Professor Jennings uses Harry Potternovels to explore "attachment, friendship, and intimacy"

Russell Sage College professor and Knox resident Sybillyn Jennings knows how to reach her students. She helps them explore the relationships among characters her students have grown up with in the Harry Potter novel series.
"I’m a developmental psychologist," Jennings said. "When I read the Harry Potter books"I was simply entranced with the way that [J.K.] Rowling was showing Harry and Hermione and Ron not only growing up, but interacting with adults."
Jennings taught the class for the first time last spring, and the college is already touting it for next spring. While not all the faculty likes the Harry Potter series, "Overall, they were pleased. Overall, it was positive," Jennings said. "It was a very fun experience."
Three years ago, she said, she heard students discussing the books, and she thought a class on the series would be a good way to examine "attachment, friendship, and intimacy."
Jennings uses the series "as a window" to look more deeply into the major themes of attachment between an infant and a parenting person, moral reasoning, friendship and enemies and how they contribute to human development, she said.
The Rowling series allowed Jennings and her students to delve into issues in a non-threatening way with familiar texts "so they could get a hold of it," she said.
Jennings’s class is not Baby Psych 101; the class is offered through the honors program and the psychology department at RSC. The issues they examine go "a little deeper" than would be possible in an introductory course, Jennings said. She had 18 students in the honors seminar with backgrounds in psychology and enough credits under their belts to be proficient writers.
"I want them to recognize the skill of this author, Rowling — a genius, what she’s been able to sustain across seven books," Jennings said.
Her class will help students "admire the expressional form"to address themes of relations," she said. The characters grapple with friends and enemies, and Jennings’s students gain a much deeper appreciation of the issues of attachment and loss, friendship, and identity, she said.
The seminar also focuses on the notion of discrimination as seen in the Rowling books. Conflict between "mud bloods" and "purebreds" pervades the series.
Discrimination "is an important issue for people to think about, how we isolate ourselves from others," Jennings said.
Student reaction to the class was "amazing," she said.
"I had not realized the significance of these books in their lives and in their development," Jennings said. Speaking of the first six books, because the final book had not yet been published when the first class was taught, she said, "We did go through every book and additional readings. The way they connected the different characters was amazing to me. They said, ‘These books are always going to be in my life.’ "

Rather than the two main characters, Harry and Hermione, Jennings found that her students identified with outcasts Neville Longbottom, Professor Snape, and the third main character Ron, who is always a second to Harry. Students even connected with the relationship between Harry and his step-father, Jennings said.
Rowling created "all sorts of hooks students could grab onto with their very own interests," Jennings said. Her students appreciated the way each of these characters developed through the series, and the continuing character interactions raised more questions among her students, said Jennings.
"It was striking to me the breadth of their interests" as the characters of different ages interacted in the books, she said.
"I think it does reflect a kind of maturity on their part. Allowing them to focus on these fictional characters made it easier to recognize the usefulness of experience"to own the feelings they have," Jennings said.
"The role of magic in all this"I don’t think the magic was the draw"but it really had to do with the stories and the sense of loss that Harry experienced and Neville experienced, and jealousy. It gets played out in a way the [students] can get their heads around it," she said.

Jennings’s current research with Dr. Julie McIntyre focuses on women’s interest in electronic leisure and what is physically — or not physically — appealing about these games. Jennings is also trying to understand what brings girls to have an interest in mathematics and science, she said.

When the spring semester begins, Jennings will incorporate Rowling’s recently-released final book in the Harry Potter series into the course.
"I’m certainly looking forward to this next iteration of the class," she said. "Rowling’s ability to address death and what death means"It’s just amazing, and especially pertinent in the current world where people are so divided by religious belief. It didn’t bother me that this was fiction. Psychology, as a field, more and more is coming to use narrative, the telling of a life story, as" a method for trying to understand how people make meaning in their lives." The Rowling series follows Harry Potter through seven years of trying to find meaning in his life, she said.
Jennings said that, perhaps, Rowling sees herself as a Charles Dickens. There is "a cycle of kinds of books that touch us and touch generations," said Jennings. "This is a generation that is touched by Harry Potter."