Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

26 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
awareness of selfhood. At times in the recent history of cognitive psychology—for example, in
behaviorism—scientists insisted that consciousness did not exist because it did not lend itself
to empirical measurement. Other cognitive perspectives, while not denying its existence three
times before the cock crowed, simply ignored it. Obviously, such approaches to consciousness,
immediate experience, and awareness of selfhood left an unfillable theoretical hole in its wake.
Why, Varela asks, do humans experience the self so profoundly? Just ignoring the hole will not
make it go away.
Informed by enactivism we ask what is the nature of the disjunction between scientifically
validated cognitive theory and our experience of consciousness. Operating on the grounding of
our understanding of consciousness construction, we follow Varela’s description of the emergent
and self-organizing dimensions of selfhood, his notion of the virtual self. The emergent, virtual
self arises out of a maze of relationships—in much the same way hermeneutics describes the
emergence of meaning in the relationships produced by the hermeneutic circle. It has no definable
CPM, no “brain command” where control is coordinated. Consider this cognitive dynamic in
light of our understanding of the cultural politics of the construction of the self. Such a process
operates to create new social, cultural, political, and economic relationships to produce new and
more market-compliant, consumer selves. In this context we begin to understand the pedagogical
implications of the emergent self. The self is infinitely more malleable, more open to change than
we had previously imagined. Given one’s motivation, of course, this dimension of selfhood can
be mobilized for great benefit or manipulated for great harm.
Buoyed by these insights, we enter the arena with a new insight into what can be. We know that
despite the power of generations of cognitive determinists operating under the flag of IQ, human
beings can learn to become more intelligent. Individuals can construct their own intelligence in
a supportive context. And in this context such people understand that selfhood is even more of a
miraculous phenomenon than many had imagined. In the emergent context we gain a perspective;
indeed, to live is to have a point of view. A critical teacher or researcher, however, gains numerous
levels of understanding on the origins of his or her perspective.
Varela writes of a moment-to-moment monitoring of the nature of our selfhood. Such monitoring
involves gaining meta-awareness of the various connections we make to diverse dimensions
of the sociophysical world around us. It involves isolating and letting go of an egocentrism that
blinds us to the virtual and relational nature of our selfhood. In a critical interpretivist educational
psychological context it means avoiding those definitions of higher-order thinking that view it
as an egocentric manifestation of the combative proponent of rationality. In the process we also
elude the cultural and gender inscriptions such perspectives drag along with them. With these
knowledges we are prepared for the struggle to reconceptualize educational psychology.
So critical interpretivists begin to play more focused attention to the ways complex systems
display emergent properties by way of the interaction of simple elements. The structural couplings
that develop in this interaction make possible such emergence. Thus, as Jeanette Bopry posits
in her chapter on Varela, the human nervous system does not pick up information from the
environment. Instead, it makes meaning, it interprets its interaction with its context. This is why
enactivists assert that they don’t see the external environment but their own visual field. To figure
out the significance of what they see in their fields, human beings—according to the enactivists—
must reach out to others for help. How do my perceptions mesh with the perceptions of others?
As Bopry puts it, “we share a reality because we have cospecified it through the coordination of
our actions with the actions of others.” The development of a view of reality takes place in social
interaction—such a view emerges from individuals talking to one another about what they see in
their visual fields.
In Western societies our language constructs a view of worldviews and knowledge about the
world as a “thing” that one deposits in the container of the mind. Thus, knowledge is viewed as