Creatively teaching introductory psychology in liberal arts institutions

Abstract

Introductory psychology courses are generally designed primarily for pre-professional training and organized like traditional textbooks, that is, topical (overviews of various sub-disciplines of psychological discourse without specific concern for ordering of material or forging connections between topics); ahistorical (insufficient attention to how past discoveries inform present theory and research), and insulated and isolated from other academic disciplines. Such courses are often unsuccessful in college settings, where professors must prepare prospective majors for future study and pre-professional training, while simultaneously engaging and informing other students with more general interests in the liberal arts. In this chapter I present an overview of my effort to transform introductory psychology from a topical, a-historical, academically insular venture to a “sequential hierarchy of multimodal interdisciplinary recursive experiences.”