Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

436 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
could include the work ethic, the industrial revolution, the globalization of the world economy,
and the teacher accountability movement; in other words a range of linked items from the very
small object to larger social forces.
WHERE TO FOR READINESS?
I do not mean to imply here that a focus on development is wrong, because in most cases a
single teacher may be working with a number of students and attempting to give each child tasks
that “stretch” them beyond the skills and ideas already accomplished. It is the larger cultural
“script” about appropriate times and ages that I think we could reflect on more tentatively and
with greater openness.
So what does this mean for a perspective on developmental readiness? Most teachers have
probably already experienced some sense of “postmodern” fragmentation in dealing with students
who might differ from day to day depending on all kinds of things outside the school’s doors.
Janey, a middle-class Puerto Rican ten-year-old who was so involved in reading a book about
insects yesterday, may be listless, lost in some unknowable thoughts today, while fourteen-yearold
Damien, from a poor German/English background, may show intense enthusiasms about
sports that are never seen in his math classes. Instead of seeing these children as bodies moving
up and down daily on a hierarchy of school success (dipping more over time toward the “dropout”
end), their passions, desires, and knowledges could be part of a larger assemblage beyond an
individual body. Janey instead is hooked into the collective world of insects and forest ecology,
while Damien is linked with the eyes and twitching hands and feet of soccer players on the field
or on a videogame screen.
Let’s return to the teacher, assisting the student in a footrace from the sidelines, on standby
with the water or orange juice, trying to find just the right moment of “readiness” in the runner’s
progress to pass on what was needed to speed the runner’s progress. Given some of the issues
raised by postmodern and cultural questions about development, this imaginary teacher might
leave the runners and see herself choreographing a village fair or school sports day in which
there are multiple activities going on at the same time, with all kinds of different goals and
achievements. Instead of focusing on an individual on a solitary path of development, the teacher
might instead be part of a team of adults that includes parents and caregivers, extended family,
social workers, ministers, educational psychologists, medical staff, youth aid workers and perhaps
many others who know these particular students and their siblings. All these adults might be there
on the school playground among students of all ages—such as might be painted by Pieter
Breughel, the sixteenth-century Dutch painter of crowded village scenes. This may be a picture
of school life you already have in mind, quite in keeping with the hectic nature of life these
days, rather than the soft-focus lens aiming toward the single teacher and student working
together.
Of course at the end of the day teachers and school psychologists must write reports commenting
on the progress of individual students, perhaps suggesting interventions to students and their
parents and caregivers. This reality of individual scrutiny, often with comparison to some linear
timeline of developmental appropriateness, cannot be waved away so easily. It is difficult to know
what Deleuze and Guattari might have said to educational psychologists, but their work is—if
anything—unashamedly pragmatic and cognizant of the constraints people operate under. One
possibility is that in the writing of the report, or in the filing of the case notes on a difficult student,
there is much more than a positive statement about a student’s potential. There could also be
greater openness, and acceptance of the mysterious unknowability of all the lines of flight that