I am a Professor of Psychology at Olin College of Engineering, a school renowned for its innovative teaching.
(For example, in 2020 Princeton Review ranked Olin #2 Best Classroom Experience and #3 Professors Get High Marks in comparison to all colleges.) Part of the reason Olin has earned this reputation is the fact that faculty are given enormous autonomy and encouragement to experiment with innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to pedagogy. I am the only psychologist on the Olin faculty, part of a small but mighty group of faculty in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
Our fundamental job is to cultivate students who know what they don’t know — and who to turn to to find out. We aim for disciplinary rigor coupled with disciplinary humility. One big win for me as a teacher was a time I was coaching an engineering team on the design of adaptive textiles for people with disabilities and one of the engineering students said: “We are the wrong people to make these decisions until we get input from someone who thinks about this stuff all the time – let’s go find a costume designer!” I want students to understand the kinds of questions psychologists (and theater artists) ask, the tools we have for pursuing those questions, and to know when they need a psychological perspective on whatever they’re working on.
In every course I teach, regardless of the topic area, I have four overarching goals:
1) Gaining Intellectual Content
I want my students to learn something they didn’t know before. This might be a psychological concept that changes the way they approach their work, a methodological or analytical approach for collecting and making sense of data, or an insight about human development that applies to their own life.
2) Developing Epistemological Awareness
I want my students to understand that all forms of inquiry are embedded within systems and traditions that determine what counts as evidence. I work to help my students not only understand the content of the course, but also the values that shaped the questions that led to this content. I find interdisciplinary (and especially team-taught) teaching particularly effective for pursuing this goal.
3) Practicing Social Process Skills
In any learning environment there is a parallel curriculum that often remains implicit: one focused on how we learn. I strive to cultivate an awareness that we all need practice engaging with ideas or people that we find challenging, articulating our ideas (verbally and in writing) even when they feel provisional, and constructively managing the friction inherent in learning.
4) Fostering Holistic Development
I believe that the best learning experiences impact us in ways far beyond the intellectual. I design my courses to push for holistic learning, asking students to reflect on the ways in which the material impacts their sense of self, embracing the discomfort of expanding yourself, and savoring the joy of learning.
The courses I teach at Olin range from those that convey core content in my specific area of specialty (e.g., Narrative Psychology), broad-based psychological courses (e.g., Foundations of Psychology), interdisciplinary courses on psychological topics (e.g., Identity from the Mind and the Brain), interdisciplinary courses that bridge my expertise with other disciplines (e.g., Constructing and Performing the Self, a course combining psychology and theater), and courses that have stretched me far beyond my training (e.g., Collaborative Design).
I have also had the opportunity to teach courses in the Psychology Department at Wellesley College, the Arts Department at Babson College, and the Global Health & Social Medicine Department at Harvard Medical School.