Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Urban Education

Advisor

Anna Stetsenko

Committee Members

Anna Stetsenko

Michelle Fine

Debbie Sonu

Subject Categories

Developmental Psychology | Higher Education | Psychology | Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Keywords

teaching-learning, psychology, community college, pedagogy, developmental psychology, transformation

Abstract

This dissertation reimagines a different relationality to teaching-learning psychology in the community college classroom through a series of three separate articles. Each article draws on quasi-ethnographic, autoethnographic, and group discussions elements to wonder about the types of theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical dimensions that might make psychology courses more attuned and accountable to younger generations and the end of the world as we know it. The first article explores the metaphysical inseparability, interdependence, and co-constitution of teaching-learning, theory-making, and collective world-making in the psychology community college classroom as an invitation to the end of psychology as we know it. I argue that community college teaching-learning in relation to the end of the world as we know it provides co-generative practices to directly and indirectly co-revise, co-update, and co-transform the pedagogy of psychology, psychological theories, and the curriculum to be accountable to present world configurations with students. The second article explores an alternative relationality to (mis)understandings drawing on my experience of teaching-learning psychology in the community college classroom. Rather than falling into the dichotomies of growing from vs. punishing/rewarding mistakes, I argue that students’ (mis)understandings in the psychology classroom can produce cogenerations that expand and problematize psychological concepts and theories. The third article proposes a different exploratory relationality to research methods to move beyond the constraints of traditional research patterns and situates teaching-learning-researching as an opening space to transmute research and pedagogy by collectively cogenerating knowledge with students in the psychology classroom. Together, all three articles demonstrate how the community college classroom has the potential to transmute the teaching-learning of general and developmental psychology and their theories.

This work is embargoed and will be available for download on Sunday, June 01, 2025

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