The Teaching of Psychology

Essays in Honor of Wilbert J. McKeachie and Charles L. Brewer

Stephen F. Davis, William Buskist

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780805839548
• eBook ISBN: 9781135644154
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Teaching of Psychology is centered around the masterful work of two champions of the teaching of psychology, Wilbert J. McKeachie and Charles L. Brewer, in order to recognize their seminal contributions to the teaching of the discipline. The book's main goal is to provide comprehensive coverage and analysis of the basic philosophies, current issues, and the basic skills related to effective teaching in psychology. It transcends the typical "nuts and bolts" type books and includes such topics as teaching at small colleges versus a major university, teaching and course portfolios, the scholarship of teaching, what to expect early in a teaching career, and lifelong learning.

The Teaching of Psychology also features:

• Biographies of Bill McKeachie and Charles L. Brewer
• Fourteen chapters written by leading authorities in the teaching of psychology, which provide overviews of the latest psychological research and theories in effective college and university teaching. These chapters cover lecturing, classroom presence, using humor in teaching, pedagogy, advising, teaching critical thinking, writing, and technology, and training graduate students to teach
• Useful advice to new teachers and seasoned veterans, including qualities of master teachers, understanding the many facets of working within the academy, and teaching with technology
• Insights into teaching specific courses within the psychology curriculum, including the history of psychology, biological psychology, statistics and research methods, learning, social psychology, personality, psychology of women, cross-cultural psychology, industrial/organizational psychology, psychology of religion, and environmental psychology
• A closing section containing Bill McKeachie's and Charles L. Brewer's perspectives into the teaching of psychology and its history, highlights, and future.

This book is intended for academic psychologists who teach and/or train graduate assistants to teach at the college and university level. All royalities from this book will be donated to the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (Division 2 of the American Psychological Association), which each year sponsors many activities across the country to promote the teaching of psychology.

V

Teaching About Psychology’s Domains

27

Teaching the History of Psychology

C. James Goodwin

Wheeling Jesuit University

Teaching the History of Psychology course is both a great joy and an enormous challenge. It is always a pleasure to teach a course about a topic one loves, of course, but the history course presents the instructor with problems not found in other courses. For one thing, teachers of the history course seldom have been trained as historians of psychology, whereas courses in social psychology, for example, are often taught by professional social psychologists. Consequently, the level of preparation can be daunting for the person asked to teach history, and the feeling of being out of one’s depth when teaching the course can be persistent. A second difficulty is student resistance. Many students come into the course having survived Western Civ or other history courses that seemed, to them at least, to involve little more than memorizing names and dates, organizing lists of the causes of war X, and placing the proper names of countries on blank maps. Then they come across the name of psychology’s most prominent historian (you know who) and they just roll their eyes and prepare for what they assume will be a long and “boring” semester.

In a history course taught well, however, students end the semester in a much different frame of mind. They understand the intellectual and cultural foundations of the discipline they have chosen to study, they come to know some truly fascinating individuals, they develop a deeper understanding of how historians think, they learn to appreciate the problems associated with presentist thinking, and they understand and appreciate the interconnectedness among the various fragments of knowledge they have accumulated in their other psychology courses. This last point is especially important, I believe, because it gives students an important insight into the truth of a simple yet elegant phrase that I have heard Charles Brewer say (as only he can say it) on numerous occasions: “Everything (pause) is connected (pause) to everything else (pause and slowly scan the room).”

As a scholarly discipline, the history of psychology has changed considerably in the last 30 years. One of the goals of this chapter is to examine how the field has evolved and how these changes affect the way we teach the history course. My second goal is to describe some of the resources about psychology’s history available to instructors. I close the chapter with an argument that we should make psychology’s history an integral part of every psychology course, even the introductory course.

HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY AS A SCHOLARLY DISCIPLINE AND THE IMPACT ON TEACHING

In 1960, a brief article appeared in American Psychologist with the title “The History of Psychology: A Neglected Area” (Watson, 1960). Its author was Robert Watson, a clinical psychologist who became passionate about psychology’s history late in his career. As is evident from the title, the article was a call to arms, a “plea for greater attention on the part of psychologists to their history” (Watson, 1960, p. 255). Over the next few years, Watson became the leader of a small but vigorous group of like-minded psychologists, the eventual result being a series of actions that professionalized history as a legitimate specialty within academic psychology (Hilgard, 1982). These events, all in 1965, included the creation of (a) a formal division within the American Psychological Association (APA Division 26); (b) an archive to collect and organize the raw materials of psychology’s history, founded at the University of Akron by two other clinicians in love with history, John Popplestone and the late Marion White McPherson; and (c) a new journal, the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. In the late 1960s, Watson was also instrumental in the creation of the first doctoral program in the history of psychology (at the University of New Hampshire) and the formation of a second organization devoted to the history of psychology and the social sciences—the Cheiron Society.

It is not that psychologists completely ignored their history prior to Watson’s activism. Courses in “history and systems of psychology” were a regular part of the psychology curriculum in Watson’s time. A study conducted in the early 1960s, for instance, found that of 150 schools responding to a survey, 130 offered a course to undergraduates and/or graduate students in the history of psychology, and in most cases it was required (Nance, 1962). The Nance survey also revealed that 75% of those schools with history courses used the same textbook—E. G. Boring’s A History of Experimental Psychology (1929, 1950). This book is appropriately recognized as one of the great books in the history of American psychology, but it also presented a portrait of psychology’s history that reflected a bias that is evident from its title. Specifically, it focused on the development of psychology as an experimental laboratory science that evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; had parental origins in philosophy, physiology, and Darwinian biology; and developed its identity from the conflicts among advocates of various schools of psychology (e.g., structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism).

Competing texts (e.g., Chaplin & Krawiec, 1960) were clearly influenced by Boring’s work, as were texts that began to appear in the late 1960s (e.g., Schultz, 1969). Thus, a generation of psychologists learned about the history of psychology from E. G. Boring, either directly or indirectly. Students were taught a story about psychology’s history that attained quasi-mythological status—the story went roughly as follows.

Philosophers asked age-old questions about human behavior, but they never bothered to subject their ideas to the purity of scientific test. Certain more enlightened 19th-century physiologists/philosophers came along (e.g., Fechner, Wundt) and corrected this egregious oversight, thereby creating psychology as a new discipline and bringing to it the bright light of scientific methodology. Wundt created the first laboratory in 1879 and founded a school of psychology called structuralism, the goal of which was to break consciousness into its elements using a method called introspection. Wundt’s admiring protégé Titchener carried the master’s system to the United States, but the rugged individualist do-it-their-own-way Americans had their own ideas, so they created functionalism and then behaviorism and launched an assault on structuralism, which quickly withered and died. The behaviorists were the most vigorous opponents; the functionalists were a little wishy-washy. Meanwhile in Germany, gestalt psychology came along and took up the offensive against structuralism on its home turf. It then emigrated to America, discovered that structuralism was on its last legs, looked around for a new target, and started attacking behaviorism. Outside of academia and by implication of less importance, Freud revolutionized the field of abnormal psychology and therapy.

Students in the traditional history of psychology course then learned about the attributes of the competing schools of psychology, “all with something to offer,” except perhaps structuralism, tainted by the subjective (i.e., false and evil) method of introspection. Modern psychology was a culmination of the march of progress from the darkness of philosophical speculation, through the sectarian battles of the schools, to the modern era, where we are now much closer to the truth about human behavior (having corrected the errors of the past).

In the 1970s, things began to change gradually, and the mythology of psychology’s history (i.e., virtually everything about the story you just read) began to be questioned. Spurred by Robert Watson and a renewed interest in the history of psychology as a scholarly discipline, articles began to appear that subjected the traditional history of psychology to intense scrutiny. For example, several articles raised serious questions about the typical portrayal of Wundt (e.g., Blumenthal, 1975; Leahey, 1979). It appeared that hewas not a structuralist after all, that he was much more interested in synthesis than analysis, that his version of introspection (and his overall outlook) was very different from Titchener’s (Danziger, 1980), and that he was perhaps more interested in higher level cognitive processes (e.g., language) and cross-cultural psychology than basic sensory phenomena. Historians also began to examine the life and work of E. G. Boring more closely, discovering that his view of history was influenced by his own training (he was a student of Titchener’s) and by political and institutional considerations. For example, it appeared that his emphasis on the centrality of experimental psychology was motivated at least partly by his concern about the rising tide of applied psychology that occurred after World War I and by his own desire to produce an intellectual justification for his goal of creating a separate laboratory-based department of psychology at Harvard (O’Donnell, 1979).

Textbooks published during the 1980s began to reflect the new scholarship in the history of psychology. For instance, Duane Schultz’s readable and popular history text kept appearing in new editions, each one reflecting changes resulting from the scholarly efforts of historians. A comparison of content in the third edition (Schultz, 1981) and fourth edition (Schultz & Schultz, 1987) provides a useful illustration of how these alterations began to occur, especially in the portrayal of Wundt. In Schultz’s third edition, Chapter 4 covers Wundt and is called “The New Psychology: Structuralism and its Early Opponents” (p. 59). The chapter includes statements like these:

… we shall see that Titchener’s position was similar to that of Wundt. (p. 59)

Wundt mapped out the field of structural psychology. (p. 59)

Wundt gave the larger share of his attention to the opposite of creative synthesis, to the analysis of mind, the reduction of conscious experience to its elementary component parts. (p. 68)

In the fourth edition, Schultz incorporated much of the new scholarship and the text changed its depiction of Wundt considerably. All of the prior statements disappeared, for instance, and the Wundt chapter was retitled “The New Psychology.” The chapter even began with an explicit description of how new research had questioned the traditional portrayal of Wundt’s ideas. Structuralism did not appear until the following chapter, when it was used as the appropriate title of the chapter on Titchener’s work. The fourth edition (Schultz & Schultz, 1987) contained sentences like these:

… generations of students have been offered a portrait of Wundtian psychology that may be more myth than fact, more legend than truth. For 100 years after the event, texts in the history of psychology, including previous editions of this one, have been compounding and reinforcing the error. (p. 59)

E. B. Titchener altered Wundt’s system dramatically while claiming to be a loyal follower. He offered his own approach, which he called structuralism, as representing the form of psychology espoused by Wundt. Yet the two systems were radically different, and the label “structuralism” cannot be applied to Wundt’s work, only to Titchener’s. (p. 85)

As an aside, showing students these comparisons can be a good antidote to the typical student attitude that the story has been written in stone once a historical account has been written. Rather, comparing different editions should make it clear that histories always have to be rewritten in the light of new information and new ways of looking at events.

Revised depictions of Wundt were not the only changes that occurred in history texts. As mentioned earlier, historians digging into the life and work of E. G. Boring began discovering the biases underlying the writing of his classic texts. In particular, Boring tended to overlook or downplay the importance of applied psychology. Yet historians were discovering that psychologists, at least in America, had always been interested in how their new science could be used for improving the human condition (O’Donnell, 1985). Even before World War I, psychologists were interested in mental testing, educational psychology, child study, industrial psychology, and even forensic psychology. One clear indication of textbook recognition of the rediscovered importance of applied psychology occurred in another popular history text by David Hothersall (1984). Whereas it had been customary in other texts to give Titchener and structuralism a separate chapter, Hothersall wrote a chapter that gave equal billing to Titchener and Hugo Münsterberg, one of psychology’s pioneers in applied psychology. Hothersall also included a separate chapter on the applied topic of intelligence testing. More recent texts (e.g., Fancher, 1996; Goodwin, 1999; Leahey, 2001; Viney & King, 1998) routinely devote considerable space to applied psychology.

By the mid-1980s, then, scholarly work in psychology’s history began to be reflected in history texts. The extent to which revised texts affected the manner in which psychology’s history was taught remained unclear, however. What was needed was an explicit call for teachers of the history course to learn the new scholarship and to incorporate it into their teaching. The call arrived in the form of a G. Stanley Hall lecture delivered at the APA’s annual meeting in Atlanta in 1988 by Laurel Furumoto, one of psychology’s most distinguished historians.

EXCHANGING “OLD” FOR “NEW” HISTORY

Furumoto’s Hall lecture appeared in print the following year, carrying the title, “The New History of Psychology” (Furumoto, 1989). If there is one article that every teacher of the history course should read, this is the one. In it Furumoto drew a sharp contrast between what she referred to as “old” history and “new” history. She described how scholarship in the history of psychology had been changing in the prior 20 years, in effect catching up with the efforts of trained historians. Yet her primary message was that it was time for those teaching the history course to both learn about the new scholarship and incorporate it into how they taught the course. According to Furumoto, old history could be described as (a) internal, (b) personalistic, (c) ceremonial and celebratory, and (d) presentist. New history, by contrast, she described as (a) external, (b) contextual, (c) critical, and (d) historicist. Let us consider each of these approaches in more detail.

Old History

By describing old history as internal, Furumoto (1989) meant that it was an approach to psychology’s history that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• About the Editors
• I: Portraits of Excellence
• II: Essential Qualities and Skills of Effective Teachers
• III: Teaching within the Context of Modern Academic Life
• IV: Teaching with Technology
• V: Teaching about Psychology’s Domains
• VI: The Final Word
• Author Index
• Subject Index