Over many years I've been developing online activities to help make Psychology concepts real and personally-relevant. Sometimes students would like to share our activities with friends and family. When other professors would like to do my activities, there's a hurdle: they need to recreate them for themselves in their LMS if possible, download responses, score with a spreadsheet, and provide students with their responses on slips of paper. It's a lot to organize and it takes time; it's what I did for each activity each semester. The Copernican Revolution Project is my effort to make activities available to everyone, everywhere - at least with internet access. Each activity scores itself automatically with personalized results, provides a certificate of completion so students can get credit, and provides a summary about each activity so it's educational even if teachers don't have time to discuss it during class. Once I complete the most essential parts so they work, I'll create pretty static web pages to showcase each activity and I'll start sharing widely on social media.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1514) discovered the Earth is not the center of the universe and forever changed how humanity understands ourselves and our place. He inspired Galileo Galilei and the blossoming of science. He inspired Immanuel Kant (1787) in his Critique of Pure Reason to completely reimagine Philosophy by challenging assumptions about epistemology - how we know what we know - and he aspired to what he called a Copernican Revolution of Philosophy. Among the first to study Psychology, Jean Piaget (1950) described the qualitative stage shifts of children's development as their own personal Copernican Revolutions. Thomas Kuhn (1962) drew inspiration from Piaget to model scientific progress as paradigm shifts - analogous to children's development. I feel Copernican Revolutions are education at its best. We don't aim to merely learn isolated facts; we struggle and develop ourselves in profoundly new ways.
To me, what makes us truly persons, is how we come to our world without a predefined purpose or meaning. Rather - in stark contrast with a chair, or a chicken - we can choose to make ourselves who we decide we're meant to be. I choose teaching, volunteering, parenting, and creativity to help everyone with our own Copernican Revolutions. I choose Psychology, life-long learning, and developing to foster my own metamorphosis.
I've taught mathematics to underprivileged elementary and middle school students, physics at an all-girls high school, philosophy in college, and psychology to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. I have taught a diverse range of college psychology classes including intro, social, developmental, and cognitive, and I've taught special topics in education, infancy, and creativity. In my lab we study deep conceptual change through struggle - our creativity, moments of insight, struggle with morality, and the power of teaching and parenting to transform our lives. I volunteer to help others and focus on feeling gratitude.