USING DOCUMENTARIES TO TEACH KEY CONCEPTS IN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY COURSES FOR PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS ON TRAINING

Over recent decades, education experts point out the convenience of including the use of new technologies on teaching and learning processes in different phases of education. Many teachers use this kind of methology during first years of formal education, assuming that current children and youths´ motivation and involvement may be higher ussing this kind of methodology, closer to their interests than the classical master class.

In this paper we present a proposal for using audiovisual material in University lessons of Developmental Psychology, common subject in Psychology and Education Degrees. The contact with this subject is for many inexperienced students their first approach to Psychology, so they have several problems to understand and internalize complex concepts related to cognitive, social and emotional human being development.

Some years ago we began to include in our teaching practices some documentaries in order to go into these topics, specially basic concepts that should be acquired by our students during their pre-service teacher training. This material and activities designed to work with the videos seems to be specially helpful for our students, because it allows them to see experiments in the topic, professionals´ and scientifics´testimonies and examples of children and families in real contexts.

The first video that we propose is included in the collection "Baby Human: Geniuses in diapers." Specifically, we use the Episode "To belong” to work the concept of attachment, its origin and development. We also suggest the excellent documentary "Genie" (BBC, 1994), to work concepts as critical period, feral child and the importance of the environment on human development. Furthermore, we use an episode from the BBC collection "A child's world" ("A mind thing") to explain the concept of Theory of Mind and to show scientific experiments used to evaluate their development. This documentary also show interesting real life examples where we use this important social skill. Finally, we propose the use of the BBC documentary "Difficult parents, Children with problems". The documentary shows the behavioral problems of Peter (4 years old) and the role of child-rearing practices in the development of psychological and social problems.