Augsburg College - Augsburg Now

Psychology professor Sean Truman is beginning his second year teaching in the department. Augsburg Now editor Betsey Norgard talked with him about students and teaching.

Why did Augsburg interest you as a place to teach?

I'm interested in undergraduate excellence, and I'm interested in grounding education in the liberal arts tradition. ... I also thought that the caliber of my colleagues in the Psychology Department was remarkable. The people in the department were clearly committed to teaching, and to producing research and working in the community on things that were important. I found that compelling.

What do you seek for your students?

I want to be unapologetically demanding of students.

I want them to be intellectually sophisticated, rigorous, considered people who have the capacity to deal with intellectual ambiguity and who can manage in a world that is frequently contradictory. The world is complicated, and what we do here is help people to develop a capacity for complex thinking that serves them throughout their lives.

The way we do that in the psychology department is through science-based understanding of people's experience—whether it's people's emotional experience, cognitive process, social behavior, or what have you. These are all different slices of how we, as psychologists, think about human experience. There's nothing magical about one particular perspective; it's the discipline we bring to the perspective that I think is really useful.

You don't know who's in your class. You have no idea. I'm hoping I have a future senator in my class. When she sits on a Senate sub-committee, she'll think, "How do we evaluate this issue? What is the justification for spending a half billion dollars on this program? Where is the evidence that this approach will be effective?" We hope that our students are disciplined and rigorous thinkers when they leave the College.

Some of the most compelling moments I've had here are when students begin to see themselves as intellectually sophisticated. Early on in college students rarely appreciate their own capacity for excellence; they don't see the horizon that's possible for them. They can excel in ways that they don't yet appreciate. It is really fun to see students change over four years in ways that are simply astounding.

How will a new science building make a difference in your department?

The first thing a new science building does is provide physical evidence of an institutional commitment to the sciences.

When we apply for grants, a new building will make it possible to support larger and more substantial projects. It puts us in a much more compelling position to say, "We have intellectual capital here, we have the capacity for hard work here, we have the institutional and organizational capacity, and we have the capacity to contribute in a serious way through our laboratory research." In the end, having these resources will mean that our students get more opportunities to do meaningful work with faculty.

We have to recognize and be honest about the fact that we've done great work. This work has taken place without many resources. While people have done an incredible amount with what they have, we also should be clear that the limited resources reduce our capacity to do work that will be meaningful, larger in scope, and more compelling and productive for our students.