Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 17
understandings do not simply dictate our pedagogical strategies—instead, they inform them. One
can still use a wide variety of teaching methodologies in light of such knowledge. Teachers by
no means are condemned to teach the same way.
If we understand that learning takes place in context and in process, then we begin to appreciate
the impact of the prior knowledge students bring to a classroom on the learning process. Many
boys coming from working-class backgrounds, for example, may carry with them to school an
understanding of academic work as an effeminate pursuit. Such prior knowledge plays a dramatic
role in shaping their disposition toward learning. An educational psychologist or a teacher who
does not know this operates at a severe disadvantage. Sandra Racionero and Rosa Valls in their
chapter on dialogic learning are well aware of such dynamics and maintain that teachers who
understand them focus more attention on the nature and needs of the learner. This moves pedagogy
away from the mechanistic focus on the teacher as the “unique agent in the teaching–learning
process.” Again, such insight does not dictate pedagogical method. To focus on the nature and
needs of the learner does not mean that teachers do not ever confront students with bodies of
knowledge. There is still much analysis to do on just what it means to be more attentive to the
nature and needs of the learner.
To be attentive to the nature and needs of the learner in a critical interpretivist sense does not
mean that we focus our attention on natural and ready-made students. It also does not mean that
we attend to the learner so we can “normalize” him or her—fit him or her to the needs of dominant
institutions. Here is where critical interpretivists have to be very careful. We can develop the most
child-centered pedagogies possible that not only focus our attention on the nature and needs of
the learner but allow the learner to produce his or her own knowledge about the world. If such
knowledge is not problematized, subjected to ideological, discursive, and cultural analysis, then
we may empower students to become hegemonized by the needs of the dominant culture. While
critical interpretivists most definitely want students who actively participate in the world, we also
want students with the ability to ask hard questions of the knowledges they encounter and even
the knowledges they produce. Such a goal requires even more of the teacher who must understand
the nature and needs of the student in a larger sociocultural and political context. Such a teacher
must always be aware of the political consequences of particular epistemologies, psychologies,
and pedagogies.
MECHANISM AND THE CENTRAL PROCESSING MECHANISM
With these epistemological understandings in mind one is better equipped to understand how
mechanistic educational psychology has come to “believe in” a central processing mechanism
(CPM). Indeed, the primary task of such a paradigm is to delineate the nature of this hidden
mechanism and how it operates. To study it mechanists must remove it from everything else and
then in its isolation delineate exactly how it represents the real world, categorizes the different
aspects of the world, draws on stored memories, learns, etc. This mechanism stands apart from
everything on which it operates and must be described in this way—the focus is on its universal
properties. The capacity or efficiency of this CPM is what mechanists claim to be measuring
when they administer psychological tests. Of course, the problem is that since we don’t have
any clear understanding of what the CPM is and little understanding of what exactly constitutes
its high-level and efficient operation, then we’re not exactly sure what such tests are measuring.
When we bring our epistemological insights to bear in this situation, we can uncover further
confusion about the relation of the CPM to social, cultural, political, economic, and philosophical
context.
Mark Garrison in his chapter on psychometrics extends these observations, maintaining that
there is an irrational dimension to the measurement work of mechanistic psychology. Garrison