Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

16 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
complexes, contexts, and relationships that shape the lives of diverse individuals. Knowledge in
a critical interpretivist epistemology no longer simply resides in textbooks and students’ brains.
Instead, critical interpretivist knowledge is always being constructed, always being produced in
the interaction of perspectives generated in diverse contexts. As learners examine these diverse
knowledge constructions and their relationships to one another, they begin to aspire to a higher
domain of cognitive thought. The process of moving to these higher levels of thinking is a
powerful and exciting activity. Its promise of new insights about self and world motivate me to
engage in this work on educational psychology.
MOVING TO A NEW EPISTEMOLOGICAL TERRAIN
Many scholars have argued over the last three or four decades that a correspondence epistemology
promotes a misleading portrait of the process of recognition. Recognition does not
consist of simply comparing two pictures with one another. The process is much more complex,
as illustrated in human beings’ recognition of emotional feelings, justice, and genius. One does
not hold a picture of genius up to what he or she is observing in the lived world—other types
of thinking are operating in this context. The individual here is producing situated and implicit
knowledges that help him or her interpret the nature and meaning of the phenomenon he or she
is encountering. Thus, a simple correspondence-based test cannot be used in such situations to
determine if the observer has accurately represented reality.
Jeanette Bopry in her chapter on Francisco Varela extends this epistemological point. This
correspondence dynamic, she asserts, does not help us understand the way dogs perceive the
world. Dogs’ ways of constructing the world is very different from humans but is not “wrong.”
Such a reality implies that there are numerous ways of making sense of the world that work
for the individual or animal that constructs them. Perceptions emerge when cognitive systems
interact with the environmental context surrounding them. Bopry adeptly articulates this point:
“My description of a sunset is not a description of an external phenomenon as much as it is a
description of my own visual field.” Thus, knower and known are eternally joined together, as no
constructions of reality can be made without the presence of both mind and environment.
In this context we can clearly understand the epistemological foundations on which interpretivism
rests. The interaction/connection between the individual and culture and the knower and
the known is central to an understanding of the learning process. Indeed, the cultural system of
which one is a part profoundly shapes the ways one thinks, the ways one constructs the world
around oneself. Because of the diversity of such contexts and the infinite ways they shape cognitive
behavior, mechanistic efforts to generate universal general laws are futile. Guided by a
constructivist epistemology, interpretivists view cognition as a contextually specific, interactive,
ever-evolving process in which the person both constructs and is constructed by the various
contexts enveloping him or her.
Operating on this new epistemological terrain, interpretivists understand they must be better
scholars than those who preceded them in educational psychology. They must gain an interdisciplinary
understanding of the cognitive process. (See Lara Lee’s chapter, “Reconnecting the
Disconnect in Teacher–Student Communication in Education,” on the role of communications in
an interdisciplinary educational psychology.) In this context they enter the bricolage, making use
of diverse disciplinary tools and perspectives to gain a deeper and thicker view of these complex
social, cultural, economic, political, philosophical, and psychological dynamics. Such insights
dramatically reorient our pedagogical understandings, as we are empowered as scholar-teachers
to discern the ways particular students in specific circumstances construct their own meanings
of academic experiences (see Alison Cook-Sather’s chapter “Recognizing Students among Educational
Authorities”). Contrary to the pronouncements of many, such epistemological/cognitive