Re: Child Psychology

[Mark A. Casteel]

Hi Wally. At Penn State, we have a similar situation, where the Dept. of 
Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS) (part of the College of Health 
and Human Development) teaches courses in both developmental psych and 
adolescent psych, similar to courses offered by the dept. of psychology 
(with similar differences in emphases). What we do here is label the course 
"Introduction to Infant and Child Development" for HDFS and "Introduction 
to Developmental Psychology" for the psych dept. Additionally, it's labeled 
"Adolescent Development" from HDFS and "Introduction to Adolescent 
Psychology" from the psych department. It seems to me that since your 
administration (at least implicitly) recognizes the need to offer two 
courses that they bite the bullet and allow the psychology department to 
lay claim to the term "psychology" in the course titles, and have courses 
taught by the College of Education named something along the lines similar 
to what we have. Of course the question is, is there any possibility at 
getting the central administration to agree to such a naming request? Here 
at Penn State, re-naming courses is a relatively simple thing: a proposal 
is made which goes to the curricular affairs committee of the University 
Faculty Senate, then before the entire senate. I can't ever recall a name 
change NOT receiving approval by the faculty, even if there are individual 
holdouts doing so for turf reasons. Just my two cents.

-- Mark

At 11:25 AM 4/12/2004 -0400, you wrote:
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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*********************************
Mark A. Casteel, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Penn State York
1031 Edgecomb Ave.
York, PA  17403
(717) 771-4028
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