedagogy moving forward. I have been thinking much more about content, and more specifically, how to redefine “the canon” using a critical race and feminist lens. Observing my colleague last week reminded […]
Freud, human nature, and critiquing the canon
Since my last blog, I have continued to think about the value of teaching “the canon”—fundamental texts that have shaped the discipline. In psychology, what we think about as “the canon” certainly includes the work of Freud. We spent a few class sessions delving into his theories and what he fundamentally thought about human nature […]
Facilitating Critical Thinking about the Political Underpinnings of Psychology: Where Do We Start...
I am lucky enough to be trained in psychology from a critical perspective that centralizes the relationship between psychology and politics, or the ways in which power functions in our production of psychological knowledge. I am also a woman of color whose history is deeply entwined with colonialism, which has given me another form of […]