Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Introduction 33
egocentric culture that is taught to avoid such an orientation. Taking Varela’s question seriously,
postformalists merge their critical orientation with enactivism. Combining their power literacy
with an enactivist effort to enact compassion in the specificity and immediacy of everyday life,
postformalists struggle to transcend egocentrism and move psychological scholarship to a new
domain of political understanding and informed action. At this point Varela’s insights dovetail
synergistically with the cognitive theory of John Dewey.
Dewey was always concerned with connecting the ability to think critically with issues of
ethical sensibility and social reform. Indeed, he was impatient with scholars who sought to
develop grandiose theories and abstract truths outside of any connection to the real life problems
of human beings. Cognitive studies in this critical context can never retreat to the privileged
position of mere contemplation—there must always be an active, operative grounding to such
scholarship. Had they been contemporaries Dewey and Varela could have engaged in a fascinating
conversation around the issue of enacting reflective, contextualized, and critical forms of thinking.
Montserrat Castelló and Luis Botella in this volume challenge educational psychologists to take
up these political challenges, maintaining that any form of ethical practice demands that they
engage in the social debates of their time and place.
One might ask why do relatively few professionals operating in the field of educational psychology
connect their work to such social debates. Obviously, the epistemological and paradigmatic
dynamics discussed throughout this introduction contribute to such inactivity. The political tasks
of postformalism are often hidden from overt view by the power wielders of the contemporary
electronic social condition. In the information saturation of hyperreality power shapes information
and access to dangerous information that challenges the status quo in a covert manner.
Michelle Stack writes in her chapter in this volume about the power of television to represent the
world in particular but in hidden ideological ways. As Stephen Brookfield writes in “Reclaiming
Critical Thinking as Ideology Critique,” we often operate in the midst of ideology without ever
knowing it. Indeed, educational psychologists and many teachers unfamiliar with critical power
theory will often deny the political nature of their professional work. I’m just measuring student
academic performance, psychometricians will tell us. It is the role of postformalists to help such
professionals understand the discursive, ideological, and regulatory dimensions of their work.
Such an effort to bring individuals to a literacy of power is delicate and complex. It must
be undertaken with great respect for the many talents the learner possesses and the unique
knowledges he or she brings to the table. Just as one learns mathematical literacy or technological
literacy, the individual engaged in developing a literacy of power enters into particular power
relationships with the critical teacher. The critical teacher must always be sensitive to the ways
this relationship can be abused and be represented as a simplistic hierarchy as one “in the know”
and one who is ignorant. Postformalists are radical in their pursuit of humility in their efforts to
engage various individuals in a literacy of power in general and in the psychological domain in
particular. It must sensitively and carefully lay out the way that particular ways of conceptualizing
cognition and the role of educational psychology produce a power illiteracy.
As Scot Evans and Isaac Prilleltensky maintain in their chapter here, such an illiteracy renders
individuals unable to “challenge dominant ideas about what society should be like.” Indeed,
they posit, psychological counselors, for example, who lack a power literacy often engage unconsciously
in psychologizing problems in ways that socially and politically decontextualize
their interventions. Such psychologizing leads to strategies that blame the victim for his or her
oppression. Understanding these political dynamics, counselors can operate with an understanding
of connecting the macro and the micro, the social and the individual. Beckoning the spirit
of Dewey, Patricia Whang extends Evans and Prilleltensky’s insights by reminding readers in
her chapter in this volume that education always performs for better or worse particular social
functions. A literacy of power moves us to see beyond the blinders of mechanism’s abstract
individualism.