Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 27
something contained in vocabulary, written documents, databases, etc. Drawing on Varela and
Bopry, critical interpretivists understand knowledge is too complex to be simply contained. Bopry
puts it succinctly: “Within the enactive framework knowledge is effective action within a domain.”
Indeed, knowledge is always constructed (enacted) within a context. Thus, this enacted view of
knowledge reshapes our view of intelligence. Intelligence is no longer equated simply with the
ability to solve pre-given and well-structured problems. In an enactivist context it involves one’s
capacity to construct frameworks of understanding that resonate with and extend the insights of
others. Bopry is quick to point out in this context that the networks created in this context do
not have to be the same as everyone else’s. There is room for disagreement and diversity of the
worlds of understanding that human beings create. The key point is that the frameworks of insight
different individuals create resonate, that is, it engenders thought and positive interchange among
groups of interpreters.
Given our epistemological insights critical interpretivists understand that this enactivist understanding
of intelligence with its frameworks of insight does not mean that intelligent people
recover a pre-given, objective reality. Thus, as Varela insists, cognition is constructed not by
representations of true reality but by embodied action in lived contexts. This means that the world
is enacted, made in the everyday activities of human beings interacting with their environments.
The everyday world of humans is a cosmos of situated individuals, perpetually having to devise
their next steps in light of the contingency of the next moment.
Contrary to mechanistic psychological precepts, this ongoing configuration of what to do is
not a rationalistic selection process among a pre-given smorgasbord of possible courses of action.
It can more accurately be described as a never-ending improvisational performance in an everchanging
environment. Definitions of intelligence and even ethical action do not amount to much
if they are merely abstract principles that are separated from the necessity of figuring out what
to do in immediate situations. Outside of these immediate contexts definitions of intelligence,
precepts for professional performance, and rules for ethical action become stale utterances and
banal homilies of the cloistered scholastic. Such pronouncements like the seed of Onan fall on
barren ground.
MOVING TO THE CRITICAL: POSTFORMALISM
Drawing upon the innovations delineated by the long tradition of interpretivism, the psychological
work of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky, cultural psychology, the paradigmatic analyses
of Ken Gergen, constructivism, situated cognition, and enactivism, Shirley Steinberg and I have
worked over the last fifteen years to develop a critically grounded foundation for educational
psychology. Incorporating insights from feminist theory, African-American ways of seeing, subjugated
knowledges, the ethical concerns of liberation theology, and a variety of critical theories
from the Frankfurt School, Paulo Friere, and critical pedagogy to particular post-discourses, we
have sought to provide a contemporary critical interpretivist educational psychology grounded
on a multilogical version of scholarly rigor and a concern for social justice.
This postformalism also draws on the work of Jean Piaget, although parting company with
him around the importance of the social and questions of the universality of Western science.
Piaget’s formal thinking implies an acceptance of a mechanistic worldview that is caught in
a linear, reductionistic, cause–effect form of reasoning. Unconcerned with questions of power
relations and the way they structure our consciousness, Piaget’s “higher-order formal operational
thinkers” accept an objectified, unpoliticized way of knowing that breaks a social, educational,
or psychological system down into its component parts in order to understand how it works.
Aggrandizing certainty and prediction, formal thinking organized certified facts into universal
theories. The facts that do not fit into the theory are jettisoned, and the theory developed is