Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

398 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
Wishing to find out more about how this personal contact/closeness, as opposed to the professional
distance teachers typically maintain in the classroom, enhanced Aboriginal student
learning I asked Ned to elaborate on his comment and he said:
Well, I mean, the close contact means personal attention. When they (teachers) come close to you, sometimes
they bend down to your seat level and you tell them your specific problem and they explain and help you.
When you get the point right, sometimes they pat you on the back. They are also more friendly one on
one. . . .
Individualized instruction has been found to have a positive effect on student academic achievement
in general. For these Aboriginal students in particular, individualized instruction appears
to carry added benefit because of its significance in communicating the warmth which they perceived
as important in interactions between them and their teachers. Joe expressed this feeling
best in his closing comment on this aspect of our conversation:
When they (the teachers) are that close and personal you get the feeling they care. . . .
These data do not suggest that all “respectful,” “strict,” and “warm” teachers are good teachers
of Aboriginal students. They do, however, suggest that there are different notions among different
cultural groups about which characteristics make for a good teacher. It is, therefore, impossible
to create a model of the good teacher without taking issues of cultural and community contexts
into account.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
This was a small-scale exploratory research, undertaken to identify aspects of Aboriginal cultural
socialization which mediate/influence the learning of some students of Aboriginal ancestry
in the Canadian formal school system. Four examples of such cultural mediators have been identified
as significant in providing place-conscious education for two groups of Aboriginal students.
Research is still inconclusive about many claims relating to specific or predominant cultural
practices and classroom learning, highlighting the difficulty in arriving at any final “formula”
for helping a cultural group perform better in an educational setting. However, taken together,
these examples signal a vibrant counterpoint to the dominant system of education, which fails
to connect meaningfully to the lives of learners and the communities from which they come.
The examples are, therefore, suggestive of a badly needed conversation about the relationship
between the places we call schools and the places where students live their lives.
The last two decades have seen profound changes in educational psychology that have placed
psychosocial and cultural processes squarely at the center of learning and development. We are
witnessing a resolution of the antimony traditionally heard in discussions about the primacy of
individual psychogenesis versus sociogenesis of mind, in favor of the recognition that learning
and development arise through the interweaving of individual biopsychological processes and the
appropriation of cultural heritage. This new view adds a political dimension to the conversation
as it moves cognitive and educational study from the individual level which hides the effects
of race, socioeconomic status, and culture, to the level where learning and development are
understood within cultural and larger sociopolitical contexts and their effects. The new position
calls for research into what different groups bring to processes of learning and development and
how this interfaces with the culture and practices of the school. In this paper, I have provided an
example of such research, and argued that the design of any study intended to inquire into how
cultural processes mediate and influence learning and development must focus on understanding