Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 23
psychologists and teachers to evade a confrontation with complexity and operate in the shadow of
reductionism. Such naivete undermines the scholarly rigor of educational psychology, rendering
acts of penetrating insight, contextual analysis, and interpretive genius irrelevant. Knowledge is
produced by following positivist procedure not by analyzing phenomena in new contexts and as
parts of unseen processes.
Psychologists who embrace these positivist epistemologies and ontologies study an objective
world and its contents as isolated phenomena. In this naïve realist framework things-in-themselves
wait around like belles at the ball for a knower to arrive and “discover” them via use of the
correct research method. Such a system shapes not only the production of knowledge but the
reception of knowledge as well. Naïve realism fosters the faith that knowledge discovery is the end
of the research and learning process. After researchers, teachers, and students “know” one of
these things-in-themselves, they have nothing more to learn. Thus, in this epistemological and
ontological context the purpose of learning is to obtain the “truths” already certified and commit
them to memory.
In the world of mechanistic psychology’s naïve realism all of our work on the interaction of
whole and parts, process, structural coupling, complexity, interrelationship, power, and justice is
irrelevant to the real work of the discipline. Returning to Tara Fenwick’s important contributions
to these ideas, the interpretivist concerns laid out here set up the possibility of inspired human
action. The more teachers and learners understand about the interactions of complex systems,
the more empowered they are to participate in creative shared action. What I have referred
to elsewhere as a “critical ontology” holds particular importance in this context. If we better
understand the constructed, situated, and enacted nature of humans “being-in-the-world,” then
we appreciate that—in the words of Hung, Bopry, Looi, and Koh—we construct “the world by
living in it.”
Being-in-the-world demands that we constantly learn and interpret. Critical interpretivist educational
psychologists take these ideas seriously as they attempt to better understand both the
knowledge production and learning processes. These tasks cannot be performed rigorously and
justly without engaging diverse and multiple levels of analysis. Scot Evans and Isaac Prilleltensky
are helpful in their delineation of what these levels involve: “personal, interpersonal, organizational,
community, and social.” For teachers and students to learn, to develop a sense of democratic
sensitivity and social justice, and to develop a satisfactory balance of a wide variety of needs,
they must engage with all of these levels. It is disconcerting to note that mechanistic psychology,
operating in its positivistic framework, excludes such interaction as an act of degradation to the
sanctity of scientific work.
INTERPRETIVISTS DRAWING ON THE POWER OF SITUATED COGNITION
Critical interpretivists carefully study and learn numerous lessons from situated cognition which
emerged in the 1980s as a challenge to mechanistic cognitivism. Led by psychologists such as
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, situated cognition insisted that we would learn far more about
the cognitive process if we focused more attention on practical forms of thinking found among
everyday people in everyday pursuits. Such research is important on many levels, not the least of
which it would help move such psychologists away from their obsession with the computer model
of the human mind. In this context situated cognitivists examined on the cognitive processes of
workers engaged in vocational pursuits around the world. In these imminently practical contexts
situated cognitivists came to understand in great clarity the way that mechanistic educational
psychologists had become obsessed with producing a model of the vehicle in which cognitive
activity takes place, in the process missing the activity itself.