Syllabus Psych 14 Spring 2023
Psychology 14 Abnormal Psychology
Overview
The Open for Antiracism (OFAR) Program – co-led by CCCOER and College of the Canyons – emerged as a response to the growing awareness of structural racism in our educational systems and the realization that adoption of open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy could be transformative at institutions seeking to improve. The program is designed to give participants a workshop experience where they can better understand anti-racist teaching and how the use of OER and open pedagogy can empower them to involve students in the co-creation of an anti-racist classroom. The capstone project involves developing an action plan for incorporating OER and open pedagogy into a course being taught in the spring semester. OFAR participants are invited to remix this template to design and share their projects and plans for moving this work forward.
Action Plan
My focus on integrating antiracist pedagogy will be in my Abnormal Psychology course, but could also be applied to every Psychology course that I've taught. The question of contributions by Black and African American researchers, writers, creatives, academics, etc. is conspicuously omitted from textbooks and major scholarly publications, etc. I have to search for meaningful contemporary, and intersectional content written by Black and Latinx/Hispanic creatives to supplement the primary textbook.
I assign a textbook that is authored by "multicultural" psychologists and researchers of color, and the text challenges students to consider, understand and synthesize "psychological disorders" from a multipath perspective (biological, psychological, social and sociocultural framework). However, the dynamics that inform each of these dimensions aren't given authentic attention. This gap is where I can engage students to insinuate their cultural agency. For example, when the discussion centers on specific disorders (depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and other "psychotic disorders"), rather than simply discuss symptoms, etiologies, diagnosis and treatments, we can take a deep dive into the contributing, confounding and precipitous dynamics of trauma that may have impacted and invaded the individual's ecosystem. There's much attention and research on genetic and biological factors, but the underlying individual and collective societal trauma that creates these manifest symptoms is often overlooked or omitted. Of course I'll need to be intentional about how I will accomplish this, but that's just one way that racism shows in core course concepts in the course.
Course Description
Psychology 14 - Abnormal Psychology
Antiracist Assignment / Module
After covering foundational theories of Psychology and definitions of abnormal behavior for the first few week, students were encouraged to critique, analyze and respond to discussion questions challenging the validity of signs, symptoms, diagnosis and treatments of psychological disorders from their unique racial, ethnic, cultural, gendered, and sociocultural perspective.
Attached are examples of two such legacy assignments.