Questions to be explored include: How are a sense of self and place constituted in early childhood? How do adolescents navigate differing language communities and cultural values in forging their identities?
What are some of the implications for public education in this country? Students will have the opportunity to do fieldwork in school or community settings and to use conference work to bridge reading and practical experience. Learning language is a fundamental aspect of the human experience that is reproduced from generation to generation all over the world. Yet how similar are the processes of language development among people of different places and backgrounds?
This course will explore the nature of language and its relation to thinking, meaning-making, and culture. We will then consider topics such as language and gender, early literacy, second-language learning in the contexts of bilingualism, transitions from home to school, and immigration. Readings will be drawn from psychological studies and observational and ethnographic accounts. Students will be encouraged to do fieldwork in settings, including our Early Childhood Center, where they can observe and record language to investigate and document the processes we will be studying or as the basis for conference projects.
For many years, the conviction has grown upon me that civilization arises and unfolds in and as play. Many adults look back fondly on their memories of childhood play and the rich imaginary worlds created.
Yet, play in our current sociopolitical climate is threatened by the many demands of our over-regimented lives and standardized goals of education. Sleep deprivation and disordered sleep can have a catastrophic impact on health and well-being. Supporting sleep health can have profound impact on productivity, cognitive functioning, mood, and creative process. This mini-lecture will provide a basic overview of current sleep science, including: the two-process model of sleep-wake regulation; functions of the sleep phase; developmental sleep patterns; dreams and dreaming including lucid dreaming ; primary sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and narcolepsy ; and the impact of anxiety, depression, and substance use including caffeine and alcohol on sleep.
We will further explore topics such as sleep routine; sleep environment; racial, socioeconomic, and gender inequities in sleep access; sleep in the digital age such as the impact of blue-light on circadian rhythms and the influence of video games on dreaming ; and the impact of the COVID pandemic on sleep. Historical, developmental, neuropsychological, physiological, and cross-cultural perspectives on sleep and well-being will be considered.
This course is a multidisciplinary overview of addiction. Although the primary focus of the course is substance-related addictions and use, the emerging literature regarding nonsubstance addictive behaviors food, gambling, internet, gaming will also be discussed.
Explanations for addiction—spiritual, emotional, biological—have spanned the ages and remain controversial today. This course will explore the study of addiction from its historical roots to contemporary theory. This course presents a framework for understanding models of substance use and addiction, including neuropsychological advances, with a critical review of the evidence and controversies regarding each.
Students will be asked to think critically and constructively about the topic, eschewing dogma of any one approach to the treatment and understanding of substance abuse. Readings will include literature from psychology and medicine to the arts, ethics, and the press. Adequate time will be spent introducing basic social and brain science as it pertains to later, more advanced examinations of exciting neurological research.
This one-semester course will focus on what psychology can tell us about how we learn and, in turn, what those findings tell us about how to teach.
Over the course of the class, you will learn how to read primary-source research papers and will exercise that knowledge on seminal research spanning the history of educational psychology from to today. By the end of the course, you will be proficient in many theories of learning and instruction, including cognitive load theory, multimedia learning theory, and theories of motivation in learning. Other discussion topics will include but are not limited to : How do children of all ages learn reading, writing, mathematics, and science?
How does learning differ by age and by topic? Are learners passive vesicles or active constructors of knowledge? What teaching methods do we know to be effective? Is there consensus among researchers about what is and is not effective? What are the barriers to incorporating evidence-based best practices into real classrooms?
While the readings each week will be seminal papers in the field, I invite discussions to be critical of these sources, to evaluate how generalizable or actionable the findings are, to compare how research recommendations differ from your own experience in your K education, and to question whether the research methods used capture the complexity of the experience of learning.
By the end of the course, you should have a greater appreciation for the Sarah Lawrence system of learning and instruction from a pedagogical point of view. This is an open-level course and should be equally interesting whether this is your first psychology class or whether you plan to pursue graduate school in this field.
Some of the most interesting and most important pieces of knowledge that a child will ever learn are not taught in school. This course will explore the social world of the child from birth through adolescence, focusing upon three main areas: parent-child relations, gender-role development, and moral development. Within the topic of sex-role development, we will read about the role of powerful socialization forces, including the mass media, and the socialization pressures that children place upon themselves and each other.
Within moral development, we will study the growth of moral emotions such as empathy, shame, and guilt, along with the role of gender and culture in shaping our sense of right and wrong. Conference work may include field placement at the Early Childhood Center or other venues, as interactions with real children will be encouraged.
In this seminar, we will explore child and adolescent development through a cross-cultural lens. Focusing on case studies from diverse communities around the world, we will look at the influence of cultural processes on how children learn, play, and grow.
Our core readings will analyze psychological processes related to attachment and parenting, cognition and perception, social and emotional development, language acquisition, and moral development. We will ask questions like the following: Why are children in Sri Lanka fed by hand by their mothers until middle childhood, and how does that shape their relations to others through the life course? How does an Inuit toddler come to learn moral lessons through scripted play with adults, and how does such learning prepare them to navigate a challenging social and geographic environment?
How does parental discipline shape the expression of emotion for children in Morocco? How does a unique family role influence the formation of identity for Latinx youth in the United States? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, our course material will draw from developmental psychology, human development, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology and will include peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and films that address core issues in a range of geographic and sociocultural contexts.
Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course and may opt to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center. Topics to be addressed include: play in the time of COVID, play aggression and trauma, and access to play as a social-justice issue. Students will read critical works in the psychology of play and recent cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research. There will be discussions, documentaries, and class presentations.
Why do we hold on to certain things and not others? Why do some objects have the power to evoke personal memories, while others leave us cold?
Working together, students in this course will create a bibliography of relevant texts on the topic of objects and memory, produce an oral history of an object with a partner at Wartburg, and contribute to the infrastructure of the larger project. While developing the project, we will read a selection of literary and theoretical works by Roland Barthes, Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, and others to understand the role of objects in preserving, accessing, and sharing memories. We will meet once a week to discuss course readings, connect with seniors and staff, and develop the multimedia project.
The location of our meetings will alternate between our classroom on campus and meetings at Wartburg in Mount Vernon. This class will include a community-based component working with an adult care community at Wartburg. Over the past several years, digital spaces—such as social media, messaging apps, dating apps, and online communities—have transformed the ways in which we experience ourselves and each other. As the COVID pandemic sent much of daily life online, this process was accelerated and amplified—providing the benefits of connection for some, challenges for others, and highlighting disparities in access for many.
This semester, we will discuss this impact and process the path forward through emerging research and relevant observations. This seminar will consider how various digital platforms e. Classes will be both discussion-based and experiential, with opportunities for observation and in-class activities related to weekly topics. Class reading will include psychological perspectives on social media and video games; gender, sexuality, and race in the digital age; developmental, neuropsychological, and clinical psychology and related fields.
Reading assignments will include both academic literature and relevant popular media. Supplemental material will include films, TedTalks, and podcasts.
If you are interested in a potential ECC placement, you will need to contact the ECC Director, Lorayne Carbon, as soon as you are registered for this class and prior to classes beginning. If you are able to secure an ECC fieldwork placement, please note that this will be a semester-long commitment. You will be expected to attend your scheduled ECC placement for four hours each week, work closely with your classroom teacher, and actively engage in your role as a classroom assistant.
Why are movies so compelling to us? When you think about it, it is odd to spend so much time sitting still in a chair, in the dark, staring at a flat screen and watching flickering light, without the possibility of interacting with the depicted characters or affecting their actions in any way. Philosophers posit that movies tap into our dream mechanisms. In this perceptual psychology course, our focus will be on how study of fundamental faculties of mind and body—perception, attention, emotion, and memory—can inform our experience of viewing and, perhaps, making movies.
Switching point of view, we will also investigate how study of film can advance our understanding of the workings of perception, attention, emotion, and memory. We will watch some films together and discuss examples from many others that you select and present to the seminar group. This is a good course for people who are interested in interdisciplinary work that integrates artistic and scientific approaches to the material at hand.
This community partnership course will focus on the health of humans living within physical, social, and psychological urban spaces. We will examine theoretical perspectives in the psychology of health, health cognition, illness prevention, stress, and coping with illness; and we will highlight research, methods, and applied issues. This class is appropriate for those interested in a variety of health careers or anyone interested in city life.
We will work with local agencies to promote health-adaptive, person-environment interactions within our community.
With a growing awareness of health disparities and inequity in food access, researchers and policymakers are rethinking the role of the environment in shaping our diets and health. This course takes a collaborative approach to investigating some of the key issues guiding this area of research and action. Students will critically review literature on food environments, food access, and health inequities and explore how modes of food production and distribution shape patterns of food availability and consumption in cities.
Students will use photography and video to examine foods available in the neighborhoods where they live, review news articles and media related to the course themes, and reflect on the ways that their own eating habits are influenced by the social and material settings of their day-to-day lives. Happiness is more than a feeling; rather, it is a state of well-being that should ideally last a lifetime. We all want happy lives filled with meaning and satisfaction.
Yet, for many of us, happiness can be hard to obtain with regularity or to sustain over a long period of time. Why is that? We can look to years of evidence from the fields of psychology and neuroscience, which tell us that, on average, we are mentally unprepared to: 1 predict what will make us happy, and 2 engage in behaviors that are known to make us happier. Like exercising to improve physical health, it takes sustained cognitive effort to overcome those tendencies in order to improve our mental health.
This course will cover the psychological and brain-based factors for why happiness feels so fleeting and what we can do to build better and more productive habits that have been shown to lead to longer-term maintenance of a positive mood and well-being.
Students will read foundational work in the field of positive psychology by Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Edward Diener, Daniel Kahneman, and others. Through weekly, small-group conferences, students will apply evidence-based practices, such as bringing order and organization to their daily lives, expressing gratitude, and building social bonds i. By the end of this course, students will have gained the ability to sift through the ever-booming literature on positive psychology and neuroscience to identify the practices that work best for them, as well as an appreciation for the notion that deriving and sustaining happiness and well-being requires intentional practice and maintenance.
The pandemic has widened already existing disparities in access to therapeutic services and supports. Therapy, schools, and work largely went virtual yet, unequally.
Systematic oppression was on full display, with an outpouring of public action and unrest. The death toll mounted and, with it, many were personally affected by the grief that ensued. Many of us have been glued to our screens as much of this tragedy has unfolded, with journalists, bloggers, and therapists writing poignantly about this last year of challenge, loss, and grief.
This course will explore the research in psychology regarding the above issues and questions. As advances to , academics and clinicians alike are starting to investigate and publish regarding these concerns, with the tools of research beyond individual observation. Students in this course will undertake an in-depth exploration of this research as it is unfolding. This course asks how contemporary immigration shapes individual and collective identity across the life course.
We will analyze how the experience of immigration is affected by the particular intersections of racial, ethnic, class, gender, generational, and other boundaries that immigrants cross. For example, how do 1. In our exploration of identity, we will attend to the ways in which immigrants are left out of national narratives, as well as the ways in which people who move across borders draw on cultural resources to create spaces and practices of connection, protection, and continuity despite the disruptive effects of immigration.
The creative process is paradoxical. It involves freedom and spontaneity yet requires expertise and hard work. The creative process is self-expressive yet tends to unfold most easily when the creator forgets about self. The creative process brings joy yet is fraught with fear, frustration, and even terror.
The creative process is its own reward yet depends on social support and encouragement. In this class, we look at how various thinkers conceptualize the creative process—chiefly in the arts but in other domains, as well.
We see how various psychological theorists describe the process, its source, its motivation, its roots in a particular domain or skill, its cultural context, and its developmental history in the life of the individual.
Different theorists emphasize different aspects of the process. To concretize theoretical approaches, we look at how various ideas can contribute to understanding specific creative people and their work. In particular, we will consider works written by or about Picasso, Woolf, Welty, Darwin, and some contemporary artists and writers.
Though creativity is most frequently explored in individuals, we also consider group improvisation in music and theatre. Some past conference projects have involved interviewing people engaged in creative work. Others consisted of library studies centering on the life and work of a particular creative person.
Some students chose to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center and focus on an aspect of creative activity in young children. Psychological trauma has been described as unspeakable—so cognitively disorganizing and intense that it is difficult to put the experience and the emotions it evokes into words.
Yet, the language that survivors use to describe their traumas provides insight into the impact of trauma and the process of recovery. This course will begin with an overview of theories of trauma, resilience, and post-traumatic growth, as well as an introduction to the study of trauma narratives and how language reflects emotional and cognitive functioning. We will then explore the cognitive, emotional, and biological impact of undergoing a trauma and how those changes are reflected in the language that trauma survivors use as they speak and write about their experiences.
We will consider works by experts on trauma and language, including Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and James Pennebaker, as well as current research in the field of trauma and trauma narratives.
Through these readings, we will address topics such as what makes an experience traumatic, how representations of trauma in popular culture color our perceptions of trauma and recovery, the role of resilience and growth following a trauma, and what we can learn from attending to the content and structure of language. This course will be of interest to students who are curious about how the words that we use reflect our cognitive and emotional functioning—and especially for students interested in pursuing topics such as these at an advanced or graduate level.
What kind of work is care work? Is it a form of labor? Of love? Is caretaking a social or individual responsibility? And who pays for it? This course questions the role of caretaking in modern societies through a range of literary and sociological texts. We begin with the premise that caretaking is both fundamental to a functioning society and also grossly devalued.
This devaluation is marked by the poor pay associated with caretaking professions, as well as the gendering and racializing of caretaking responsibilities. We will discuss terms, like self-care and prenatal care, that have become commonplace but that we often encounter as marketing concepts that have been stripped of their origins. This course aims to situate the concept of caring into historical, political, and aesthetic contexts.
Reading work by Audre Lorde, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Silvia Federici, and others, students are encouraged to imagine the future of care work in a changing society. This is a five-credit seminar that includes a community-based component working with an adult care community at Wartburg Nursing Home in Mount Vernon.
As part of the course, you will partner with a senior at Wartburg to complete an oral history, podcast, and catalogue entry for a digital exhibition. Freud, Erikson, Bowlby, and Stern provide differing perspectives on emotional development. Skinner, Bandura, Piaget, and Vygotsky present various approaches to the problems of learning and cognition. Chess and her colleagues take up the issues of temperament and its interaction with experience.
Chomsky and others deal with the development of language. We will read the theorists closely for their answers but also for their questions, asking which aspects of childhood each theory throws into focus.
We will also examine some systematic studies that developmental psychologists have carried out to confirm, test, and critique various theories: studies of mother-infant relationships, the development of cognition and language, and the emergence of intersubjectivity.
In several of these domains, studies done in cultures other than our own cast light on the question of universality versus cultural specificity in development. Direct observation is an important complement to theoretical readings. All students will do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center or find some other opportunity for observing and interacting with children.
As part of the seminar, we will at times draw on student observations to support or critique theoretical concepts. The fieldwork will also provide the basis for developing conference work.
Ideally, conference projects combine the interests of the student, some library reading, and some aspect of fieldwork observation. In this course, we will read articles, listen to podcasts, and discuss a variety of issues related to access and equity in education. What do we mean by access? What do we mean by equity? What are some of the policies and practices related to access and equity in education? What are the challenges and opportunities related to schooling and education?
We will learn from one another, as well as from invited guests, through assigned readings and seminar discussions. Class participants will be a combination of Sarah Lawrence students and high-school juniors and seniors from the surrounding communities of Yonkers, Bronxville, and Mt.
How is research conducted with young people? What are the ethical dilemmas when working with children, adolescents, and young adults? Instead of focusing on traditional research methods on subjects, this course will explore the possibilities of conducting research with , or alongside, young people.
This is an interdisciplinary course, and our readings will be pulled from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, history, anthropology, education, criminal justice, and critical childhood studies. First, we will examine the sociohistorical context of children, adolescents, and youth.
Next, we will investigate the rights of young people and the policies that designate them as protected populations. This course will survey a number of different research methods with youth participants, including but not limited to interviews, mapping, narrative analysis, youth participatory action research, and visual and performative research. We will apply a critical eye to a number of case studies of young people dismantling systemic oppression and working toward racial, immigration, and environmental justice.
Students will develop their own conference project, focusing on how to conduct research with young people. Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. Psychologists and neuroscientists have long been interested in measuring and explaining the phenomena of visual perception. Using an embodied, process-oriented approach to learning, the program:. This combined plan program allows students to earn two bachelor degrees in five years: a Bachelor of Arts in the liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence and a Bachelor of Science from Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Learn more about the program. The small classes and personalized attention made me feel valid, important, and intelligent, which was not always the case in my history with school. And the graduate curriculum was rich with philosophy, theory, examples, and applied experience. Quick Links.
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