Ashley: My Classes

Video

Ashley taking notes in the developmental psychology classroom; Didi against neutral background speaking to the camera; psychology professor Robert Shilkret speaking to the camera in his office; Didi walking and talking with friends by a campus lake.

Audio from video

Ashley:

“I’m a biology major. I’m taking developmental psych.”

Norma Cutts DaFoe Professor of Psychology Psychology and Education Robert Shilkret, speaking in the Introduction to Developmental Psychology course:
“Piaget’s analysis of all behavior was essentially a dialectic.”

Ashley:

“This is my second class with Professor Shilkret. The first class I took was a seminar, a first-year seminar, and it wasn’t so much about just ‘these are the theories, this is what’s out there.’ It was more of ‘these are the theories, what do you think about them? Have you seen these theories? Do you think these theories really apply to infants and children today?’ My classes focus more on the stages of development, both cognitive and physical, from birth to about childhood, early adolescence.”

Professor Shilkret:

“Ashley [Didi] is a delightful student. She’s in my second class now. She was in my first-year seminar two years ago in the fall, which is an extremely challenging class to teach because it’s a very small class and there’s a lot of discussion and a lot of writing and it’s the first college course for all these students in their first semester of their first year. So I really love teaching that group at that particular time in their lives and, in a sense, it’s an introduction to college as well as an introduction to psychology as well as an introduction to developmental psychology. But really it’s an introduction to college. What can you take away from the next four years that will be maximally beneficial to you? In Ashley’s case she’s had a lot of experience working with children. As a student athlete, she’s a swim coach also and has worked with children in summer camps and so on, and I think that motivates her interest in the developmental course as well. So for her I’m hoping that she’ll get a lot from the material in the course in terms of how to motivate students. And I like having that kind of student in this class.”

Ashley:

What I think I enjoy most about my classes is that, especially in Mount Holyoke, I always find these moments where all my classes are talking about the same thing. They always seem to connect. And that it really is enjoyable because I know that even as my major is biology, I can use any point in biology and connect it to any other study.

For more information on Ashley’s PSYCH 230: Developmental Psychology

(Links to related sites outside this tour)

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