- Move my slides.
Catherine Sanderson, from Amherst College.
We're so thrilled to have her today.
Catherine is the Poler Family Professor
and Chair of Psychology at Amherst College.
She's published over 25 journal articles and book chapters
in addition to several intro to psychology textbooks.
Her latest book, "Why We Act, Turning Bystanders
Into Moral Rebels", examines why good people
so often stay silent or do nothing
in the face of wrong-doing.
So we're thrilled to have Catherine here with us today
to talk about embedding EDI
throughout introductory psychology.
So join me in welcoming Catherine.
- Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here.
So I have taught intro psychology for a long time.
I got my PhD, immediately started teaching
at Amherst College.
It's the only job that I've ever had with health insurance.
And I've taught intro psych from the spring of 1998
was my first time, and I frankly thought
I was pretty good at it.
You know, my evaluations were good,
I have tenure, and so on.
And then after the pandemic hit, a number of things,
frankly, happened within our department
and within the country.
I know that this will not be unfamiliar
to any of you listening.
But as my colleagues all tried to sort of grapple
with how were we going to teach
in this new, strange, virtual environment,
we watched with horror at the murder of George Floyd
on behalf of a police officer
as three colleagues stood around.
And then that summer, and frankly that spring and all year,
many of our students of Asian descent
reported feeling uncomfortable in all different environments
and hearing about anti-Asian slurs
on public transportation, and violence, and so on.
And so my colleagues and I frankly came together
that summer of 2020, so just about two years ago now,
and we recognized the power and potential
of the discipline of psychology.
At our school, like with many schools across the country,
many, many students take intro psych.
About half of our students at Amherst College
take it each year.
And we really sat down and said,
what can we do within our course?
And we worked together in a really exciting,
collaborative way to come up with a new version
of intro psychology, which I'm gonna share with you today.
So I do not have particular expertise in pedagogy.
I believe that the next speaker is gonna give you
a fabulous presentation that's really gonna focus
on the science of this, but what I'm gonna talk about
is what we've done at my school.
And I'm glad to answer any questions.
We will have time today.
I'm also glad to have people reach out to me after
or if you're watching a video of this,
and talk about it in other ways.
But I'm basically gonna talk about what we did,
and then how it could be adapted
to all different kinds of schools across the country,
to virtual learning and so on.
So what we did is we developed a framework
in which we changed our intro psych class
in four distinct ways, as I'll go through briefly today.
So one, we developed a new set of learning goals,
and here are the learning goals that we developed,
and in particular, these were also done
with the assistance of somebody in our CTL,
Center for Teaching and Learning, who's excellent,
so I want to give full credit when credit is due.
So first, we wanted students to have an understanding,
a mastery, of course, of psychological content,
but we also wanted to have a particular focus
on how the content that was developed
didn't represent all voices, that we heard a lot
from particular voices, basically heterosexual,
relatively wealthy white men from particular parts
of the world, and that in fact many other voices
were historically absent.
So we wanted them to understand the core concepts
and discipline knowledge and theories and research,
but we also wanted them to do so with an awareness
that this does not mean that these are the only voices
that might have thoughts about basic
core psychological principles.
So a more sort of skeptical view on the knowledge
that was being presented.
Two, we wanted them to really understand the science,
so that psychology is a science,
and we wanted them to understand the scientific method
and to be able to utilize skills in the scientific method,
but we wanted to do so particularly with thoughts
about diversity, equity and inclusion.
So understanding how particular research questions
can be examined from different points of view,
understanding how asking somebody,
well, are you homophobic or sexist or racially biased,
people are like, no, I'm not.
And that there are issues in terms of self report,
and so thinking about other methods
of being able to assess sensitive topics
was really important, so even from the very beginning
of the class, we really had this focus
on research methodology that would be applicable
to studying diverse topics.
And then three, we also wanted them to really see
the power and the potential of psychology
in real world contexts.
So in every single class, we really tried to link up
not just here's this theory of classical conditioning
or whatever that you should know,
but really how does this apply to real world contexts,
and many of these, of course, had embedded in them
issues of D, E and I.
So we set these three learning goals that again,
all faculty members in my department
who teach in the intro rotation, which is about half of us,
bought into and we developed these together
as a set of core learning goals.
So this was part one.
Part two, we integrated DEI content throughout.
So in every lecture, in every topic,
we included DEI material.
Now, I'm just giving you a couple of examples.
So our students read a paper
that people may be familiar with
that looks at racial differences
in terms of how teachers discipline young students.
So this is a pretty famous paper that cues student race
by their name, the student's name,
and the sample was actually teachers.
And so this is a way in which we are talking about
perceptual confirmation, about self-fulfilling prophecy,
et cetera, using a particular lens of looking at DEI
to investigate here are research methodologies.
We talked about the shooter paradigm,
and showed them images and a little video looking at,
okay, what do you see in somebody's hand,
and how quickly do you respond and see something?
Does that change as a function of the person's race?
So those are just two examples,
but we talked about a range of different kinds of topics
in terms of issues of the model minority stereotype
of Asian Americans, we talked about issues
of gender stereotypes, we talked about issues
of racial stereotypes, stereotypes about poverty and so on.
So basically trying to have, in every single lecture,
material that helps students connect what they were learning
in terms of classic theories and research in psychology
to how that might apply more broadly
in terms of people from different backgrounds, experiences.
Three, and this is probably the trickiest.
So the first two, I'll say many of you listening
might be like, yeah, I could do that
and I could adapt those learning goals,
and yeah, I could throw in some content here and there.
But the third thing we did was perhaps the most impactful,
and this is that we created space
for what we called DEI-focused discussions.
So we actually chunked our course into three different units
and at the end of each unit we included
DEI-focused discussions with smaller groups.
So at my school, intro is taught to about 50 students.
We then would bring in half of the students
for the first half of class, and the other half
in the second half of class, and have a specific discussion
that focused on some kind of a DEI topic.
They would have read an article,
and they then discussed this article.
What are the strengths, what are the limitations,
what are the implications, and so on,
in these small group discussions.
Now, this was really difficult initially
because we had to create what is accessible content
for first year for us.
It's largely first year students to engage with.
We had to come up with a set of discussion questions.
And we were really doing something different,
because it was not just sort of lecturing
from a PowerPoint, but it was really having them engage
in depth in terms of these discussions
about DEI-focused content.
So this required us, in fact,
cutting a little bit of material to make space for this,
and I can talk about ways in which we did that.
But I will say, and a preview of coming attractions,
I'll talk about this later, it was very, very
well-received by the students.
So as an example, students read an article
that looked at racial bias in terms of decision making.
So it was an empirical article from psych science
that looked at, sorry, my dogs are here,
that looked at racial bias in negotiations
and how people negotiate differently
with a partner who is Black versus white.
They then read a New York Times article,
this is from a couple of summers ago,
but it looked specifically about how home appraisers
appraise houses differently if they believe
a Black person owns the house
versus a white person owns the house.
This was a front page article in the New York Times,
so it's, again, very, very accessible.
And so students read the empirical scientific article,
they read this New York Times popular press article,
and then they answered a series of questions
in these DEI-focused discussions.
So literally, here are the questions
that we used for this one.
What does this paper tell us about the impact of race
on financial negotiations?
How do these apply to real world?
What other professions might need to address internal bias?
Is that realtors or teachers or lawyers
or professors or whatever?
How can we combat it?
And what are the implications?
And so these were small group discussions,
again, about 20-25 students in which it combined
empirical research, a popular press kind of thing,
and then these discussion questions.
And my colleagues and I worked together
to choose these materials, and these were standard
across all of our different sections of intro psych.
Four, we changed our assignments.
And this was probably the biggest thing also
that we had to kind of come to an agreement on.
Many of us had been doing lab reports already,
in which students actually conducted their own
kind of little study, but we also added something
called the applications project,
and I actually got this idea,
to give credit where credit's due,
from the SPPN, Social and Personality Psychology Network,
and it was a great idea.
And this was to have students create
some kind of an applications project.
So anyone who's interested in doing this,
shoot me an email and I can give you the rubric,
I can give you the assignment,
I can give you some sample papers.
But what students had to do, either working alone
or in groups, is they had to use some theory,
concept in psychology, and then create change in the world
through an actual project.
So they had huge flexibility as to what they chose.
It had to be something societally beneficial,
so it couldn't be I want more people to vape or whatever,
or I want more people to vote for this candidate.
It could be I want to reduce vaping
or I want to increase voting, or whatever,
but they had to choose some topic
that was generally pro-socially beneficial,
generally viewed that way.
And then they had to create some projects.
So that could be a podcast, it could be a TikTok dance,
it could be a video, it could be an infographic,
it could be a game, it could be a poster,
it could be a work of art.
They had huge amounts of room.
And then they had to present these to the class.
And I will say, super loved this idea.
Students got really into it.
They created lots of different things.
I'm showing you a couple of examples here.
So one student actually created a game
to help introduce students to the diversity
of Asian perspectives in the world,
that it's different if you're from Korea versus China
versus whatever, so literally created
this very complicated game that was super creative
in terms of exploring different perspectives.
And another student created an infographic poster
designed for teachers to help explain
to elementary school teachers
that racial bias exists and it's really important
to try to treat all students in the same way,
with the idea that helping teachers understand
that very natural bias that some people have
actually can have detrimental consequences.
So again, this was designed to be useful
for elementary school teachers.
So these assignments were both designed
to help students understand that psychology
has applications, psychology has implications for the world,
and to basically help students take more ownership
and responsibility for their learning.
Now I'm gonna show you a little bit of a complicated slide,
which is how the scope of this course works.
So again, this actually predates the Pillar Model,
developed by the APA, but we will tweak it
according to the Pillar Model.
But basically what we did, again, was introduce them
to research methods, then there was a little discussion,
then we talked about unit two, so issues in neuroscience,
sensation, perception, then we had another discussion.
Unit three, learning, memory and development,
another discussion.
And then finally finishing it up with issues
of social, personality, emotion and so on.
We had a number of different kinds of discussions,
as I described.
We actually tweaked these after the first rendition
to add in, we talked about race and poverty, SES.
We actually added a new article looking at model minority
and Asian Americans.
We also had a series of different assessments.
So we did have exams.
I'm glad to talk about the assessments that we used.
And then we had distinct different kinds of assignments.
They had to critique an article,
then to do an applications paper/project,
and then finally conduct some kind of independent research.
And faculty also met throughout the semester
to kind of debrief and to tweak,
and we've done so again this summer, heading into the fall.
So final slide, and then I will turn it over to Q and A.
How was it received?
So first of all, the faculty loved it.
The faculty felt more engaged.
They felt that the discussions really gave them a chance
to work individually with students and get to know them
as people, not just students sitting in a lecture hall.
So the faculty found it really rewarding.
The student evaluations at the end of the semester
were also very, very positively received.
Many of the faculty at Amherst who teach intro psych
do not have tenure, and so the evaluations
are really important.
We wanted to make sure that we weren't creating something
that wasn't gonna be useful in terms
of their teaching evaluations.
And the students just responded in such a positive way.
Here are some of the comments, again,
that I'm just gonna share.
The applications paper enabled me to connect my upbringing
to the topics we learned, and the mental tolls of poverty.
Someone else talks about how poverty
actually has manifestations in terms of how people live.
People talked about implicit bias
and having a new recognition of how early it occurs.
People talked about the many different ways
in which wealth actually has implications,
and in terms of how we can overcome those biases
through self affirmation.
Again, this related to a particular discussion unit
and paper they read.
And then finally, one of our real goals
was to give students a sense of hope,
because it had been kind of a depressing summer
pandemic wise, and actually in many different ways.
And so having students, I think, have a sense
of personal agency about steps they could take
in terms of managing social issues like poverty,
racism, was really our goal.
And we're frankly hoping that this is going to have
a ripple effect for our college, our campus community,
but also well beyond.
So I know that you all have been sitting
for a long time today.
I am going to stop.
I'm on my share now.
I'm glad to take any questions now.
I'm also glad to have anyone contact me individually.
If you Google Catherine Sanderson,
I come up really easily, and I'm at Amherst College.
I'm glad to share, I think, Sue, my syllabus is posted.
Is that right?
They have access to my syllabus?
Yeah.
- Yes, right.
- I tried to get you access to a chapter we've written,
but I haven't quite gotten the permission on that front.
But I've shared my slides with APA,
so certainly you can have access to my slides.
But I'm glad to share any materials
if you want copies of the discussion questions
or slides that we used during teaching
or assignment rubrics.
Glad to share any materials at any time.