Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

34 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
Postformalists thus develop new purposes for educational psychology. They ponder questions
of “what could be” in addition to questions of “what is.” They ask what difference my work can
make at both the social and the individual levels. The development of a critical consciousness
becomes central to the educational psychological enterprise, as professionals carefully analyze
what it means to see behind the curtain of everyday life. As they see behind the curtain they begin
to understand the tacit forces invisible to mechanistic eyes. Defining critical consciousness as
the process of individuals working together to gain awareness of repressive political conditions,
Cathy Glenn in her chapter in this volume discusses the process of respectfully engaging students
in a negotiation of what it might mean to gain and act on a critical consciousness.
In Glenn’s pedagogical process students and teachers work together to interrupt the operations
of dominant power in ways that expose their respective complicity in supporting such frameworks.
While Glenn’s understanding of this delicate process does not necessitate a particular form of
pedagogy, it does demand that students not be treated as passive receptacles of expert produced
truths concerning the nature and effects of power. This theme of the multiplicity of pedagogies
available to accomplish such a delicate educational psychological task is a theme that runs
throughout this handbook. These are complex and ambiguous issues that demand rigorous study,
experiential insights, and profound interpretive labors in our effort to develop effective strategies.
Glenn’s nuanced discussion of the complex pedagogical implications of teaching for the purpose
of developing a critical consciousness constitutes one of the high points of this handbook.
Smartin’ Up: Postformalism and the Quest for New Orders of Cognition
Postformalism understands that intelligence, justice, emotion, activity, disposition, context,
access, power, justice, tools, process, and ethics ad infinitum cannot be separated in the study
of educational psychology. With these connections in mind postformalists warn scholars about
the complexity of the scholarly process they’re about to get into when they seek to engage in
postformal educational psychology. Much is asked of those who enter into this realm. In their
chapter on situated cognition David Hung, Jeanette Bopry, Chee Kit Looi, and Thiam Seng Koh
provide great insight into the complexity of this scholarly process. Indeed, postformalists urge
adherents at every level of theory and practice to enter into research groups, to develop lifelong
learning relationships with those interested in the multiple dimensions of postformal psychology.
As I write about the process of becoming a bricoleur in my work on social, educational,
and psychological research, the multidisciplinarity and multiperspectival demands of the bricolage
cannot be learned in an undergraduate, master’s or PhD. program. Becoming a scholar of
postformalism—like becoming a scholar of the bricolage—is a lifelong learning process. Everytime
I enter a new dimension of postformalism, I feel as if I need to put myself through another
self-taught doctoral program. Lifelong interactive learning relations with other individuals make
the process much easier. My motivation to engage myself and others in this process never wanes,
for we are dealing with one of the central processes of humanness—making ourselves smarter,
more ethical, more sensitive to the needs of others, more active in helping alleviate those needs,
and more aware of the nature of our connections and interrelationships with various dimensions
of the world around us. I want “smartin’ up” in all the complexity that our study of these multiple
and interrelated domains informs us.
In this postformal context as we transcend the “rational irrationality” of formalism and mechanism,
we help students get in touch with what John Dewey called their own “vital logical
movement.” In the history of mechanistic educational psychology it was these forms of analysis
that were denigrated and replaced by formalist logical procedures. In the memorization of these
cut-and-dried logical steps millions of children and young people lost their passion for learning
and growing. Indeed, they dedicated their lives to getting out of learning situations, in the process