Saturday SAVY, Week 2, Harry Potter and Psychology (5th-6th)
Welcome back to the world of Wizards and Psychology!
I was so happy to see everyone enthusiastically ready to get back into learning about the ways we can connect the study of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to one of our favorite book/movie series! To begin the class, we played all the students’ favorite game: Jeopardy. This version of the trivia game was different from last week, as we used it as an opportunity to review what we covered in the first class. In addition, everyone had the opportunity to gain points in their teams, and all the students performed super well.
We then moved on to talking about the students’ ideas of how what they know about psychology could connect to the Harry Potter universe. Students offered really great examples about the role of social relationships, how legitimacy is connected to the unconscious and the ways in which the characters developed their problem-solving skills over the course of the series.
We then discussed a key way we can categorize personalities within psychology, based on the work of famed psychologist Carl Jung: archetypes. Students had a wonderful time linking the different characters of Harry Potter to the various archetypes that exist within psychology. They used the goals, weaknesses, and other important characteristics to link archetypes like “The Ruler”, “The Everyman”, and “The Caregiver” to Voldemort, Neville Longbottom, and Molly Weasley.
Before lunch, we set up an activity about the protective role of mentors within the context of Harry Potter’s development. Students wrote down how 6 adults in Harry Potter’s life were central to his growth and development. Then, we used the last couple of minutes to discuss how magic can be representative of certain psychological constructs, namely “internal desires” and “dreams”. Students provided in-depth explanations of how they could see why magic allowed the characters within the Harry Potter series to express their internal desires, as well as to accomplish their dreams.
After lunch, we dove right back into the mentorship activity by cutting up all the students’ answers about the mentors and then trying to guess which statements applied to which characters. Ultimately, students came to understand how these characters helped Harry Potter become the person he was meant to be and allowed him to cope with many of the difficulties that he faced throughout his life.
We then created a large social network web, to understand the concept of “degrees of separation”. Students did a wonderful job finding novel connections between characters that may not be obvious to less knowledgeable fans of the series. Then, we all discussed which connections were the most central to the plot of the Harry Potter series. Students each got up and presented one connection they felt was key, describing their perspective in wonderful detail.
We ended the class discussing the function of resilience during our development, using Harry Potter and Voldemort to contextualize this important social-emotional term. Students walked through the similarities in the experiences that Harry and Tom Riddle had as young children, as well as how resilience factored into the people they eventually became.
I am so looking forward to next week as we conclude the class. We have a fantastic last lesson in the story for these amazing students!