Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 13
� the necessity of side-stepping the mechanist tendency to decontextualize the subjects of research and the
researcher from their sociohistorical context—thus, no individual activity exists in simple isolation.
� the impact of the psychologist’s values on how he or she sees the world—the frames we bring shapes the
knowledge we produce.
� the inseparable nature of language and data in the field—no psychological data is pure and objective.
� the elitist nature of the relationship between educational psychologists and the consumers of the knowledges
they produce—psychological knowledge production must always involve a democratic dialogue
between producer and consumers of information.
Such insights allow interpretivists the empowerment to free ed psych from its status as a
“nonsocial social science.” Operating on the multilogical, multidisciplinary terrain of interpretivism,
scholars represented by the authors operating in this volume work to bring the psyche and
consciousness back to center stage in the discipline. Always positioning this move in a variety
of larger contexts, the editors and the authors work to view subjectivity in more complex frames
than the automatic processes and quantitative constructs of the mechanists. It is Ray Horn’s and
my interpretation that mechanistic psychology has failed to construct a compelling description
of what it means to be human. To describe cognitive processes without an understanding of
the construction of identity and selfhood or devoid of insight into the nature of consciousness
provides little help in the larger effort to make sense of human beings and their relationship to
the processes of teaching and learning.
Mechanists, interpretivist educational psychologists maintain, have provided a cornucopia of
fragmented information about the brain. In this process they have failed to carefully examine the
larger theoretical dimensions of their mission. Such a failure has moved them to discern their
goal as producing a final, fixed, universal notion of the mind—one that works as well today as it
will in the year 2525 and in every sociocultural context. Psychological theorizing, interpretivists
contend, should not involve such decontextualized, monological pronouncements nor should it
be considered objective knowledge that can simply be transferred directly to practice. Knowledge
production and usage are far more complex activities. Thus, interpretivists argue that educational
psychologists have to start at the beginning and actually rethink what it is that we are trying to
do in the first place.
THE INTERPRETIVIST RETHINKING OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
Such a rethinking involves the difficult and long neglected task of asking what shapes our view
of what a science such as educational psychology should be trying to accomplish. The goal is
not, interpretivists argue, the attempt to gather pieces of the larger jigsaw puzzle of the mind
so that one day we will know all there is about it. Instead, interpretivist educational psychology
posits that we must expose the often-occluded background assumptions on which psychologists
draw to help them shape their professional activities. The science of psychology found its roots
in the common cultural, social, political, and philosophical assumptions of the historical epoch
in which it developed. In this context there were unquestioned ways of seeing men and women,
white people and those not considered white, the rich and the poor, the sexually “normal” and
the sexually “deviant,” the intelligent and the stupid, etc. Many find such insights very disturbing
because of their exposure of the ways hard sciences reflect the biases and prejudices of their
Zeitgeists. Indeed, they are disturbed by the disrespect for scientific authority such expose might
foster.
Without this interpretivist expose, living human beings—in particular, students—will continue
to be reduced to transhistorical and transcultural central processing mechanisms. In the