Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

266 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
constructions, since it does not reveal to us directly but through the templates that we create and
then attempt to fit over the world.
The constructivist conception of knowledge as an anticipatory construction is explicit in PCP’s
fundamental postulate: a person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which
he or she anticipates events. PCP also shares the constructivist notion of predictive efficiency as
an epistemic value.
Finally, what we call relational constructivism constitutes our attempt to press the dialogue
between constructivism and social constructionism further and to enrich it with the voice of
narrative and postmodern approaches. It is based upon the following nine interrelated propositions,
all of them sharing the aforementioned set of constructivist metatheoretical principles:
1. Being human entails construing meaning.
2. Meaning is an interpretative and linguistic achievement.
3. Language and interpretations are relational achievements.
4. Relationships are conversational.
5. Conversations are constitutive of subject positions.
6. Subject positions are expressed as voices.
7. Voices expressed along a time dimension constitute narratives.
8. Identity is both the product and the process of self-narrative construction.
9. Psychological processes are embedded in the process of construing narratives of identity.
Even this sketchy discussion of different constructivist theories shows some features of the
contemporary constructivist scene that we will focus on in the next pages.
First, not all of the constructivist approaches have the same theoretical status. Some of them
constitute formal theoretical systems (e.g., PCP, Piaget’s theory), while others are younger and,
therefore, less developed.
Second, while all of the approaches mentioned broadly share a common conception of knowledge
as a construction and nonjustificationist epistemic values, their mutual compatibility at
subordinate levels is sometimes controversial. For instance, social constructionism and PCP differ
in their relative emphasis on the social versus personal origin of construing. However, some
PCP theorists have recently tried to reconcile both approaches by proposing a social constructivist
psychology. Such reconciliation is also the explicit intention of our own efforts to articulate a
relational constructivist framework in the realm of psychotherapy and a socio-constructivist one
in the realm of educational psychology.
Similarly, some authors who even suggested that Piaget’s philosophical assumptions are not
constructivist (since the assimilation/accommodation process means that we can experience outer
reality and distinguish it from our inner world) have questioned the compatibility between Piaget’s
approach and PCP. However, Piaget’s approach has been included in our discussion because it
has been explicitly characterized as constructivist by some other authors and is one of the most
influential authors to first consider children as meaning makers. Thus, we are not suggesting that
all constructivist theories constitute a unified whole, but that they share a superordinate core of
metatheoretical assumptions. This shared metatheoretical core allows the ongoing exploration
of cross-fertilizations between different constructivist approaches, the final goal being not an
overarching unification but the increasing complexity of constructivist thought.
CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACHES TO EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
Before proceeding to specify the characteristics of the main constructivist approaches to
educational psychology we need to locate it within the framework of constructivist epistemology.