Dear Colleagues,
I need some suggestions for how to resolve a dilemma I am facing. I am
at a school where child psychology, adolescent psychology, and lifespan
psychology are not taught out of the psychology department, rather they are
taught through the College of Education, in a department called Human
Development and Learning. The reason for this comes from a long history,
ultimately stemming from the fact that the Department of Psychology used to
be in the college of education about 25 years ago, at which time it split
off.
To be sure, developmental psychology is central to the core mission of
any department of psychology that offers a psychology major, but for my
department it has been difficult in principle to include developmental
psychology courses as part of our core curriculum since what is taught in
these courses is rather outside of our control, to the extent that the
courses are taught by nonpsychology folk.
The existing developmental psychology courses have a significant applied
orientation, and not a particularly strong focus on the basic science.
However, the psychology department would prefer that the courses have a much
more significant emphasis on basic science. For this reason, we, the
Department of Psychology, have been given the green light to develop our
own, new developmental psychology courses, so long as there isn't
substantial overlap with the existing developmental psychology courses.
Here are my questions.
1) How would you design the syllabi of our new science-emphasized
developmental psychology courses to maximize their distinctiveness from the
existing applied-emphasis courses?
2) Given that we can't use the names "Child Psychology," "Adolescent
Psychology," etc., what names would you use instead?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can provide.
Wally Dixon
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Wallace E. Dixon, Jr. |
Chair and Associate Professor | Rocket science is child's play
of Psychology | compared to understanding
Department of Psychology | child's play
East Tennessee State University | -unknown
Johnson City, TN 36714 |
(423) 439-6656 |
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