Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Sandra Harding 115
The achievement of a standpoint, by Harding’s definition, involves moving away from the center
of traditional thought to the borderlands. Kincheloe (2001) describes the way Piagetian accommodation
(the restructuring of one’s cognitive maps to deal with an unanticipated event), when
combined with the Frankfurt School’s negation involving criticism and reorganizing of knowledge,
creates a new epistemology. He uses the example of teachers who reach new definitions
of intelligence by observing the sophisticated thinking displayed in other contexts by children
who score low on intelligence tests. “Picking up on these concerns, teachers would critically accommodate
nontraditional expressions of intelligence that would free them from the privileged,
racially and class-biased definitions used to exclude cognitive styles that transcended the official
codes” (Kincheloe, 2001, pp. 246–247). This represents a move toward the borderlands to which
Harding refers.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
The origins of educational psychology as a discipline separate from the main branch of psychology
can be traced back to the mid to late nineteenth century. Its development and fragmentation
from the Herbartian model, through pragmatism, behaviorism, cognitivism, and a host of other
“isms” reflects the dynamic nature of the study of teaching and learning. The dominance of a
theory at any given time, however, can be directly traced to the societal preoccupations of that
time, illustrating the constructed nature of the field. The Herbartians gained a foothold at a time
in the nineteenth century when scientific study and the notion of objective, rational thinking was
gaining ascendancy. Thorndike’s ideas about intelligence and the possibility of its measurement
nicely dovetailed with an increasingly industrialized society in which the early classification of
workers would create smooth-running factories. Intelligence testing also eased the process of military
recruitment during World War I, creating identifiable officer and militia corps. Behaviorism
dominated ed psych for many years, and its impact is still felt in the twenty-first century in the
continued reliance on testing and measurement to determine students’ aptitude and achievement.
The recessive branches of ed psych including pragmatism, constructivism, and humanism, while
gaining some cachet during the twentieth century, suffered from being labeled unscientific, or
subjective.
In her historiography, Harding cites cases where scientific research was clearly not intended
to benefit the general population, but was instead a means of rewarding an elite. This is exemplified
in ed psych where the purpose of study is to identify deficiencies instead of differences,
creating normal and abnormal groups. Benefits then accrue to the normal, while the abnormal are
problematized. For example, not everyone benefits from the notion of measurable IQ. Generally,
those who benefit are those who are deemed by the test to be intelligent, and they don’t need
to think about the consequences of being judged deficient. The debate as to why this question
and not that one is contained in the test, and questions as to how achievement and learning are
defined, are not part of the discussion. Feminist and postcolonial discourse thus point to holes in
this dominant strain of ed psych. Harding asks if social progress for humanity is social progress
for women, or even for all men (Harding 1998). If the purpose of testing is to assign individuals
to their “proper place” in society, how progressive is it to relegate them to a place where they
cannot earn a living wage or afford decent housing?
GAPS BETWEEN DOMINANT AND MARGINALIZED EPISTEMOLOGIES
Harding refers to postcolonial feminisms, not feminism. The distinction is important, because
use of the plural recognizes that gender, class, and race are all intertwined. The issues faced by
a middle-class white girl in a North American suburb are different from those encountered by a