This May, we are featuring posts from Brandeis faculty and students who are visiting Al-Quds University in Jerusalem as part of a Brandeis partnership. This post is from Prof. Derek Isaacowitz (psychology). Prof. Isaacowitz is part of a short-term faculty exchange, and is teaching short modules as well as consulting on curriculum design and research.
Psychology professor Derek Isaacowitz talks with a colleague at Al-Quds University
I just came back from teaching a class on Psychopathology for students in the Al-Quds MA counseling program. I taught about psychopathology in old age, a topic which they may not be exposed to in their regular curriculum. This course is taught by Dr. Eyad Hallaq, and he translated what I said, as many of the students struggled to understand and speak English. I had them first say where they were working, and found that almost all of them were already working in mental health contexts, such as schools, and that they came from throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem. As I spoke with them about depression in old age and about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, I found them to be incredibly engaged both with me and with the material. They were interested even though (as I made clear at the outset, and they are no doubt aware), the demographic push to study aging in the US is not the same for them, as Palestinian society is currently very youth-heavy (unlike the “greying” America).
The students displayed some concern with the application of the study of aging to their particular context, but were equally intrigued by what is known from research in the US. They asked many excellent questions — ranging from the role of religion in depression to whether there is any relationship between stress or genetics and dementia. The level of participation and caliber of question was quite similar to when I teach this material at Brandeis.
Derek M. Isaacowitz, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology and
Volen National Center for Complex Systems
Brandeis University
MS 062
Waltham, MA 02454-9110
Phone: (781) 736-3308
Fax: (781) 736-3291
http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/emotion/
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