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The following is a list
of selected courses I have taught, accompanied by links to syllabi,
noteworthy activities, and my own evaluations of the experience. I have only
included here courses that I taught as instructor of record.
Multicultural Women in the U.S.
This is an introductory level course in the women's studies department. It
also counts as a multicultural course for our school's multicultural credit.
The students were undergraduates of all grade levels. The first semester I
taught this, it was a 100 person section and I was originally assigned to be
the TA. It was quite an experience having to take over the course several
weeks in, after our instructor became ill and our substitute declined to keep
teaching for us. Ultimately, it was one of the best teaching experiences I
have had, especially because the students and I formed a real camaraderie
after all we had been through. The second semester was almost as good,
although the class was much smaller and more homogenous. It was my first
experience designing a syllabus for a semester long class as instructor of
record. In retrospect, I tried to include too many readings and in-class
activities. However, many of the students were still excellent at
contributing to in-class discussions. Some of my favorite activities for this
course included Cross The Line, Tracy Ore's "Life Happens!,"; and a
number of activities from the workbook Women's Education in the Global
Economy.
Theories
of Personality
This course was a small section psychology elective at a local community
college. I taught it using the movie Good Will Hunting as a central
theme. I organized each lecture around a particular approach to the study of
personality, and then led the class in a discussion about how that theory
might apply to Will Hunting's personality. Students were asked to complete a
final paper analyzing Will Hunting through the lens of one particular theory.
Overall, the class was very receptive to this activity. Another popular activity
in the class was the personality collage, which asked students to represent
themselves via a collage and then discuss their own theories of personality
as they were implicitly represented in it.
History
of Psychology
I taught this course twice. The first time, I had students create web pages
for famous psychologists. I ran into a few problems here with students not
choosing figures from history and plagiarizing from other web pages, so the
next year I created some explicit guidelines about these issues. After the
first year, I dropped a requirement that students read some primary
historical writings such as Freud and James, as student feedback indicated
these were too difficult to understand. Instead, I added an assignment requiring
them to teach a chapter of the book to their fellow students, based on my
belief that you cannot teach something without really learning it. This
activity was so successful that I also included it in my theories of
personality class later that semester. I am especially proud of the fact that
students were required to read a number of outside sources that they would
not have normally been exposed to in a history of psychology class, such as
chapters from Guthrie's Even the Rat was White and Laura Brown's
article, "New voices, new visions: Toward a lesbian/gay paradigm for psychology."
Psychology of Adulthood
This course was challenging to teach in a multicultural fashion,
largely because a lot of the available research on aging in psychology is not
multicultural. I did manage to include some information on adult
relationships for gay and lesbian individuals, as well as some multicultural
perspectives on death and dying. A favorite activity of many of my students
was interviewing an elderly friend or relative. I had them apply theories of
adult development to these interviews, which they found challenging but
rewarding.
Human Sexuality
When I initially took over this distance learning course, it was far longer
than other, comparable courses. I also found a lot of the questions
redundant, unclear, and out-of-date. As a result, I took on the task of
revamping the course guide. Due to limited time, I was unable to select a new
textbook or write entirely new questions, but I did remove some of the most
confusing or out-of-date questions. I also combined several chapters together
to form each new lesson, changing the total number of lessons from 23 to 8.
Each chapter was combined with one or two others on the basis of similar
themes, and I wrote completely new introductions for each set of chapters. In
the introductions, I focused especially on parts of the text I thought were
unclear or not as critical as they could be. In this way, I hoped to provide
the students with an evaluative component that was theretofore missing from
the class. I also added quizzes to each lesson and reworked the midterm and
final exams to better reflect lesson content.
Developmental Psychology
Although I was initially scheduled to teach this lab in a traditional format,
due to some unfortunate circumstances we had to reorganize the class
schedule. This effectively pushed all the lab material to the end of the
semester. As a result, I ended up with an intensive, 4-day-a-week,
2-classes-a-day lab schedule. This could have been disastrous, but students
were actually quite happy with the results. I designed this component of the
syllabus myself, and divided it into sections on evaluating theory,
evaluating methods, and real-world applications of developmental psychology.
A favorite lab activity was evaluating children's literature in order to
identify themes of gender socialization and other messages of discrimination.
Introductory
Psychology
This course was the first one I taught as instructor of record, and, as such,
it was quite a learning experience. The course subject requires a great deal
of knowledge about a broad range of topics in psychology, and I learned how
much I really had to work to present that material effectively. Additionally,
I was challenged by the unusual nature of the class. The class met once a
week for four hours a night, and the session was only eight weeks long. This
taxed my ability to keep the students engaged and entertained. As a result, I
stopped attempting to lecture so much and started doing a lot of in-class
activities that I felt accomplished the same thing. For example, I had a
friend of mine commit a "crime" and asked the students for their
eyewitness testimony. I had them use gymenic acid to remove their ability to
taste sweet things, and I did a dichotic listening task in class to show them
principles of attention and processing. It was in this class that I first
developed my belief that an active, engaged student will learn more and enjoy
the class more. This has been a foundation of my teaching philosophy ever
since.
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