COURSE DESIGN
I have designed a course on the Sequelae of Trauma that I plan to teach to Cornell University upper level undergraduate students within the next two years. I have chosen this topic because it is an area where I have strong expertise and clinical background. It fits well into the College of Human Ecology, Human Development curriculum, and into the Developmental Psychopathology, Social and Personality Psychology, and Group Disparities in Development concentrations of my department, as well as into the mission of my center (the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research) and my project (the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect). I believe the course content will attract psychology and human development students. I also believe the topic is important in our knowledge of daily life and society (there have been many recent traumatic events in the news), and want to integrate theory with life. Finally, the topic is related to some of my current research, allowing me to integrate teaching with research in my own career.
I will devote one course class to practicing active listening skills. These are “beginner” counseling skills that are helpful to all people in their personal and professional lives. I think it is important to know how to listen (without shock or judgment) when a person is conveying something serious – like a trauma history.
In addition to learning goals in the content area, a social science undergraduate education should prepare a person to: use academic and library resources, choose and evaluate sources (e.g. impact factor of journals), critically evaluate empirical articles, use citation management software, write to synthesize literature and present coherent individual ideas, and present their work. I have included all of these skills in my course. Discussing research in a small group setting is a good way to work toward these goals.
I will devote one course class to practicing active listening skills. These are “beginner” counseling skills that are helpful to all people in their personal and professional lives. I think it is important to know how to listen (without shock or judgment) when a person is conveying something serious – like a trauma history.
In addition to learning goals in the content area, a social science undergraduate education should prepare a person to: use academic and library resources, choose and evaluate sources (e.g. impact factor of journals), critically evaluate empirical articles, use citation management software, write to synthesize literature and present coherent individual ideas, and present their work. I have included all of these skills in my course. Discussing research in a small group setting is a good way to work toward these goals.
FUTURE COURSE
An undergraduate social science education should also prepare a person to: evaluate research methods, evaluate statistical models, conduct statistical analyses, and design and conduct original research. These are beyond the scope of the Sequelae of Trauma course, but I am designing a course that integrates research methods into the study of Psychological Responses to Media (2014, forthcoming).