Abstract
This paper argues, quite correctly, that “teaching psychology for non-psychologists influences psychology’s public image and the basis of collaboration between psychologists and non-psychologists.” I would add that in many, if not most, countries, what non-psychology students learn about psychology also influences the research support available for psychological science. Some of these students will eventually hold positions in which they make, or help to make, decisions about the funding priorities at government agencies and private research foundations. Some of them may even be elected to political offices in which their influence over such things is even greater. The paper also highlights the importance of making sure that the psychology courses to which non-psychology students are exposed are courses that will increase these students’ awareness of the scientific status of psychology, the wide applicability of its subfields, and its value in promoting human welfare and dignity.
The five criteria listed for the development of curricula to serve these students are ambitious and laudable, but also challenging. Unless funds are in the pipeline to massively increase the number of psychology teachers, satisfying these criteria seems to me to be an unrealistic goal. Approximating them is certainly possible though, and so the next step in the process might be to begin spelling out some strategies and tactics for doing so.
Consider Criteria 1 and 2, for example: Psychology curricula for non-psychologists should be specific to a field of study or profession and psychology curricula for non-psychologists should be need-oriented. As the authors note, the large number of disciplines represented in the classroom makes it impossible for a single course to offer the content or meet the needs relevant to all of them. But there are alternatives to trying to include additional discipline-specific content in already content-heavy psychology courses. One option is for psychology teachers to structure their courses’ writing assignments, research projects, collaborative learning activities, and other non-lecture components to give psychology and non-psychology students alike the opportunity to focus on the topics, theories, and methods that are of greatest interest to them. So the cognitive psychology term paper of a psychology student hoping for a university research career might center on parallel distributed processing models of memory, while the paper of a law student in the same class who hopes to be a prosecutor might be about the repressed memory debate as it plays out in the courtroom.
It seems to me that psychology teachers will be more likely to embrace the ideals of the criteria presented here if doing so does not require them to try to keep everyone in their discipline-diverse audiences happy by offering “something for everyone.” Instead, they could adopt a student-centered approach in which non-psychology students are encouraged to take responsibility for identifying the relevance and applicability of psychological science to their discipline. Do we psychologists know for sure what all those students should be looking for? Probably not, at least not with respect to all the disciplines from which they come. This is why one of the last sentences in the paper strikes me as also one of the most important: “… the successful application of the criteria outlined above requires collaboration of psychologists and experts from the non-psychology field.” The more knowledgeable psychology teachers are about how the traditions and values of various non-psychology fields, how students in those fields are normally taught, and what they want and need from psychology courses, the easier it will be to intelligently re-design or at least adjust psychology courses in the right directions.
I don’t know if psychology teachers in various countries discuss these things with their counterparts in departments whose students take psychology courses, but if they don’t, or they don’t do so on a regular basis, they probably should. These discussions can be informal, or could take the form of a mini-conference on campus, based on a model agenda provided by those who have successfully organized such events in the past. Similar discussions could be proposed as conversation hours at multidisciplinary academic and/or teaching conferences.
In short, the criteria proposed in this paper make sense and are worthy of our best efforts to satisfy them. The devil, however, is in the details.