Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Educational
Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities
JOE L. KINCHELOE
The great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky writing in the 1930s maintained that scholars in the
discipline of psychology were drifting into the polar camps of behaviorism and phenomenology.
There was no doubt that Vygotsky clearly saw into the future of psychology in general as well
as its associated discipline, educational psychology. Indeed, the field of educational psychology
would reflect these polar camps but the mainstream of the field was undoubtedly positioned within
the behavioristic (or as time passed, the mechanistic) camp. Even after the decline of behaviorism
as a school of psychological thought in the 1960s and 1970s, mainstream educational psychology
would hang on to numerous behavioristic trappings while embracing the most mechanistic
and rationalistic aspects of emerging schools of psychological thought (see Kozulin’s [1997]
Introduction in Vygotsky’s Thought and Language).
THE EMERGENCE OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY:
DIVERGENT TRADITIONS
This handbook begins with this insight, as the editors and authors explore the nature of
educational psychology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this process they seek to
examine and formulate new approaches to the subject that are practical, just, critical, and scholarly
rigorous enough to address the complexity of the domain of study. The mechanistic tradition
of educational psychology from behaviorism to cognitivism has emphasized the quantifiable
behavior of groups of individuals—focusing in particular on producing generalizable empirical
data about these aggregates of people. The contributors and editors of this handbook have not
found this dominant mechanistic tradition to be very helpful in contributing to the improvement of
teaching and learning. Indeed, we have often found the social, political, pedagogical, economic,
and philosophical influences of this dominant impulse to be profoundly harmful to those—
especially those marginalized because of race, class, gender, national origin, ethnicity, geographic
place, etc.—who are vulnerable to its power.
Thus, the contributors to this volume find the roots of their disciplinary orientation more
within the traditions of cultural and interpretive psychology where the focus is less on producing
generalizable empirical data and more on the process of meaning making. In these alternative