Craig Haney—Teaching Statement 2000-01
Professor, Psychology

I am grateful for the opportunity to say a few words about my approach to teaching. I can honestly say that there is no other professional activity that I find more enjoyable or rewarding than teaching. Virtually all of the courses I teach are social problem-oriented courses, primarily in the area of psychology and law. Years ago a colleague of mine and I wrote that by the time most people graduate from high school in the United States they have doctorates in "television criminology," as a result of having been exposed to literally thousands of hours of network television news, police dramas, and other crime-oriented programming. This is still the case and it has an impact on what and how you can teach students about the American legal system and how you must approach the task of talking intelligently with them about politically charged topics like crime and punishment. Even among an otherwise extremely well-informed student body that we have at Santa Cruz, many students come to my courses in psychology and law with very strongly held yet often inaccurate, stereotypic beliefs about the legal system in general and the criminal justice system in particular. So, in the approximately 20 years I have spent teaching here, I have always tried to make my courses perspective-altering experiences, ones that students leave with a fundamentally different view of the social and legal world around them than when they entered.

To a certain extent, then, I see my job as one in which I fundamentally challenge-by extensive and impactful use of psychological theory, data, and my own personal experience-as many of these stereotypes, illusions, and biases as possible. These intellectual challenges to the students are direct, uncompromising, and provocative. But there is always a respectful dialogue underway. I know that many students have passionate, deeply-held feelings about the various issues that we discuss; effective teaching means that these preconceived notions must always be questioned or challenged or alternative approaches suggested with patience and caring and open-mindedness on my part. For their part, students typically get emotionally engaged in the process, and often that means they get emotionally invested in holding on to their previous views. I work as hard and creatively as I can to shake their faith in conventional ways of looking at these issues, but always by use of evidence„data, theory, and reasoned analysis.

I do my best to expose students to extensive, sometimes non-traditional reading, and share personal and professional experiences with them about parts of the legal system that, as students, they are not likely to have firsthand knowledge of or thought much about. They learn by being exposed to psychological data and theory that they either have never encountered before or never applied to the topics at hand. And they learn by seeing and experiencing the "real thing." Thus, whenever possible, my teaching assistants and I arrange opportunities for my students to take field trips to local courts, ride along with the local police, and tour juvenile justice facilities. We even make a visit to one of the nearby maximum security prisons (Soledad or San Quentin) a regular part of the course each year. Many of my students continue their experiential learning with me through the Psychology Department's field study program and I make a point of sponsoring a large number of such students who work and study in and around the legal system in Santa Cruz. But experiential learning works best if students have already been given a large dose of theory and systematic data that they can use to create a critical perspective that informs what they are seeing and feeling.

If I am able to achieve some measure of success in these courses, it is only because I work extremely hard at it. I work hard before the courses begin, constantly assembling new information and new forms of knowledge about law for eventual use in the classroom. For example, because the media plays such an important role in shaping public opinion about law and implanting such a wide array of often-inaccurate stereotypes, I make extensive use of it in my classes. My students are not only reminded of the misleading media imagery that members of our society typically encounter on a daily basis but they are also are exposed to its counterpoint„in the form of documentary videotapes that are taken out of actual cases and trials in which I have participated, some of them specially made or adapted for use in my classroom.

Indeed, I suspect I am notorious at the campus photo lab for the hundreds of new slides I prepare each year, including photographs I have taken of institutional settings that students are not likely ever to enter, as well as a wide array of media messages (whose impact can only be fully appreciated if seen in the form they originally appeared), specially prepared statistical graphics to present empirical facts about crime and punishment side-by-side with their common misrepresentations, and so on. And I work equally hard in the course of the classes themselves, usually ending my lectures exhausted and, unfortunately, often perspiring heavily from the effort.

Although these are all psychology courses, and I am very much-some of my colleagues in law would say "hopelessly"-a psychologist, I make a point of making my courses as interdisciplinary as possible. Thus, we regularly read material outside the traditional domain of psychology and, although we always address social scientific issues in a careful and systematic way, I try very hard to get my students to stretch their thinking and to see the connections that other disciplines make to understanding a range of problems that are commonly understood in exclusively psychological terms.

The same things are true of the other upper division courses in social psychology that I teach. Here the challenges are somewhat less obvious„since, compared to my classes in psychology and law, fewer students come to these courses with pre-conceived, media-based ideas about the subject matter. But the approach I take is very similar, in part because social psychology is such a powerful counterpoint to many implicit individualistic assumptions in our culture. My goal is to take a variety of issues and topics that are commonly understood in exclusively individualistic terms and explain them through structural, contextual, and situational frameworks. Again, the hope is that these courses will be very much perspective-altering, and that I can get students to become more practiced and adept at deconstructing conventional individual-level psychological explanations for social problems and phenomena that they do and will confront in the world outside the campus. Here, too, we use readings and course materials that are somewhat non-traditional in nature and always emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of social scientific knowledge and perspectives.

I came to Santa Cruz a little more than 20 years ago, in part because of its reputation as an institution that emphasized high quality undergraduate teaching, and because of the reputation of its independent, critical-minded students. I have never regretted it. As is true for many of us who have been fortunate to teach at Santa Cruz for a number of years, my students have been very generous with their positive feedback; it has been gratifying to receive and it is comforting to look back on. But more important than the teaching evaluations per se, I have been able to engage in honest dialogue with highly intelligent and motivated students who-I hope-come to see the world a little differently as a result, and may even be motivated to translate that new perspective into social action and social change.

I know that all teachers have a special element or quality that they believe represents the essence of their teaching. For me, it is passion. I try to share my passion and commitment for justice-related issues, in part because I believe that we are at our most effective when we are doing the things we care most about, and in part because I believe that such passion and commitment can and should be contagious. Indeed, I know that most students who take my courses-especially the courses in psychology and law-leave them with a very different worldview, that many of them are empowered by the perspective they gain from the work we do together in class, and that a number of them even alter their career aspirations as a result of the experience. I feel extremely fortunate to be in a position to have this kind of impact on students. It is why I became a professor and why I have stayed at an institution that continues to privilege undergraduate education as much as this one does.