Psychology for Understanding and Changing the World
I teach psychology as a way of understanding human development, but also as a set of tools for examining the social conditions under which we live, learn, work, and struggle. Across my courses, students encounter mainstream psychological research alongside critical, cultural-historical, Marxist, disability, anti-racist, and other perspectives that challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about people and our societies.
I want students to ask how social institutions shape development, and how psychological knowledge can contribute to collective efforts to transform the conditions in which people live. My courses emphasize active learning, discussion, collaborative inquiry, and connections between theory and students’ own experiences. Rather than passively receiving knowledge, I want students to critically examine psychological claims, develop their own questions, and use psychology to analyze real social problems.
Courses
Educational Psychology
Examines learning and development within educational settings while asking the larger question, “What is education for?” Students explore cooperation, Vygotsky and cultural-historical approaches to learning, play, language and private speech, disability and ableism, motivation, emotion, and the social conditions that help or hinder learning. The course also examines how schooling can reproduce racism, class inequality, exclusion, and alienation – and how educational practices can instead foster development, participation, collective agency, and social change.
Psychological Disorders in Young Childen
Examines disability in childhood through psychological, educational, historical, and social perspectives. Alongside questions of diagnosis and intervention, students examine disability rights, the social and medical models of disability, disabled people’s lived experiences, strengths-based approaches to education, and the institutional and environmental barriers that shape access and inclusion. A central question throughout the course is how psychology and education can understand disability without reducing people to diagnoses, deficits, or labels.
Developmental Psychology
Examines human development across the lifespan as a biological, psychological, social, and cultural process. Students explore major theories alongside questions about nature and nurture, play and private speech, perspective taking, social class, political engagement, aging, and death and dying. We critically examine assumptions about development and how social and historical conditions shape the ways people grow and change. Students engage in active inquiry through myth-busting, media analysis, collaborative discussion, and research-based debates comparing competing developmental perspectives.
Psychology & Political Activism
Examines political activism and social movements through developmental and social psychology. Students investigate how psychology is formed through social activity and how collective struggle can transform the attitudes, identities, solidarity, and political consciousness of participants, supporters, and even opponents. The course connects psychological theory to oppression, alienation, liberation, and movements for racial, educational, gender and sexuality, disability, and economic justice, as well as workers’ power.
The course is deliberately experiential. Students analyze psychological measures of activism and class consciousness, interview activists about their motivations and development, and participate in real-world activist fieldwork while reflecting on how engagement changes their own attitudes, knowledge, and perspectives.
Teaching Materials & Course Design
I regularly redesign my courses around questions that connect psychological theory to students’ lives and to broader struggles over education, inequality, disability, work, race, and social change. My teaching draws on open educational resources, primary research, historical and contemporary texts, multimedia, and assignments that ask students to apply psychological ideas rather than simply memorize them.
Course design is also part of my scholarly work. I am particularly interested in active and collaborative learning, writing-to-learn, critical pedagogy, culturally and historically situated approaches to development, and ways of making psychology more intellectually and politically relevant to students at a public urban college.