Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

120 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
teachers taught black students through life in the black community—a practice that necessarily
incorporated antiracist and liberation struggle pedagogy. However, with desegregation into white
schools, “knowledge was suddenly about information only,” teaching was disassociated from
“respect and care for the souls of students,” and learning was distanced from knowledge of “how
to live in the world” (hooks, 1994). This disjunction between lived experiences and schooling
and disjunctions among the mind, body, and soul would follow her, with exceptions, to her
undergraduate days at Stanford and graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Many of her transgressive acts—being “bad” in
the academy by challenging dominant cultural constructions and conventionally approved ways
of thinking and knowing—as both student and teacher emanate from her visions for democracy,
equity, and justice. She has been “inspired by those teachers who have had the courage to
transgress those boundaries that would confine each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach
to learning” (hooks, 1994). It is this courage that she carries into her own teaching, first as a
graduate student, then as an assistant/associate professor at Yale University and Oberlin College,
and finally to her resignation from the academy as a distinguished professor at The City College
of the City University of New York. With the radical notions that teachers should care for their
students’ souls and that theoretical knowledge should be inextricably linked to knowledge of how
to live in the world, hooks argues for a pedagogy and an educational psychology that is engaged,
transformative, liberatory, and culturally responsive.
Reintegrating body, mind, and soul and reconnecting theory to practice in schooling are
transgressive, counterhegemonic acts that deeply challenge formalistic thinking. “The erasure
of the body encourages us to think that we are listening to neutral, objective facts, facts that
are not particular to who is sharing the information” (hooks, 1994). The reverence of neutrality,
objectivity, and rationalism upon which Western science rests demands that components be
isolated from the systems that they comprise: the mind can therefore be separated from the
body; social structures can be removed from schooling; and race, class, gender, language, and
sexual orientation have nothing to do with how learners perceive the world. Knowledge is a
stable, predictable, “out there” thing waiting to be discovered and teachers facilitate its discovery
through information giving. In The Stigma of Genius: Einstein, Consciousness, and Education,
Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, and Deborah Tippins (1999) contend that reductionistic Western
science asserts that all aspects of complex phenomena can best be understood through a process
that essentially centrifuges constituent parts and then pieces them back together according to
causal laws. Just as Newton separated time, space, matter, and motion, formalistic thinking in
schooling separates the social, the political, and the economic from the mind, intelligence, and
performance in school. Applying scientific, formalistic processes such as these to education results
in nothing short of disengagement by teachers and students, reinforcement of the status quo, and
subjecting all students to predetermined, ahistoricized, and purified (whitened) knowledge. Has
this scientific approach to education—one that reduces knowledge to memorizable factoids, one
that distances teachers and students from each other and the curriculum, one that isolates school
from society—been maintained in order to prevent schooling from becoming dangerous, from
becoming a place where transgressive and counterhegemonic acts are allowed to occur?
Classrooms and schools are always and already inscribed with power: they are politicized and
contested spaces that reflect a struggle for culture production, which includes the production of
knowledge. In these contested educational spaces, sanctioned ways of being and knowing (those
that reflect the dominator) render some students more visible and more easily heard than others.
hooks calls for a radical pedagogy grounded in presence through which classrooms become
spaces that acknowledge teacher and student positionality, require shared personal experiences
that are linked to theory, and demand inclusion. This is a particular type of multiculturalism,
one that “compels educators to acknowledge the narrow boundaries that have shaped the way