What I really teach

After nearly 30 years of teaching at a university, I have come to understand that what I’m really teaching students is how to be prepared for life. Not teaching psychology, not teaching certain sub-aspects of psychology, not teaching particular facts, but skills for life. I am not just teaching the specifics of the discipline, though those are of use, but other lessons: that hard work is necessary; things don’t always go as planned, but that sometimes can be a good thing; and – most importantly – skills that they will use for their whole lives.  

I have been thinking about this issue for the past few years, during which I wrote an essay about my career pathway for the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Human-Animal Interaction Section. Writing that piece led me to consider how much things have changed for me throughout my career, but the basic skills which I have acquired as a researcher are always being used. I have gone from using behavioural analyses to register drug effects and doing “lab bench” neurochemistry, to strictly behavioural work investigating spatial memory, to looking at beneficial effects of sport and exercise participation and the use of equine interaction in psychotherapy. Through all these career changes, my basic skills were of use. The abilities came to be applied in different ways, specific aspects of how things were done might vary, but research was still being done. 

A scientist whom I heard being interviewed on CBC Radio once said that what is important in life are not what they called “18-month skills”, but rather “18-year skills” (I think that time frame of 18 years was only chosen to be alliterative with 18 months; true skills have life-long application!). The argument being made was that it is easy to get caught up in learning the skills that seem useful right now – to think that knowing a certain computer program, for example, or some currently fashionable way of doing things, is what needs to be taught and learnt. These things come and go, however. As a student, I had on my CV that I could use the .ed and .em word processing computer languages, used with mainframe computers. I also learnt to do the type of computer programming which at that time was required to perform statistical analyses. Who uses those things today? Word processing is automatic, we just open Word and type; statistical analyses are run though “plug and play” systems such as SPSS. So, the 18-month skills die out and are forgotten, while the 18-year skills, such as diligence, critical thinking and use of the scientific method, last. 

Some years ago, I was assigned to teach a basic introduction to research methodology course for second-year undergraduate students. At the end of the first, introductory, lecture I would tell the students about what the course would do for them. The students are often not particularly interested in this required course, and even see it as an imposition, something more to be endured than experienced. But research is important, it underlies all that we do in psychology, it is how we know what we know. For the first few years of teaching the course I noted this aspect of the utility of research, and also explained how the course prepared students to understand the content of the courses they would subsequently take in psychology. One year, I suddenly realized how much more the understanding of the bases of research was teaching the students. The catalyst for this realization came from reading the British science magazine NewScientist. For a time, the magazine had a series of interviews with individual scientists about their work, which always ended with the joking question “what use will your skills be after the apocalypse?”. Reading this question, at first I would think my research skills would have little application, it would be my extra–curricular activities of karate and horse riding that would be what would be of use in a post-apocalyptic future. One day, however, I had an epiphany – rather than not being helpful, in fact all of my research skills would be of use! I realized that I could then apply that concept of “skills for life” to the courses I taught. Now, at the end of that first lecture in the research methods course I still finish with the “basic applications of research” information, but then expand to consider the wider application to life, such as problem solving, clear thinking, weighing options/probabilities, etc., and try to get the students to think about this for themselves.  

One example which I use to generate such thinking is what if the apocalypse did happen, and we have to move North for safety? What if you don’t have a compass, how would you work this out? Calmly thinking one’s way through this situation and applying knowledge such as “the sun rises in the East”, or “I know that Richmond Street goes North” would lead to answers. If one didn’t know that the sun rose in the east, but the street went North, one might start walking, and observe that each day the sun rose on one’s right. When the road ran out, those empirical observations could be used to reason that the sun rises in the East. The journey north could continue, now using the direction of the sun as a guide. By taking evidence, reasoning, and then using the result of that reasoning, the problem can be solved. The APA has published a poster related to this idea, titled “The skillful psychology student: Prepared for success in the 21st century workplace” (Naufel et al., 2018), where it is noted that the study of psychology “provides skills that employers value”, such as critical thinking, creativity, adaptability and self-regulation. Those skills are the life-long skills which our students learn as they go through our courses. As the great karate practitioner Master Gichin Funakoshi is believed to have said: “A martial artist is an artist of life” (Funakoshi, 1988, ). In other words, all the things one learns in karate training – respect, honour, self-control, etc. – are important virtues in everyday life. It is the same for our university students, whatever the discipline being taught. In any course those important, underlying skills which are learnt are skills to be applied throughout one’s life. 

As the great British scientist Rosalind Franklin wrote, “Science and everyday life cannot, and should not, be separated.” (letter to Ellis Franklin, 1940; as cited in U.S. National Library of Medicine). What I teach my students is science, but what they learn, and what I really teach, are skills to be successful in life.