Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 31
of contexts in which to develop and apply them, the mechanistic tendency to label individuals
as simply “intelligent” or “not intelligent” is an insult both to the field of psychology and the
individuals affected by such crass labels.
Intelligence in the postformal articulation is not a description of the hereditary dimensions of
the CPM and the efficiency of its operation. Understanding complexity, postformalists maintain
that intelligence is more a local than a universal phenomenon. As such, postformalist intelligence
involves diverse individuals responses to challenges that face them in light of particular contexts,
access to cultural amplifiers, cultural capital, and particular tools and artifacts, specific values,
social goals and needs, patterns of construction, linguistic dynamics, and traditions of meaning
making. Thus, the postformal mind is shaped by specific contexts and is constructed by particular
interrelationships in certain domains. It is enacted into existence—that is, it emerges as it acts
in relation to these contexts and domains. Understanding the functioning of this mind is never
certain and easy and measuring it in some quantitative manner is even harder. But that’s okay,
postformalists are comfortable with such complications in the zone of complexity.
Central to this postformalist appreciation of complexity is the general task of understanding
both the situatedness of mind in general and our selves in particular. (See Wolff-Michael Roth’s
powerful chapter, “Situating Situated Cognition,” on the nature of this situatedness of mind.) In
this context we embrace our postformal humility because we come to appreciate just how limited
by time and space, by history and culture our perspectives are. A scholar of any discipline would
always be humbled if she had access to a time machine that allowed her to view scholars from the
twenty-fifth century reading and commenting on her work. And hers was work that was deemed
of sufficient quality to merit comment in 2477! This is one of many reasons that postformalists
value the effort to seek multiple perspectives on everything they do. As I have argued previously
in this introduction, the more diverse the experiences and the positionalities of those issuing the
multiple perspectives the better. In the spirit of subjugated knowledges it is important to gain the
views of individuals from groups that have been marginalized and dismissed from the mainstream
scholarly process.
Thus, complexity demands that postformalists pursue multiple perspectives and multilogical
insights into scholarly production. One dimension of such multilogicality involves tracing the
developmental history of ideas. How was it shaped by tacit assumptions and contextual factors
such as ideology, discourse, linguistics, and particular values? These dynamics are central tasks
in postformal scholarship and pedagogy. Indeed, students’ ability to understand the ways that
ideas and concepts are constructed by a variety of forces and how power is complicit with which
interpretations are certified and which ones are rejected is central to being a rigorous educated
person. Of course, a central contention of postformalism is that hegemonic educational structures
operate to undermine the presence of multiple perspectives in the school. Indeed, one of the most
important goals of many of the educational reforms championed by right-wing groups in Western
societies over the last few decades has been the elimination of such “dangerous” perspectives
from the school. With the victory of these forces in the United States embodied in the appointment
of George W. Bush to the presidency in 2000, policies based on these exclusionary practices have
been institutionalized.
Thus, the multilogical goals of postformalism have suffered a setback. As George Dei and
Stanley Doyle-Wood and Montserrat Castello and Luis Botella maintain in their chapters in this
volume, educational psychology must realize the limitations and monologicality of traditional
sources within the discipline. In this context Susan Gerofsky in her chapter on research in educational
psychology writes of the need for interdisciplinarity to broaden the field’s access to diverse
perspectives. The point in all of these chapters fit into the postformalist critical interpretivist
notion of the future of educational psychology. To move forward the field must see the psychological
domain from outside of a white, Eurocentric, patriarchal, class elitist position. Some of