Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

12 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
THE ORIGINS AND PURPOSES OF INTERPRETIVIST PSYCHOLOGY
What I am calling interpretivist psychology is concerned with research into the meanings of
human action and expressions as well as developing insight into beliefs about the self and the
“other” in particular historical and cultural settings. In interpretivism’s more critical guise it is
also concerned with the social construction of the self and the ways discourses, ideologies, and
other power structures help construct the meanings humans give to the world in ways that hurt
particular groups and individuals. Over the last three centuries the roots of this interpretivist
tradition can be traced to such thinkers as Vico, Lazarus, Wundt, the Russian school shaped by
Leontiev, Luria, and Vygotsky, and the American pragmatists Peirce, James, and Dewey. John
Dewey captured the spirit of interpretivism with his analysis of the two dimensions of learning
theory. As Douglas Simpson and Xinoming Liu describe in their chapter on Dewey’s contribution
to educational psychology in this volume, the great pragmatist viewed learning theory from two
angles—the micro and the macro.
In Dewey’s formulation the micro perspective focused primarily on the student, while the
macro focused on the teacher, other students and the more general environment that surrounds
the student. In the micro-context Dewey connected the student’s native appetites, instincts, and
impulses to the general impulse to activity, thus constructing learning as a natural addendum to
being a human being. This dimension of learning was then connected to places, subjects, ideas,
emotions, and any other social dynamic that exerts an influence on the student. In this context
Dewey maintained that learning always involved the student’s interaction with the environment.
The role of the teacher was to make sure that such interactions could develop in ways that would
eventuate in personal, social, and moral growth. Like Dewey scholars such as Lev Vygotsky
and many others would focus on the continual interactions between biology and culture. In the
case of Dewey and Vygotsky the message was clear: for educational psychology to become a
rigorous, practical, socially responsible discipline, it would have to broaden its modes of analysis.
As Patricia Whang maintains in her chapter in this volume, the field would have to broaden its
“sources of influence.”
In the 1970s and 1980s such broadening began to take place with the emergence of situated
cognition and complexity theory. With these perspectives were combined critical pedagogy,
multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and interdisciplinary approaches to research—an alternative
knowledge base for educational psychology was taking shape (see Beth Blue Swadener and
Kagendo Mutua’s important chapter on decolonizing research in educational psychology). As
Montserrat Castello and Luis Botella argue in their chapter, “Constructivism and Educational
Psychology,” the new paradigm of the discipline draws upon this knowledge base always focusing
on the integration of the social and the cognitive. Such integration, they posit, allows
educational psychologists to consider both individual representations and the social situations
where education and cognitive activity occur. The editors and authors of this handbook believe
that these perspectives can help make contemporary educational psychology a more emancipatory
domain that helps teachers make education a more democratic form of social practice.
As Lois Shawver maintains in this volume, the old universal meta-narratives of educational psychology
cannot survive the electronic hyperreality of fingertip knowledge. Faith in a Cartesian–
Newtonian explanation of cognition cannot be maintained in the contemporary era. Indeed,
informed by a bricolage of diverse, multidisciplinary knowledges, interpretivist educational psychologists
of the twenty-first century know too much to perpetuate the status quo of the discipline.
Drawing upon feminism and the post-discourses, interpretivists reject mechanism because they
understand
� the connection of the knower to what is known—thus, there is no privileged vantage point to gain objective
truth about human cognition.