My Struggle with the Move away from Content
Posted March 28, 2016
By Dominic Carbone
I was so excited this year to get funding to go to the 2016 NITOP Conference in St. Petersburg Florida. I had been hearing about NITOP for years from colleagues at my college. Some of the innovations that they spoke about were fascinating to me.
The most fascinating innovation represented by a small wing of the presenters, was the move away from standard course content in favor of topics of the moment of interest to students. What?!? What about content? I was a little surprised and concerned to hear about this trend. How can we have courses without content? What would we be teaching? I left for Florida with my ears perked up, ready to ask these and other questions about this new trend.
At various points during the conference, I heard mention of the trend away from course content at the start of most of the presentations I attended. I waited patiently during each presentation to hear how the presenters planned to teach a course in Social Psychology, for example, without covering such important content as “cognitive dissonance”, “social perception”, “attribution theory” and “stereotyping and prejudice”. I attended sessions regarding a variety of pedagogical innovations and during the demonstrations of implementation of said innovative techniques the presenters invariably relied on content. Yes, while each of the presentations that I attended started out with the premise that there was an overall de-emphasis on the course content, it was in fact the content that fueled the engine that allowed the techniques discussed to be practices and enacted.
Then came the plenary session.
The plenary session entitled, “Bye, Bye Intro”, was given by Douglas Bernstein. He started with the contention that “most students remember just a few facts and concepts from their undergraduate education”. Dr. Bernstein went on to promote student-directed topical discussions of current events that were related to random psychological concepts that might be found in any psychology course. This method of randomly generated course content sounded tempting at first. With students generating the content and topics how could they not be engaged and retain this knowledge for later use?
Well, my issue with this approach is that is starts with an assumption that is based anecdotally on what “most” students are assumed to remember post graduation from college. Even if this were empirically demonstrated, it focuses on the destination rather than the journey and what the journey provides. I also wondered what would happen if students were not able to generate topics relevant to content or if they might feel like I was not competent to generate topics on my own. What would an accreditation body think of such a syllabus?
Let me indulge in anecdotal accounts from the graduates that I encounter. Many of the psychology graduates of my acquaintance appreciate and use the content that they mastered in my courses in their further graduate studies, personal lives, professional lives and lives as engaged citizens. While historical dates and names might not be freely recalled, the concepts and content has provided them with a framework from which to understand the world as a psychological thinker. They have been changed for the foreseeable future in profound ways. The content becomes the fuel for the pedagogical vehicles from which we give students that experience. While I think it’s a great idea to involve students in offering examples of real world experiences that illustrate the various psychological concepts that we cover in our classes, I do think that we need to direct the content by establishing it at the start of the course.
If Dr. Bernstein is correct and “most graduates” are truly remembering little content from their undergraduate experience, should we be solving this issue be removing critical core content from higher education? Is there not a cannon of core content that students must master before they graduate and should they be allowed to graduate with a psychology degree if they failed to demonstrate mastery of this core content? Content does matter. It’s what gives definition to each discipline and begins the journey for those engaged in a particular field of study toward content expertise. This view was reinforced by the majority of the other presentations that I attended at NITOP.
I think that it is inaccurate for a small minority to say that moving away from content in our discipline specific courses is in any way innovative and improving the teaching of psychology. We may just be fooling ourselves out of a job.
Bio
Dominic J. Carbone earned his BS degree in Psychology at Fordham University, an MA degree in Developmental Psychology & Education at Columbia University, an MS in Human Development & Family Studies, and a PhD in Clinical & Developmental Psychology from Cornell University. He is a full time faculty member at Sussex College in New Jersey and at the State University of New York. He is a practicing, state licensed clinical psychologist in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
