Teaching

Olin is an engineering school, dedicated to innovative pedagogy and hands-on learning. Obviously, I am not an engineer. However, along with my colleagues in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Program, my teaching is focused on exposing Olin students to a wider range of thought. As a result, I teach small seminar courses designed to both introduce Olin students to the most exciting ideas in the field of psychology and to challenge them to learn how to approach knowledge the way scientific psychologists do. Thus, there are both content-based and epistemological objectives to my teaching at Olin. Examples of courses I have developed include "Identity from the Mind and the Brain" and "Foundations of Psychology,. I have also taught as part of an inter-disciplinary team of engineers, designers, and social scientists in one of Olin's core courses, "User-Oriented Collaborative Design." And, my colleague from Babson, Beth Wynstra, and I used a Curricular Innovation Fellowship to design and co-teach a new psychology + theater course called "Constructing and Performing the Self," which combines the psychological science of identity and the theater of solo performance.

In addition, because of Olin's close relationship with our Partner Institutions, I regularly teach a course on "Narrative Psychology" in the Psychology Department at Wellesley College.

Finally, I also co-teach a course at Harvard Medical School called "The Healing Power of Stories: Narrative Theory and Narrative Practice" with Annie Brewster of Health Story Collaborative.