Ten years ago today, while I was prepping for the Fall semester of 2016, I spent an hour or so reviewing the illustrations in our new text (Weiten, 2017) for issues. This was at the time one of the most popular basic texts for survey courses in gen ed. On the whole, they were better than I thought, worse in some–and nowhere near as good as they should have been in that day and age.
First, the vast majority of females illustrated were white, conventionally pretty women. So if you were a big girl, or “masculine”, or whatever, in my class, you weren’t going to see yourself there. Second, there were maybe half a dozen old people in that edition, and only two of those photos disrupted conventional stereotypes–one’s doing science and one’s carrying ice skates. Third, the publisher had included only one disabled person in the entire book, a white male college professor (and I’d have been willing to bet he was an able-bodied model in a rented wheelchair). Fourth, there was not one–not one!–single fat person in the entire text.
So here’s my thing, I wrote in my teaching journal. 30% of those photos should be of fat people. 15% should be of people with disabilities (although I realize not all of us have visible disabilities). And we should be doing shit. Doing science, preferably, but doing something. Anything! The guy in the wheelchair’s just sitting there, as are all the fluffy people. All the athletes are lean, taut. Ugh. Just ugh!
One photo of “sexual attraction” is a woman in a red dress–for the male gaze, don’t you know. Of course, that’s what the study was about, women in red, but still. Couldn’t we just not? Maybe that one just doesn’t need an illustration. It adds nothing from a teaching standpoint, and he claimed in the introduction that he’d removed purely decorative photos. I would argue that he did not.
And the illustration for self-efficacy is a thin white woman dieter. The photo for a cognitive error? Hillary Clinton. I [expletive deleted] thee not.
Fast forward ten years and I’m teaching Grison and Gazzaniga’s (2022) Psychology in your life and boy, howdy, it’s a whole new world out there, y’all. Just for one example, out of the tens of thousands of films they could have referred to as examples of stroboscopic motion since it was developed in the 19th century, they picked Wonder Woman and The Black Panther. This time, I wrote in my teaching journal that I hoped my students felt seen.
Did you see yourself reflected in your school’s values when you were a student? Do you feel seen now in the social media accounts (Tweets, blogs, whatever) that you follow? Where do you see improvement over the years, or remaining gaps? Let me know in the comments!
References
Grison, S., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2022). Psychology in your life (4th ed.). W.W. Norton.
Weiten, W. (2017). Psychology: Themes and variations (10th ed.). Cengage Learning.
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