Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 21
schooling practices.” Since the macro always intersects with and shapes the micro, the power
of colonialism and the neocolonialism of the twenty-first century is always embedded in the
individual mind. Taking a cue from Dei and Doyle-Wood, critical interpretivists employ anticolonial
knowledges and epistemologies in the effort to reconstruct educational psychology. Brenda
Cherednichenko’s insights in her chapter, “Teacher Thinking for Democratic Learning,” extend
these ideas into the everyday life of the classroom. In this context she writes that many teachers
hold a cultural and socioeconomic class affinity with many of their successful students. As a
result these are the chosen ones who are provided a “more complex, challenging, and intellectual
curriculum.” Because marginalized students lack access to the intellectual tools of high
culture—Bruner’s cultural amplifiers—they are deemed unworthy of help.
In the present era of standardized curricula and top-down content standards the pronouncements
of Dei, Doyle-Wood, and Cherednichenko too often fall on deaf ears. In this conceptual context
Sandra Racionero and Rosa Valls remind readers that when educational psychologists and teachers
fail to consider difference, school culture takes on hegemonic purposes. In this hegemony of
whiteness boys and girls from minority contexts realize that academic success demands that
they give up their ethnic and cultural identities. Indeed, they must work to become as much like
individuals from dominant cultures as possible. What is sad is that even such an effort doesn’t
assure them of acceptance and attributions of success in the scholarly domain. Delia Douglas
expands these racial dynamics in her chapter on the everyday educational practices of white
superiority.
Even after they jump though all the scholarly and advanced degree-mandated hoops, they often
find that such certification is not enough. They must prove themselves again and again to those
from the elite halls of racial, class, gendered, and ethnic privilege. Educational psychologists in
a reconceptualized discipline can play a key role in researching the ways these hurtful dynamics
manifest themselves in school setting, Scot Evans and Isaac Prilleltensky maintain in their chapter
here. To accomplish such a goal, Evans and Prilleltensky conclude, educational psychologists
must develop a sensitivity to power and structures of inequality. It is in this way that educational
psychologists can help alleviate the suffering caused by equating difference with deficiency. In
the context of these structures of inequality Rochelle Brock’s two highly creative chapters on
race and critical thinking expand our understanding of these dynamics.
CONSTRUCTING, SITUATING, AND ENACTING
Getting beyond the hurtful dimensions of mechanistic educational psychology demands much
work and an engagement with the complexity of the discipline’s domain of inquiry. The authors
and editors of this handbook fervently believe such a move is possible. Numerous important
breakthroughs in the last few decades have empowered critical interpretivists to move to a new
terrain of educational psychology. In the next few sections of this introduction I will lay out
one path to such a terrain. Via the understandings of constructivism, situated cognition, and
enactivism, I believe that the field of educational psychology can be transformed. Drawing
upon the insights generated from these discourses and interpreting them in the bricolage of
multidisciplinary understandings, critical interpretivists can move to a domain that Ray Horn and
I have described as postformalism. In no way do we proclaim that postformalism is the end of
psychological history—of course not. We do suggest, however, it might suggest an important stop
on our journey to a more just, power-sensitive, and scholarly rigorous articulation of educational
psychology.
Our earlier epistemological analysis of constructivism lays the foundation for our critical
interpretivist trek. Constructivist epistemology leads us to a vantage point where we begin to
understand the interaction of individual and context as the construction of more a process than a