CE-HSPA-1027 - Harry Potter Through a Psychological Lens
Course Description
The magical world of Harry Potter delights readers with its complex characters and its fascinating stories of friendship, love, and loss, and in this course you’ll dive into the psychology behind your favorite characters from the series. Using developmental psychology, which focuses on how people change and grow over time, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your favorite characters as well as how you can start seeing developmental psychology concepts in the real world.
Is This Course For You?
If you’re a rising high school sophomore, junior, or senior who loves the Harry Potter books that is also interested in psychology, this course is a great way to dive deeper into both the world of Harry Potter and the field of psychology. You’ll learn about psychological concepts and get to see examples of what they look like in the world of Harry Potter. As a note, you will need to finish reading the Harry Potter series before taking this course and be familiar with the world and characters, and if you have your own copy of the books it’s encouraged that you bring them with you.
What You’ll Learn
In this five day course, you’ll use the Harry Potter book series as a case study to explore major themes of developmental psychology, which is the study of how people grow and change over time. You’ll learn how developmental psychology research is conducted and get to practice applying the ideas used in this research to your favorite characters from the books. If you’ve ever wondered why Harry seems to thrive psychologically despite years of trauma and abuse, how having multiple siblings affects Ron’s sense of self-worth, or how Voldemort went from a Hogwarts student to a mass murderer, you will learn the answers to these questions and more in this course.
How You’ll Learn
This course is designed to not just teach you about developmental psychology, but also give you the opportunity to find examples of how it’s used in the world of Harry Potter. You’ll do this through a variety of activities, including large and small group discussions with your classmates, video analysis, presentations, interactive activities, and more. This class will also take a field trip to the Strong National Museum of Play to visit their Harry Potter exhibit and to see how children play and how it relates to developmental psychology. At the end of the week, you’ll give a presentation applying the developmental concepts you’ve learned about to a Harry Potter character of your own choosing.
Skills You Walk Away With
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Understand some of the normative processes of human development.
- Have an understanding of some of the basic fundamentals of social science research methodology, with particular emphasis on techniques used in developmental psychology research.
- Think more critically about psychological science, with particular emphasis on claims and conclusions made in the field of developmental psychology.
- Apply concepts from developmental psychology to a case study.
- Have experience using some of the research methods of developmental psychology (particularly observational techniques).