Program Overview

What’s Our Mission?

The psychology program at SPU endeavors to accomplish four goals:

• Provide students with solid academic and experiential grounding in the theory, research, and practice of the field of psychology.
• Prepare and inspire motivated and able students to enter and contribute to the field of psychology.
• Nurture students toward valuing themselves and others as persons of worth, created in God’s image.
• Empower students to act in this world. That is, actively celebrating God’s human and non-human creation, showing mercy and compassion to the vulnerable, and challenging and changing aspects of society that deny or denigrate persons.
  

What Makes Our Program Distinctive?

Disciplinary Assumptions and Values. Humankind is comprised of biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. Behavioral science and religious faith complement one another and provide multiple levels of explanation; however, they are not independent of each other. Faith informs one's hypotheses about human behavior, what one decides to study, and how one carries out behavioral research. Likewise, the scientific study of psychology may well carry implications for one's religious beliefs and experiences.

Philosophy of Teaching. Teaching and evaluation processes are to be motivating, redemptive, and rigorous. They should nurture critical thinking skills, include a variety of methods and engage a variety of cognitive modalities, and elicit the higher cognitive functions of application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Philosophy of Research. The scientific method provides a primary process for grounding knowledge; however, it is not the only legitimate means of knowing. Basic, applied, and action research complement one another, and each is to be valued. Research should be grounded in theory, methodologically sound, and ultimately applicable to serving the needs of God's human and non-human creation.

Philosophy of Service. Followers of Jesus are called by his life and teachings to serve in gentleness, humility, and strength, and to seek out the marginalized and hurting. All teaching and scholarship should be perceived as service to God and on behalf of God's creation; the goals of which should be to model, prepare, and inspire students to seek out opportunities to serve in their world.