Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

6 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
this domain. To function effectively in an informed and ethical way, educational psychologists
must come to understand the ways the knowledge they are taught to accept as true are shaped by
dominant power interests and ideologies. Such forces move educational psychologists to produce
knowledge and engage in activities that often reward the socially, politically, and economically
privileged and punish the marginalized (see Richardson and Woolfolk [1994]). In this context
Ray Horn and myself and the authors included in this book emphasize the need for educational
psychologists to carefully examine what passes as reason and validated research in the mechanistic
tradition, in the process asking in a critical sense whose interests this most modernist of
sciences serves.
In this context a central question of psychology/educational psychology emerges. How we
answer it shapes the way in which we approach the field. How do humans represent and make
meaning of the events that take place around them? Mechanistic psychologists maintain that
the world is represented by symbols that are material (have substance) in some neuron-based or
biochemical manner. In a more interpretive psychology the symbol processing that takes place
is more conceptual and less biochemical. These symbols in interpretive psychology are very
complex and cannot be separated from sociocultural and political contexts or situation-specific
intentions, moods, and meaning constructions. In this context symbolic representation of the
world and its events always connect the mind to micro (individualisitic) and macro (social)
contexts. Thus, as we will emphasize throughout the handbook, educational psychology cannot
be studied as simply an individualistic phenomenon.
Making these distinctions in relation to the question about representation and meaning making,
it is important to note that a central task of educational psychology involves developing a
theory of learning. It is necessary but not sufficient for educational psychologists to possess a
theory of representation and meaning making. The field has a more difficult task—to find out
not how individuals learn but how they learn in particular sociocultural settings, e.g., school,
work, leisure, etc. Such a task, interpretivists posit, cannot be accomplished by only studying
quantitatively measured behavior of groups of individuals that can then be generalized universally.
Instead, individuals must be studied in their natural settings (not labs) using a bricolage of
research methods including ethnography, phenomenology, history, life history, semiotics, and
many others. Unfortunately, the most modern of sciences in its mechanistic articulation has
not been comfortable using such research orientations. As a result, our understanding of how
individuals represent and make meaning of the world and how they use these processes to learn
about the world, themselves, and others has been profoundly compromised.
BORN IN THE USA: MODERNITY, MECHANISM, AND REGULATION
Thus, modern psychology and its educational psychological nephew were born in a Eurocentric,
patriarchal, individuated, and decontextualized academic domain. The founding fathers within
this mechanistic cosmos had faith that studying the abstracted, self-contained individual would
lead them to an understanding of human life in general. Patricia Whang in her chapter in this
volume extends this assertion contending that it is important to question “how the contributions
made by educational psychologists have been constrained by the largely male and Euro-American
perspectives, values, and traditions held by influential members of the field.”
Since psychology emerged in movement from Western traditional to modern social orders, it
was caught in the change of emphasis from the community and the household to the separate
individual. In the premodern West, individuals were inseparable from the sociocultural context
in which they were born and raised. Premodern westerners were simply not able to remove
themselves from their social location and role(s) in order to try on new ways of being or new
behaviors. To exist outside the local community was to “not be,” to cease to exist. One’s meaning