Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

22 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
thing-in-itself. As a process this individual-context interaction results more in an ever-changing
mutual modification than an act of producing a “finalized something.” Thus, individual and
context are coconstructed, as they enter into a dynamic interactive process—the human being
changes as does the environment in which he or she operates. Jeanette Bopry in her chapter here
clarifies our understanding of this coconstructivism as she describes perceptions as emerging from
the interaction of a cognitive system with its environment. This interaction in the language of
complexity theory is labeled “structural coupling.” Such a process, Bopry maintains, is recursive
“in that changes in A triggered by B will trigger changes in B which will trigger changes in A.”
Tara Fenwick in her chapter draws upon her own important work in complexity theory to highlight
these insights. The systems shaped by the structural coupling, she maintains, are inseparable as
they create “a new transcendent unity of action and identities.” Such insights hold profound
implications for the future of educational psychology and pedagogy.
For example, the field of neuroscience, John Weaver writes in his chapter on “Neuropolitics,”
illustrates the biological and cognitive importance of structural coupling of the individual and
the environment. Every neuron in the brain is constructed to engage in a particular activity. Yet,
at birth, Weaver contends, all neurons can be employed to perform any task regardless of their
predisposition. Thus, human beings are capable of creating new neural networks to facilitate
their insight into the surrounding cosmos. Educational psychologists can make good use of this
neuroscientific understanding to help teachers and students create new neural matrixes by exposing
them to new and diverse ways of seeing the world. In many ways this is an amazing
scientific insight in that it subverts mechanistic forms of cognitive essentialism that insist humans
cannot “learn intelligence,” that they cannot teach themselves to become smarter. Thus, structural
couplings connecting students with diverse contexts and sociocultural processes produce neurological,
cognitive, political, and ethical benefits. Critical interpretivists use this knowledge in their
larger effort to reconceptualize educational psychology, in the process creating a psychology and
subsequently a pedagogy of optimism and hope.
Thus, this educational psychology of optimism and hope focuses on the importance of these
insights into the interaction of individual and context, the macro and the micro. As David
Hung, Jeanette Bopry, Chee Kit Looi, and Thiam Seng Koh maintain in their chapter, “Situated
Cognition and Beyond: Martin Heidegger on Transformations in Being and Identity,” the whole
is not made up of discrete things-in-themselves but is an interaction of intimately connected
dynamics. The relationship connecting these entities, Hung, Bopry, Looi, and Koh posit, shapes
the meanings they assume. No meaning exists outside of these interrelationships. Indeed, the
mind is shaped by these structural couplings and cognitive activity comes to be understood in
terms of this individual-contextual relationship and the coconstructive process that modifies both.
Knowing in this configuration is always a social process seeking to interpret the meaning of
diverse relationships. Teachers and learners in this complex process always know that there is no
final interpretation. Epistemologically savvy, they realize that they must be humble for all of their
interpretations are incomplete and flawed in ways not discernible in the present sociohistorical
context.
In this interpretivist context, learning, Tara Fenwick in her chapter reminds us, is viewed as
a “continuous invention and exploration, produced through the relations among consciousness,
identity, action and interaction, objects, and structural dynamics of complex systems.” Relationship
in this domain takes on an importance previously unimagined in the psychological sciences.
A quick return to some previously addressed concepts is appropriate in this context. Our previous
discussion of epistemology and positivism’s unquestioned acceptance of a naïve realism becomes
very important in this context. Intimately connected to the positivist epistemology is a positivist
ontology that views the world as a simplistic domain composed of things-in-themselves that
lend themselves to precise empirical measurement. Such an epistemology and ontology allow