Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

CHAPTER 50
The Buddha View: ReVIEWing
Educational Psychology’s Practices
and Perspectives
PATRICIA A. WHANG
Tracing the growth and development of the field of educational psychology unearths its largely
Eurocentric and patriarchical roots. Consider, for example, the table of contents of a recent book,
Educational Psychology: A Century of Contributions (2003). Fifteen of the nineteen chapters
of this book are profiles of individuals who have made seminal contributions to the field. More
specifically, thirteen of the chapters document the achievements of Caucasian men, all of whom
are American except for Binet, who was French; Vygotsky, who was Russian; and Piaget, who
was Swiss. Maria Montessori and Ann Brown are the only two women profiled and they were
Italian and British, respectively. Calling attention to the token representation of women, the
absence of people of color, and the invisibility of educational psychologists of non-European or
American descent in this book is not meant to diminish the accomplishments of the individuals
profiled. Rather, the point is to contextualize the importance of questioning how the contributions
made by educational psychologists have been constrained by the largely male and Euro-American
perspectives, values, and traditions held by influential members of the field.
This question resonates with me because I am an educational psychologist who is intentionally
positioned on the margins of the field. That is, as an Asian American woman holding a Psychological
Foundations position in a teacher education department, I have struggled to commit my time
and energy to the traditional pursuits of educational psychologists, as reflected, for example, in
the types of articles that get published in the field’s most prestigious journals. This has not always
been the case. As a graduate student I received my doctoral degree in educational psychology
from UC Berkeley and was a student of Arthur Jensen, the prolific and controversial researcher
of intelligence. I was well prepared to continue deploying the experimental methods, quantitative
statistical tools, and theoretical perspectives that I had acquired in graduate school and I did so
for a few years. Despite my growing involvement in the field, I felt a gnawing dissatisfaction
with my intellectual pursuits and yearned to commit my time and energy to endeavors that I was
passionate about and that held personal meaning. For example, as a person of color I see the
need to contribute to a more just, dignified, and sustainable world. My scholarly efforts to make
such a contribution ultimately necessitated trespassing the traditional boundaries of educational
psychology and exploring what other disciplines had to offer in terms of purposes, methods, and
theoretical perspectives.