Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

118 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
only one correct arrangement of pieces. Data or theories may have multiple explanations that
are reasonable, and this is what provides science with its potential for growth. In conventional
Cartesian epistemology, however, the possibility of multiple explanations is equated with error
and relativism. The idea that truth is not absolute and may depend on context is anathema.
CONCLUSION
If we come, as always, to the dilemma of whether the baby should be thrown out with the
bathwater, Harding responds with a no. The epistemology of modern science, she says, should
be an important part of a new science.
The question should be not how to preserve as if carved in stone or else to completely reject the European
legacy, but rather how to update it so that it, like many other ‘local knowledge systems,’ can be perceived
to provide valuable resources for a world in important respects different from the one for which it was
designed. (Harding, 1998, p. 125)
A “new ‘objectivity question’ ” recognizes that whether the observer knows it or not, observations
are always accompanied by the baggage of theory. Where in the past the question was “Objectivity
or relativism? Which side are you on?” (Harding, 1998, p. 127), a new paradigm examines the
epistemology in which that question is posed, and asks which definitions of objectivity among
many are preferred. The choice is political because science, like education, is always political.
There is no such stance as neutral. A scientific procedure that is identified as “normal” serves to
define “the objections of its victims and any criticisms of its institutions, practices, or conceptual
world as agitation by special interests that threatens to damage the neutrality of science and its
promotion of social progress” (Harding, 1998, p. 133). New objectivity examines the assumptions
and interpretive dimensions of research methods, recognizing that science is a socially, not
individually constructed activity.
Educational psychology, like all of science, is a work in progress. For its practitioners to assume
that it will not change is at best, naïve, and at worst, harmful. But it’s not a question of all or
nothing, the old paradigm or the new. As Harding makes clear, science does not and has never
existed in a vacuum. It cannot help but be impacted by its contact with feminist, postcolonial
thought; in fact the history and development of science shows its hybridity. The same is true of ed
psych. As the discipline interacts with non-Western, non-Northern epistemologies, the resulting
new paradigms represent a change for the better, a change that will benefit those who were
previously merely labeled deficient.
REFERENCES
Harding, S. (1998). Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Epistemologies. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
Harding, S. (1991). Whose Science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press.
Kincheloe, J. L. (2001). Getting Beyond the Facts: Teaching Social Studies/Social Sciences in the Twenty-first
Century (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang.
Kliebard, H. M. (1995). The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893–1958(2nd ed.). New York:
Routledge.
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books.
Spring, J. (2005). The American School: 1642–2004(6th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Webb, L. D. (2006). The History of American Education. Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Pearson.