Teaching Psychology in a Third World Setting

This article attempts to illustrate some of the peculiarities of and the possibilities opened up by tbe introduction of psychology in certain Third World settings. For this purpose it draws upon the experience of teaching psychology to students at the University of the South Pacific. The article brings together three apparently disparate phenomena as manifestations of a more fundamental learning problem faced by many students. Viewed from the stand point of the learner, this problem isconceptualised as stemming from an excessive subjective distance between the life-world of the learner and the learning situation. Ultimately, the solution lies in imaginative pedagogy. Using evidence from student participation, the author tries to show the possibilities offered by a humanistic approach for achieving a reduction, if not a closure, of this gap.