PsychSessions™

As we enter 2022, the PsychSessions™ podcastopens in new window — formally “PsychSessions: Conversations about Teaching N’ Stuff” will be celebrating its fifth birthday. In October 2017, Garth Neufeld from Cascadia College and Eric Landrum from Boise State University launched this new podcast, having no idea what it would become (and largely not knowing what they were doing in the podcast space). The “official” description of our work:

The original PsychSessions podcast is co-hosted by Garth Neufeld from Cascadia College and Eric Landrum from Boise State University. We leverage our connections with psychology teachers from all levels (high school, community college, college, university) as well as individuals from other occupations to have meaningful conversations about what it means to be an educator. Of course, we veer away from the teaching conversation from time to time to hear about origin stories and the personal perspectives of our guests, touching on current events and topics of interest.

Our AskPsychSessions feature is hosted by Marianne Lloyd from Seton Hall University. For AskPsychSessions, listeners submit questions about teaching and learning, and Marianne interviews experts and posts short features with the question and answer together. These features are often thematically grouped, such as information about making the sudden pivot to online instruction or various aspects of improving equity, diversity, and inclusion instruction in your course.

We should mention that PsychSessions is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization, and we are primarily devoted to making high-quality professional development resources and opportunities available to teachers of psychology. To date, all episodes of PsychSessions are freely available, including the entire back catalog of more than 135 full-length interviews. Across all series, we have released over 300 recordings, and as of February 2022, we have data from our podcast host libsyn.com documenting over 120,000 unique podcast downloads.

Over the course of the last 4+ years, we’ve delivered a variety of programming using multiple methods. This would include:

• a 9-part Introduction to Psychology mini-series with tips on how to improve this course;
• a new-year’s day podfest featuring keynote addresses from teaching conferences;
• three seasons of “Garth and Sue Talk,” where Garth Neufeld and Sue Frantz discuss so many different topics related to teaching and higher education; and
• “Writing for Psychology,” a mini-series hosted by Jane Halonen and Garth Neufeld, takes a deep dive into the faculty side concerning the challenges of teaching writing and professional writing.

All of the above are available in our back catalog. In addition to our original PsychSessions long-form interviews and the long-running AskPsychSessions features, with the help and support of talented hosts and many guests, PsychSessions has launched new series (and seasons) and has plans for more.

• The series Beyond Teaching has released three seasons, and the hosts are Susan Nolan, Adeyinka Akinsulure-Smith, Asani Seawell, and Eric Landrum. They focus on discussing all the topics needed to be successful that academics and professionals were not taught in graduate school, which turns out to be a lot.
• The series On TLC (Teaching & Learning Centers) is hosted by Chris Hakala, and in his first season Chris interviewed the directors of TLCs from all across the U.S. and from different types of institutions about the challenges in serving as faculty developers.
• The series Teaching Matters has released two seasons and is hosted by Rob McEntarffer and Eric Landrum. These two educators talk about a wide range of high school and college educational topics, but they veer off-topic quite a bit too. 
• The series Hero or Disruptor is hosted by Garth Neufeld and Jane Halonen, and they are currently releasing their first season. They share fascinating discussions about the role or persona that an educator adopts, and how this self-perception influences teaching decisions.
• The new series At Work is about to launch, hosted by Janet Peters, and this podcast is all about the world in industrial/organizational psychology, and it should be extremely valuable for both faculty and students interested in the topic.

By accident, PsychSessions has become the unofficial oral historian to a generation of legendary scholars in our field. And not-by-accident, we have the perfect medium to connect with psychology teachers during pandemic times. We don’t know of another national teaching resource that offered programming related to diversity, equity, and inclusion or the pandemic switch to remote teaching (the “grand pivot”) as quickly and robustly as we were able to, interviewing many experts in a very short period of time.  While some teaching conferences were canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, we increased the number of episodes produced and our services to psychology teachers during challenging times.

We have big plans. We continue to expand our programming to meet the growing need of our primary audience — teachers of psychology. We will continue to improve our outreach, including the rollout of a new website in 2022, and we have longer-term plans for a PsychSessions-dedicated app to be freely available from the iTunes Store/Google Play. We’d love to have transcriptions of our episodes available, accompanied by educational modules, so that instructors could quickly turn podcast episodes into ready-made homework assignments with built-in learning outcomes. And, of course, a fine collection of custom-ordered swag for the hard-to-shop-for academic who already has everything.

More seriously, we’re consciously working to improve our commitment to equity and inclusion: in our podcasting content, in our show hosts, in our show guests, in all that we do. The podcast medium affords us a great deal of flexibility and freedom. We plan to leverage these characteristics and make sure that we improve our focus and our efforts to be more inclusive. Watch for these efforts, and please, offer comments, suggestions, and criticisms as needed. You can reach us via email.  

You can subscribe to the podcast/follow the podcast on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible, iHeartRadio, YouTube, LinkedIn, or the PsychSessions website.

R. Eric Landrum, PhD, is a professor and chair in the Department of Psychological Science at Boise State University, receiving his PhD in cognitive psychology from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.  He is a research generalist, broadly addressing the improvement of teaching and learning, including skills assessment, improving help-seeking behavior, advising innovations, working to understand postgraduate student success such as entering the psychology workforce, effective school applications, and more. Eric has 450+ presentations, more than 25 books/textbooks, and published 95 peer-reviewed journal articles in his career to date. He has collaborated with 325+ research assistants and taught 18,500+ students in 30 years at Boise State.  He has served as President of the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association (2016−17), Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology (2017−18), and the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, APA Division 2 (2014). In August 2019, he received the American Psychological Foundation’s Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award, one of the highest awards given to teachers of psychology in America.

Garth Neufeld, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Cascadia College and the co-director of its Teaching and Learning Center. He is the founder of Teaching Introductory Psychology Northwest, Intro Psych Coast-to-Coast, and the Teaching of Psychology Incubator workshop, and co-founder of the PsychSessions podcast. He has served the national teaching of psychology community through various leadership roles through the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, the AP Psychology Reading, and APA’s Education Directorate. In 2018, Garth was awarded a Citizen Psychologist Presidential Citation from the APA for co-founding Shared Space For All, an organization that educates and mentors at-risk Thai children toward the prevention of prostitution. He is also the recipient of the 2019 STP Wayne Weiten Teaching Excellence Award.