Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

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Despite such deep-rooted structures, many students and teachers defy the culture of domination
through transgressive, hopeful acts that promote counterhegemonic ways of being and knowing
that willingly surrender to complexity and diversity of a beloved community. hooks states, “To
me the classroom continues to be a place where paradise can be realized, a place where all that
we learn and know leads us into greater connection, into greater understanding of life lived in
community” (hooks, 2003). Her prophetic imagination reminds us “that what we cannot imagine
we cannot bring into being” and that “what must be takes priority over what is” (hooks, 2003).
This imagination has the potential to reconnect what has long been severed and to force us to
confront what we fear. “Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose
safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what
connects us, reveling in our difference; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a
world of shared values, of meaningful community” (hooks, 2003).
As Joe Kincheloe writes in the introduction to this text, “Cognitive activity, knowledge production,
and the construction of reality are simply too complex to be accomplished by following
prescribed formulae. The reductionistic, obvious, and safe answers produced by formalist ways
of thinking and researching are unacceptable to postformalists.” In this light, hooks’s scholarly
contributions to postformalist educational psychology are clear and profound. Her call for engaged
and transformative pedagogy, new conceptions of love, and the creation of beloved, hopeful
community demand connections between the knower and known and compel ways of knowing
to change our ways of being in the world. Prescribed, formulaic approaches to teaching, learning,
and knowledge have created chasms among all aspects of education and schooling and seek to
disguise the impact of power on what has been sold as objectivity. Above all, I contend that
it is hooks’s delving into the critical ontological realm that has contributed to postformalism.
Again, from the introduction to this text, “In a postformalist critical ontology we are concerned
with understanding the sociopolitical construction of the self in order to conceptualize and enact
new ways of being human.” For hooks, new ways of being human are inextricably linked
to transgressive, counterhegemonic, countercultural acts that offset white supremacy and patriarchy.
Construction of the self occurs in a complex dance with others. “Living on the borderline
between self and external system and self and other, learning never takes place outside of these
relationships.” hooks dares to imagine a psychological world in which relationships are crucial
and in which challenge to the external system is critical for change. Without an excavation of
the processes of knowledge production, knowledge loses its eroticism and passion, becoming
sterile and fixed. Developing beloved community reintroduces the connectedness necessary for
education psychology to become both life affirming and sustaining.
REFERENCES
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
———. (2001). All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Paperbacks.
———. (2003). Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge.
Kincheloe, J., Steinberg, S., and Tippins, D. (1999). The Stigma of Genius: Einstein, Consciousness, and
Education. New York: Peter Lang.