Introduction

Understanding the history of a discipline requires looking at prominent figures and events that contributed to the growth of the discipline. Yet historical accounts are prone to including what those writing the accounts believe is most important to know. In the discipline of psychology, women and people of color are noticeably absent from historical accounts, particularly those in traditional textbooks (Cramblet Alvarez et al., 2020). This likely contributes to upper-level undergraduate psychology students failing to recognize many pioneering women and psychologists of color (Cramblet Alvarez et al., 2019; Kelly et al., 2022).

This collection of chapters features the lives and contributions of 29 pioneering women and psychologists of color–including their general biographies, some of their important achievements, the historical context surrounding their work, and the historical impact of their work on the field of psychology.

Each chapter was written by undergraduate students in sections of History and Systems of Psychology courses at the University of North Dakota and the University of Nevada Reno, under the direction of their course instructors, Dr. Alison Kelly (UND) and Dr. Brittany Avila (UNR). Students worked in teams through multiple drafts of their chapters throughout the semester and were able to choose to publish their work as part of this compilation.

We intentionally created this as an Open Educational Resource (OER) for a few reasons. In addition to being advocates for OER/open pedagogy and reducing cost barriers for students, the idea of working on this with our students and giving them the opportunity to publish their work excited us! We also viewed this as an opportunity to create a more comprehensive resource for psychology curricula diversification, as we’ve both had to adopt a “piecemeal” approach, drawing from several individual resources–and we imagine other instructors seeking to diversify their curricula have done the same. Ultimately, we envision this resource being used alongside other resources in undergraduate psychology courses to expose students to our discipline’s diverse roots.