Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

28 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
the one best suited to limit contradictions in the knowledge produced. Thus, formal thinking
operates on the assumption that resolution must be found for all contradictions. Schools and
standardized testmakers, assuming that formal operational thought represents the highest level of
human cognition, focus their efforts on its cultivation and measurement. Students and teachers
who move beyond such cognitive formalism are often unrewarded and sometimes even punished
in educational contexts.
Humble in their debt to the above-mentioned sociopsychological discourses, postformalists
attempt to politicize cognition. In this context they attempt to remove themselves from the alleged
universalism of particular sociopersonal norms and ideological expectations. The postformal
concern with questions of meaning, emancipation via ideological disembedding, and attention
to the process of self-production moves beyond the formal operational level of thought with its
devotion to proper procedure. Postformalism grapples with purpose, focusing attention to issues of
human dignity, freedom, authority, scholarly rigor, and social responsibility. Many have argued
that postformalism with its bricoleur’s emphasis on multiple perspectives will necessitate an
ethical relativism that paralyzes social action. A critical postformalism grounded on an evolving
criticality refuses to cave in to relativistic inaction. In this context postformalism promotes a
conversation between critical theory and a wide range of social, psychological, and philosophical
insights. This interaction is focused on expanding and constructing self-awareness, new forms of
critical consciousness, and more effective modes of social action.
Thus, in the spirit of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky postformalism is about learning to
think and act in ways that hold pragmatic consequence—the promise of new insights and new
modes of engaging the world. In this context students in postformal schools encounter bodies of
knowledge, not for the simple purpose of committing them to memory but to engage, grapple
with, and interpret them in light of other data. At the same time such students are confronting such
knowledges they are researching and interacting with diverse contexts. They are focused on the
process of making meaning and then acting on that meaning in practical and ethically just ways
(see Sharon Solloway and Nancy Brooks’ important chapter on postformalism and spirituality in
this volume).
Postformal Thinking: Toward a Complex Cognition
Indeed, such students are becoming students of complexity and processes. Postformal students
move beyond encounters with “formal” properties of subject matter. Cartesian logic and the
mechanistic education it supported focused attention on the formal dynamics of defining subject
matter, subdividing it, and classifying it. As Dewey put it in the 1930s in How We Think: in
formal thinking and teaching “the mind becomes logical only by learning to conform to an
external subject matter” (p. 82). The student in this context is told to meticulously reproduce
material derived from arithmetic, geography, grammar, or whatever. The concepts of meaning
making or use in context are irrelevant in the formal context. Thus, as complexity theory would
posit decades after Dewey’s work on cognition: objects in the rearview mirror are more complex
than they may appear.
In the spirit of complexity postformalists understand that since what we call reality is not
external to consciousness, cognition operates to construct the world. It is more important than we
ever imagined (see Horn [2004]). Like cream in a cup of dark roast Columbian coffee, complexity
theory blends well with Dewey’s critique of formalism. Cognitive activity, knowledge production,
and the construction of reality are simply too complex to be accomplished by following prescribed
formulae. The reductionistic, obvious, and safe answers produced by formalist ways of thinking
and researching are unacceptable to postformalists. What are the epistemological and ideological
processes, postformalists ask, that operate to confirm such knowledge claims while disconfirming