Teaching

I am a lot of things, but most of the time, I think I identify best as a teacher. This has been a blessing in my life and in many ways salvation too. At present, and since 2009, I work as a Senior Lecturer at the Psychology Department of the University of Groningen.

Since then, I have had the privilege to work with thousands of students, mainly majoring in Psychology, but also, in some courses, from the entire spectrum of university degrees.

My teaching philosophy has been inspired by the work of many people, such as Maxine Greene, John Dewey, Paulo Freire, bell hooks. The greatest influences, however, have been the teachers I have had through my life and, most importantly, the students that I work with every day. They are my main compass.

On this page, you can navigate to the following sections:

1. The courses I teach (in two major themes)
2. Information about the Degrees of Freedom podcast (on learning and teaching)
3. Information about the Turning the Page on Pedagogy book club

The second theme in my teaching relates to research methodology, ethics, reproducibility, and adjacent topics, such as research integrity, open science, publication ethics, epistemology, science communication, and sundry. In this category, you’ll find me teaching the following courses:

• There is no getting around the fact that most methods courses have horrible names (with notable exceptions); such is the case for the course Research Instruments Critically Considered, which I teach in the Minor Psychology in Society. Behind this name, one can find a course that aims to help students be better-informed citizens and consumers of (psychological) science news in their daily lives. In a quick seven weeks, we cover basics of epistemology, psychology’s quest (desire?) to be a science, operationalisations of psychological constructs (and their pitfalls), research designs and their limitations, some basic statistical concepts, and spend a lot of time looking at examples and analysing them.
• I don’t know how this ever happened, but my all-time favourite course to teach is Research Methods: Theory and Ethics (an informative, if not exciting, name). This is core course in the second-year of the Psychology Bachelor and builds on fundamentals covered in a first-year introductory course, while sitting alongside a practical course where students get hands-on experience conducting research (which I designed and used to coordinate). Throughout the course, we deal with evidence (what it is, how do we evaluate it); the various crises of confidence in the history of the social sciences (focusing on the most recent among them), their sources and solutions; replicability and reproducibility; preregistration; researcher degrees of freedom (my preferred way of thinking about p-hacking); science values, including the tension between openness and privacy; demand characteristics and experimenter bias; qualitative methodologies; epistemic justice; the concepts of causality, uncertainty, truth; and much else. I use my own version of Specifications Grading for stimulating engagement and offer much freedom so students feel empowered to choose their own path within this broad and important field.