Week 1

What do you want to focus on

Think about what you want to learn:

Some topics in the past that I have taught include the following and you may find them useful starting points to think about your own process for this quarter.

  1. Critical thinking
  2. Technical writing new paragraph finding published research
  3. Evaluating the quality of published articles, for example contrasting popular sources from academic or scholarly.
  4. General introduction to the content of psychology
  5. Theories within psychology
  6. Criticisms of psychology
  7. Limits of psychology
  8. Philosophy of science
  9. Working within groups
  10. Psychology as it relates to other disciplines
  11. Etiology of Abnormal psychology (causes)

Any and all of these above could qualify.

The goal here is for us to collectively think of it about what you’d like to learn in our time together.

This list is not exhaustive. There’s some things that you may want to focus on or add. Perhaps this might include cognitive dissonance about being a white person and being told that you’ve got white privilege. What are some ways one can think about opening up to that feedback?

Although I have some expert content knowledge in psychology, it’s not exhaustive. I don’t know everything, I have my own biases and that there may be things you’d like to learn about and practice and I would be open to hearing those things as well as how to incorporate it into the overall class.

Read the following

  1. The syllabus

  2. Miller’s law of communication (in the syllabus)

  3. George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946 (in the syllabus)

  4. The 9 standards of Critical thinking (in the syllabus)

  5. Textbook, Module 1: What is Abnormal Psychology?

  6. Dictionary/Wikipedia definitions on:

    *Anthropomorphize

    *Ethnocentrism

  7. watch intro lecture on epistemology

Epistemology 8min

  1. Skim from page 2, sub heading “The Theory of Knowledge”** of the article: An introduction to Stephen C. Pepper’s philosophical system via World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence**, Berry (1984) (found in syllabus)

  2. Watch two vids on Ontology, essentially a review of the World hypotheses reading above:

Ontology 1 7 min

Ontology 1 7 min

  1. Read about “stereotype threat”. Not stereotypes. There is a difference. You’ll need to find a source or two on your own.

Do the following

  1. Introduce yourself in canvas

  2. In Slack, post something about what interests you about abnormal psychology

  3. write a post responding to the following prompts

    what is your process for thinking clearly?

    How do you know something is true?

  4. Share your ideas about what you want to learn in the Canvas small group

You may find that using Google Docs is a very good cloud-based place to store your writing.

There are other places for you to do this. Microsoft one drive, Dropbox, I would just recommend to not simply save them on your computer in the event that some crash happens.

The idea is to be doing weekly writing about the things that we read and the prompts that I give you and then you’re going to share that information within slack and it’s going to be there short of our class repository for this information.

References

Berry, Franklin M. 1984. “An Introduction to Stephen C. Pepper’s Philosophical System via World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence.” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 22 (5): 446–48. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333873.