Currently, I teach two undergraduate coures: PSYCO 400, the Honours Seminar; and PSYCO 104, Basic Psychological Processes. In conjunction with the former course, I am also the advisor for fourth-year honours students in our department. This page presents an overview of these courses, with more specific links to the course syllabi and related materials.
Honours Seminar
PSYCO 400 is the fourth year honours seminar, required for the B.A. (Honours) or B.Sc. (Honours) degrees in psychology. It is a three-credit course, which meets once a week for both terms. It is taken by honours students in their fourth, and final, year in the honours program. Naturally, this is a time when honours students have taken a number of advanced courses in the topics relevant to their interests; they are also heavily involved in their senior thesis research. In designing the honours seminar, my objective was to provide a forum for the discussion of psychology from a larger viewpoint--one that would cross the different subdisciplines of students in my class. I also wanted to provide some practical experience in the type of team problem solving that will likely form the working environment in their future careers. Finally, I wanted something that would be fun.To meet the first objective, I have used evolutionary psychology as a possible sythetic viewpoint and have structured our classroom discussions around Stephen Pinker's book, "How the Mind Works." Classroom discussions every other week concern specific chapters from Pinker's work.
I've had considerable help in meeting the other two objectives from the management of CJSR studios at the University of Alberta. What we have done is to set up opportunities for students to form a production team with the goal of writing, directing, and producing a radio documentary on a psychological topic of contemporary interest. Rather than writing Yet Another Term Paper, the members of my class get to explore a whole new genre of scientific communication. Check out the news report linked here to see a more extensive description of this part of the course.
Basic Psychological Processes
PSYCO 104 is our departments "Intro Psych" course. It deals with the biological subdisciplines of psychology, in contrast to the social and developmental aspects. It is also a prerequisite to all the other psychology courses that we offer.Because Psychology is a popular subject at the University of Alberta, most of our introductory classes have large enrollments and are taught in large classrooms. For the last several years, Dr. Connie Varnhagen, I, and other members of our department have explored whether the internet can help to make these large classes a little more like a seminar class, where ideas can be examined, discussed, and compared. Our solution has been realized in a special set of introductory sections, labelled as "internet-enhanced sections." I teach one of these; its description is provided in the link to the right.