Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 37
for the intricacies of the human domain. Physical objects don’t necessarily change their structures
via their interaction with other objects. Postformalism’s critical ontology understands that human
beings do change their structures as a result of their interactions. As a result the human mind
moves light years beyond the lifeless mechanist computer model of mind.
Kathryn Herr picks up on these critical ontological concepts in her chapter in this volume. Such
a relational model, she writes, allows students to move from mechanistic developmental models
based on separation to relational concepts that value human beings’ ability to enter into positive,
growth-producing relationships. With these issues in mind, Herr maintains that this relational
competency catalyzes the development of creativity, autonomy, and assertion. Indeed, she posits,
one comes to learn more about himself or herself via modes of affiliation and connection to other
people. Such a psychology of self holds profound political dynamics, Herr concludes. The linear,
autonomy-focused developmental models of Erik Erikson, for example, are designed to serve the
needs of a free market economy and a “stacked deck” faux-competitive society. A critical ontology
understands that affiliation is not a threat to autonomy. Instead relationship enhances our effort to
build a empowering life where concern and care for others is central to everyone’s best interests.
Learning, of course, takes place in these relational ZPDs—not as a separate, decontextualized,
competitive activity.
Enactivist concepts of structural coupling and coemergence reenter the postformalist cosmos
in this relational ontological context. We are empowered to see beyond individual learners, Tara
Fenwick writes in her chapter, abstracted from the processes and environmental contexts of
which they are a part. “They focus on relations,” she asserts, “not the components, of systems, for
learning is produced within the evolving relationships among particularities that are dynamic and
unpredictable.” Our very identities are shaped by these interactions. Thus, drawing upon these
relational ontological dimensions, postformalists profoundly reshape what it is that educational
psychologists study. David Hung, Jeanette Bopry, Chee Kit Looi, and Thiam Seng Koh in their
chapter in this handbook contribute to these ontological dimensions of educational psychology.
Focusing on ontological relationship, they maintain that purposive behavior involves interconnected
acts connected to physical and social contexts. Change and process are the key features of
these interrelationships, which in their interaction produce a complex whole—a systematic unity
that constitutes a new identity.
Postformalists help construct communities of practice to catalyze these critical ontologies,
these relational selves. Understanding the subtle emergent character of this construction process,
postformalists know that they cannot simply mandate particular relationships and force the construction
of particular learning communities. Individual learners working together must construct
their own communities of practice and their synergistic relationships. Postformal teachers also
know, however, that they can operate to enhance such activities as opposed to impeding them. Understanding
the notions put forth in critical interpretivist educational psychology, postformalism
and critical ontology, empowers educators to enhance rather than impede. In such understanding
“learning that” enters into a dialectical relationship with “learning how.” As is usually the case
different types of knowledge are required to accomplish particular complex tasks. Postformalists
bring the knowledges discussed in this introduction into relationship with the immediacy of
human beings interacting with one another in specific lived contexts.
In this epistemologically informed ontological context—simply put, understanding the way
the produced knowledge shapes the nature of our being in the world—we focus our postformal
attention on Hung, Bopry, Looi, and Koh’s chapter here and its focus on the ontological insights
of Martin Heidegger. If learning is inseparable from meaning making, they contend, then it is also
inseparable from the process of identity formation (being) in a social community. Here, Hung,
Bopry, Looi, and Koh contend, we can begin to distinguish between “learning about” and “learning
to be.” Thus, learning is as much an ontological act as it is an epistemological act. Most school