Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

38 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
learning in a mechanistic context, they continue, is about committing to memory preexisting
knowledge domains—the truth of scientifically based disciplines. In learning to be, the authors
maintain, individuals become members of communities of practice, in the process constructing
a new relational identity. Katheryn Kinnucan-Welsch in her chapter on teacher professional
development considers these ideas in relation to the effort to improve teacher education.
This relational identity plays a central role in constructing what it is that a student learns.
We can see this ontological dynamic play out in schools on a daily basis as students who enter
particular youth subcultures where the changes in their identities profoundly shape not only what
they know about the world but also how they see both the world and themselves. This is a profound
learning experience. Thus, we cannot see learning and being apart from our contexts. Thus, we
are not self and world in the way coffee is in a can. The self is the world and the world is the
self in a critical ontology. Human being cannot be understood outside of sociopolitical context,
postformalism asserts. This is a subtle proposition. As Hung, Bopry, Looi, and Koh remind us,
“although being can be phenomenologically perceived separately from the world, being exists or
takes meaning only in relation to the world.”
In this context the absurdity of the way IQ tests have been developed and used comes into
clear focus. Constructed as measures of the individual’s ability, their failure to account for the
connection between the individual and the contexts of which he or she is a part renders them
useless. If the individual and his or her cognitive orientations are shaped by this being-in-theworld,
psychological tests miss the origins and causes of why individuals display particular
cognitive characteristics. They attribute to nature what is a manifestation of particular social,
political, economic, cultural, and historical relationships. Thus, postformalism views the self and
the development of selfhood and cognitive ability in new and exciting ways. In his chapter on
transformative learning Edward Taylor argues that these dynamics create a dramatic rupture with
the past. Our relational ontological perspectives provide us with a new way of understanding the
way individuals relate to the world around them.
CONCLUSION: THE LARGER STRUGGLE
As it integrates the powerful insights emerging from the interpretivist tradition in educational
psychology, constructivism, situated cognition, enactivism, and multiple forms of criticality,
postformal pushes the cognitive envelop. I find great hope in these ideas as they provide a
compelling way out of the dead end of mechanistic educational psychology. As I write this
introduction in the repressive political atmosphere of the first decade of the twenty-first century,
the attempt to escape mechanistic educational psychology and the regressive, antidemocratic
sociopolitical and educational system it is used to support has never been more important. Ray
Horn and I along with the brilliant authors included in this volume hope that this work contributes
to the effort to escape these authoritarian, antidemocratic, and inegalitarian impulses of the present
era. If it does then we will have considered it a great success.
TERMS FOR READERS
Bricolage—The French word “bricoleur” describes a handyman or handywoman who makes
use of the tools available to complete a task. Some connotations of the term involve trickery and
cunning and are reminiscent of the chicanery of Hermes, in particular his ambiguity concerning the
messages of the gods. If hermeneutics came to connote the ambiguity and slipperiness of textual
meaning, then bricolage can also imply imaginative elements of the presentation of all formal
research. I use the term here in the way Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (2000) employ it