As psychedelics continue to enter the mainstream for medical and legal recreational use, education about these substances will become increasingly important for students going into a variety of fields from psychology and social work, to business and law. Forward-thinking educators at many universities have anticipated this need for psychedelic education and have begun to independently create courses in their various departments to fill this gap. The Psychedelic Educators Network is a newly formed international network of professors and instructors in higher education who are currently teaching or planning to teach undergraduate or graduate-level courses on the topic of psychedelics at their affiliated college or university.
The purpose of the Psychedelic Educators Network is to share resources, support, and ideas and to work together to further the mission of psychedelic education in higher ed. The goal is to help ensure common learning objectives for psychedelic education, with an emphasis on balanced, even-tempered, critical education of psychedelic history, science, ethics, policy and all other disciplines associated. In addition, the group hopes to foster opportunities for participants to engage in psychedelic conferences and events, create pathways for students interested in opportunities in research, service, policy and more, provide public educational resources, foster interdisciplinary research and teaching opportunities, and establish curriculum standards and best practices in psychedelic education.
The group was formed when Dr. Ziemer from Missouri Western State University was interviewed by Psychedelic Grad’s Curious to Serious podcast and Berkeley’s The Microdose in 2022 about the undergraduate psychedelics class she created and taught at her university. When other professors started to contact Ziemer to share their own experiences creating courses in psychedelics they decided to form an organization. The group has an email listserv and Slack channel and has held Zoom meetings and informal meet-ups at psychedelic conferences in 2022. They are in the process of creating bylaws and electing officers to the groups’ executive board. As part of an ongoing discussion, the official name of the Psychedelic Educators Network may also be changing in the future in order to reflect the groups’ focus on college/university-level education.
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