Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 29
others? Understanding the pluralistic nature of epistemology, postformalists see beyond the onetruth
reductionism of formalism. Understanding, for example, that there are many ways to define
and measure intelligence moves postformalists to engage in a more rigorous analysis of such a
phenomenon.
The procedure-based, decontextualized, epistemologically naïve formalist way of approaching
educational psychology is the method of beginners not of seasoned, rigorous scholars. Just
as physics and biology have retreated from formalist efforts to search for subatomic particles
and genes as the ultimate organizational components of matter and life, psychologists of a
postformal stripe see the mind less as a compilation of neurons and more of a complex set of
processes operating in diverse contexts. Such reductionistic formalist obsessions emerge when
research topics are dehistoricized and decontextualized. This is why postformalists are dedicated
to the study of context. Without such contextualization Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
is put forth as a universal truth, just as relevant for a nineteenth-century woman in an isolated
tribe in an Amazon rainforest as it is for Prime Minister John Howard in twenty-first-century
Australia. Without postformalism’s contextual intervention, Piaget’s formal operational thinking
becomes the standard for measuring the highest order of intelligence for African tribespeople
in rural Namibia as well as for affluent students from the Upper East Side in New York City.
Needs and concepts of higher-order thinking, once historicized and culturally contextualized,
emerge as social constructions. It is hard to discern the footprints of social construction in the
formalist haze.
Picking up on Tara Fenwick’s delineation of experiential learning, postformalists deepen their
appreciation of the importance of experience in the intersection of constructivism, situated cognition,
and enactivism. Carefully examining the interaction of experiential learning in everyday
contexts with particular critical theoretical insights, postformalism traverses a terrain of complexity
leading to new insights about cognition and the forces that shape it. Respecting Fenwick’s
admonitions, postformalists refuse deterministic and elitist orientations that view individuals as
“blind dupes” of social structures. Instead postformalists learn from people’s everyday lived experiences,
always appreciating the need to question anyone’s experience—their own included—for
the role power plays in refracting it. No experience—no matter the context in which it is embedded,
no matter how “theoretically sophisticated” it is deemed to be—is free from the influence
of power. Drawing on insight from experience in postformalism is always accompanied by the
hermeneutic act of interpreting the meanings of such experience in light of particular contexts
and processes. There is nothing simple about experiential learning in postformalism.
The postformal effort to deal with the complexity of experience is intimately connected to
the previously discussed multilogicality of the bricolage. One of the central dimensions of this
multilogicality involves the effort to overcome the monological limits of formalistic science and
its companion, hyperreason. In this context postformalists point out the ways that mechanistic
notions of intelligence and ability have dismissed the insights and contributions of the socially
and economically marginalized and alternative ways of developing found in differing cultural
contexts. Formalism’s lack of respect for those who fall outside its boundaries is unacceptable
in the contemporary world; in this context postformalism constantly pushes the boundaries of
cognition and knowledge production with its emphasis on subjugated knowledges and indigenous
ontologies. In postformalism complexity theory breaks bread with a literacy of power. In the
process a powerful synergy is constructed that shines a new light on the field of educational
psychology.
In postformalism critical social theory works in the trenches with diverse discourses in the
process expanding our understanding of complexity and challenging critical theory itself. In this
context critical theory sees itself in terms of an evolving criticality that is perpetually concerned
with keeping the critical tradition alive and fresh. Such theoretical moves challenge educational