History and Systems

The title of the class "History and Systems" strikes boredom into the hearts of students. I know because during registration last semester, I kept repeating: "It sounds boring, but it's going to be awesome. I promise." The "history" part is what trips people up, but I think the past of psychology needs to be balanced with a view toward the future.

One of my goals in teaching History and Systems is to help students figure out what they want to do with their psychology degree, and then, how to get there. As an advisor, one of the first questions I ask is "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 9 times out of 10, they have a vague idea but no concrete plan. Bringing in guest speakers from our community is one of the tools I am using this semester to help students get a better understanding of career paths. They can ask questions of people working in various capacities and hear how each individual arrived where they are today. This process has the added bonus of fending off some of the anxiety (I know from personal experience) that may be provoked by the question ... "So...What are you going to do with this degree?"

Today, we had the privilege of hearing the first of a series of guest speakers in History and Systems. Dr. Bryan Miller, from Lincoln, is closely associated with the college. He has a Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy, runs a limited private practice, and teaches at the undergraduate and graduate level for Amridge University. For over an hour, he walked us through his pathway and various capacities as a psychologist, and entertained questions from our students. I am proud of the thought and interest demonstrated by the students that presented their questions.

So many students enter the psych major with the intent of being a therapist or counselor. Hopefully, the ones who are headed down this path got a glimpse into their futures. Sensitive to the concept that a career in counseling is not for everyone, I have a pretty fantastic lineup for the rest of the semester (if I do say so myself). Some other guests we will have from the York area are a dog trainer, an occupational therapist, a school psychologist, a minister, a court advocate, an Alzheimer's support group coordinator, and hopefully, a psychiatrist. On top of these, we will also take two field trips to the state schools to see about graduate schools for these professions.

I have put a lot of work into the planning of this course, and I am really excited to see how this plays out in sparking the interest of my advisees and students!

Behaviorist memes

Last time, I mentioned that I wanted to try something new with my "Learning and Memory" class. They have a paper due at each exam which essentially requires them to summarize the notes, give a real-life example of the concepts, and then describe how this can help them in their future careers.

I told them that they can substitute an internet meme for this assignment at any time. I feel that the ability to find humor in your discipline, and express it pictorially, lets me know that students have a decent grasp on that concept. What could be more real-life than comedy?

Having said that, here is the first student submission. I laughed so hard!

Behaviorism strikes again!

If I had a dollar for everytime I got called out on this during grad school...

Call me an internet nerd. I love memes like Boromir, Willy Wonka, Philosoraptor, and Ryan Gosling's "Hey Girl". So, one of our assignments in Learning and Memory will be to generate a picture meme related to the contents. Way to make students think outside the box. I appreciate the #YorkMLK13 faculty development day for encouraging students to be creative. I think we can do some of that.

I'll post some of them on my blog as they get generated. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Successful innovations

Our college was the recipient of a Title III grant, which provides funding for technology infrastructure. On top of getting some *sweet* iPads, we as faculty were encouraged to apply the use of technology in classes to increase student engagement. The program encouraging this at York College is called Successful Innovations.

This past Fall, a joint brain-child of mine and Mrs. Kroeker's was to do some kind of experiment. I am, after all, trained as a researcher. Mrs. Kroeker had the idea about using text messages as a medium to study social psychology. Particularly, have you ever gotten a text message that you just weren't sure about?

"We need to talk."
"What was that about?"

You know...ambiguous text messages.

This fit in well with our section about situational and dispositional attributions, and the fundamental attribution theory.

For example- "We need to talk." ... Is it someone being controlling (dispositional)? Or does the sender need to fill you in on the latest drama (situational)?

Our 26 students of Social Psychology developed a survey containing 10 ambiguous text messages similar to the ones above. They also provided one situational and one dispositional explanation for each. Participants from YC came up to our workspace to receive anonymous text messages (sent by psych students using the free TextNow app) on their personal devices and complete the survey. 59 students ended up participating: over 10% of the YC student body! Combining that number with the number of enrolled Social Psych students brought our total number of students involved to nearly 20% of the YC population! Talk about student engagement...

Though our findings weren't clear, and it was most students' first attempt at running a study, I would call this a success in terms of training and experience for Psych majors. Two of our students presented the findings to the students, faculty, and staff at Chapel. Three other students presented the findings at the Nebraska Psychological Society meeting - the first time YC has presented any research at NPS!

We are proud of how much time and effort YC Psychology students put into this project. I am hopeful that we can continue this line of inquiry in future experiments!

Six months later...one semester down!

I'm still alive! Surviving a snowy day in Nebraska, and learning about the use of technology in teaching (#yorkMLK13). I've gotten a lot of ideas and inspiration today, including using turning student professional portfolios into blogs, student-generated memes for Learning and Memory, the use of Twitter (I'm @ycpsych), personal branding, and flipped classrooms.

It's a good time to remind myself how to blog, for personal branding purposes and to process the semester's goings-on.

My first semester of full-time teaching (and department chair!) consisted of three and a half seated courses, two guided studies, and serving on the HLC committee for accreditation. Two of those classes were classes I'd never taught before, so that was really intense.

Now, second semester in, I'm teaching 5 classes (two of which are new for me to teach, though the material is not new), two guided studies, two online courses. I've got plenty of time to blog! :)

Did I mention how much I love my job? I'm having so much fun. Living the dream!

Score!

Our local library had a booksale fundraiser a couple of weekends ago. You could fill a brown bag for $5 or a paper box for $10. Boy, I sure cleaned up. For practically nothing, I was able to stock my (new, and slightly empty) bookshelves with such gems as:

"On Death and Dying" by Kubler-Ross
"Voyage of the Beagle" by Darwin
A pocket-size DSM-IV (outdated, but useful in its own right)
An 8-volume Encyclopedia of Psychology (must have been just before Wikipedia completely blew up)
"Sex and Temperament" and "Culture and Commitment" by Margaret Mead
"Go ask Alice"
"Searching for Memory" by Daniel Schacter

as well as a few young-adult and popular books on the topics of animal rights, genetics, technology and social psychology,  general audience counseling books.

Now, my bookshelves look a lot more interesting.

Speaking of technology and social psychology, I'm thinking about offering a special-topics course in the next year or so on this very topic. I read Sherry Turkle's book "Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other" and thought it was a really great starting point for getting students to think about how heavily we rely on batteries that run on devices. If you're interested in Turkle's work, may I recommend her TED talk:

Brain art

Was browsing The Beautiful Brain for some art to save as my computer's desktop and found some lovelies:

It was hard to choose, but I started with the top one, since it has so much orange in it. I love orange.