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Interview w/Tracy Esposito
College of New Jersey
Eric Alexander Hurley, PhD.
Assistant Professor of
Social Psychology-visiting
University
of Massachuetts-Amherst
Teaching: My interests as a teacher are focused on the mentoring aspects of graduate
and undergraduate education. I believe that it is my responsibility to add depth as much as breadth to the intellectual lives of students and future scholars. Toward that end,
in my own teaching I have come to rely on group investigation and project/product assignments to supplement essay and other more
traditional assessments. Internet and other technologies have made these techniques more feasible in today's academic settings.
I teach an array of general graduate and undergraduate psychology courses. In addition, I have taught several courses that because of the emphasis of my scholarship, I am particularly interested in and uniquely
qualified to teach. Several of these are described below.
Psychology of the Black Experience: Psychology/ Afro American Studies: This course critically reviews historical and traditional approaches
to the psychological study of African Americans, exploring the complex and often tense relationship between the goals and aspirations of
psychology as a discipline and those of African American people.
Culture and Human Development: Psychology: I rewrote this course for Smith college in Spring 2003 in order to orient the content around
the current understanding that culture is, not a supporting influence, but central to efforts to understand human behavior. The course also
emphasizes the important interplay between theory development and empirical research.
Introduction to Psychology: Psychology: I participated in the design & revision of this course in the summer of 2003 as part of a college
wide initiative aimed at incorporating current scholarship concerning the role and relevance of culture into our coverage of various areas
of the discipline. I also participated as an Instructor.
Graduate Seminar in Cultural Psychology: Psychology: This seminar which I first taught with Edmund W. Gordon at Teachers College, Columbia University,
closely examines the philosophical underpinnings of the sub discipline known as cultural psychology. Beginning by posing the question: What
is cultural psychology? The course is designed to give students an opportunity to closely interact and examine what distinguishes Cultural
Psychology from cross-cultural psychology, ethno-Psychology, even sociology and other areas that deal with similar topics in importantly
different ways. The course is useful in that it uses this context to encourage students broader appreciation for the relationships between
philosophy and science and for the importance of examining the assumptions implicit in any approach to scholarship. This is a graduate level
course.
