Abstract
Looking at how people get oriented towards the psychological discipline, it is striking that students are often initially drawn to psychology because they wish better to understand their personal experiences and the world around them. However, these initial aspirations often remain unmet by the content of academic psychology classes and the teachers conveying it. Building on my experiences as a psychology lecturer, I explore the challenges of connecting personal experiences to psychological content in academic practice for students and teachers and how this can be traced back to the ongoing contested nature of psychology’s subject matter. In doing so, I mainly draw on the distinction between ‘big P’ academic psychology knowledge and ‘small p’ everyday psychology knowledge to explain the current conditions and discursive dynamics in psychology classrooms. I then turn to insights from other disciplines concerned with facilitating academic teaching experiences integrating personal engagement and everyday experience to explore how the role of psychology instructors can be redefined and expanded in the future. Given that university classrooms play a pivotal role in shaping students’ professional identity and perception of the discipline, I advocate for acknowledging and utilizing the personal relevance of seminar contents to bridge the gap between ‘big P’ and ‘small p’ psychology in academic teaching.
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