Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

468 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
implication is that cognition is not seen to occur strictly inside an agent. Cognition, rather, is used
to refer to all active processes—internal and external to the cognizing agent—that are part of its
ongoing adaptive actions. The processes of cognition are the processes of life.
As with all complexity and ecological discourses, enactivism rejects the assumption of a core,
essential, inner self. Instead, personal identity is seen to arise in the complex mix of biological
predisposition, physical affect, social circumstance, and cultural context as the agent copes with
the contingencies of existence. The term enactivism is intended to highlight the notion that
identities and knowledge are not ideal forms, but enactments—that is, embodied in the nested
interactivities of dynamic forms. Life and learning are thus understood in terms of explorations
of ever-evolving landscapes of possibility and of selecting (not necessarily consciously) actions
that are adequate to situations.
A further aspect of enactivism, and one that is particularly relevant in discussions of human
cognition, is the notion of languaging. Understood in complexity terms, language is an emergent
phenomenon that exceeds the agents who language. It arises in the interactions of agents and, in
turn, conditions the interactions of agents. The gerund languaging (versus the noun language)is
used to point to the open-endedness of language. Like knowing–knowledge, doing–action, and
being–existence, languaging–language is in no way a finished form. It is constantly arising and
adapting.
A key aspect of languaging is recursivity. Humans have the capacity to language about
language—an endlessly elaborative process that seems to be vital to knowledge production
and to the emergence of consciousness (see Donald, 2001). Our abilities to self-reference—that
is, to cleave our individual selves from one another and from our contexts—is clearly amplified
by, if not rooted in, our language. In this regard, enactivism has much in common with twentiethcentury
poststructuralist and many postmodern discourses. The main differences have to do with
attitudes toward scientific inquiry and persistent reminders that we are biological beings whose
habits of interpretation, while enabled by sophisticated languaging capacities, are conditioned by
the way humanity evolved in and is coupled to a physical world. Even humanity’s most abstract
conceptual achievements are understood to be tethered to the ground of biologically conditioned
experience.
COMPLEXITY, ECOLOGY, ENACTIVISM, AND THE PRAGMATICS
OF TRANSFORMATION
Through most of the twentieth century, it was not uncommon to encounter descriptions of
psychology as the “science of education.” With the pervasive assumption that psychology was
the only domain devoted to the study of learning, most major faculties, colleges, and schools of
education in North America came to be organized around departments of educational psychology.
Such organizational structures continue to be common, even though a host of other fields and
discourses have entered the discussion on the nature of learning and learners. Indeed, whereas
psychology once dominated, among educationists it now plays a minor role.
At present, the influence of psychology on discussions of learning and teaching is perhaps
most prominently represented in Piagetian-based theories of child development and children’s
construction of understanding. These constructivist theories are typically considered alongside
social constructionist and critical theories, and they are commonly critiqued for their failure to
attend to the social and cultural character of knowledge and identity.
Complexity science offers another frame for considering the complementarities and incongruities
of these sorts of theories. It offers that constructivism, constructionism, and critical
theories—among a host of others currently represented—might be distinguished as each being
concerned with a particular body. Constructivism is focused on the individual, biological body.