Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

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diverse patterns of growth and activity of such movements defy explanation limited to notions
of educating consciousness. Multiple interactions at different systemic levels leading out from
disturbance, influenced by system shocks, desire, diversity among system parts, and mediators
such as Internet communication, are evident in recent movements such as transnational advocacy
networks protesting multilateral-trade agreements. People are not necessarily docile dupes of
capitalism. They struggle against forces that threaten their freedom.
Social action demonstrates processes of collective experiential learning that emerge through
struggle. Case studies of social action refute notions of rational critical deliberation that reframes
“distorted understandings” and “false ideology.” Radical transformation of both social order and
consciousness, as praxis or dialectic of thought and action, appears to be embedded in complex
systems interacting, adapting, and influencing one another: the body politic, diverse collective
bodies, and persons as body biologic. In other words, as people enact solidarity, strategizing and
learning together about unjust social arrangements in a choreography of action, they recognize new
problems and possibilities for action. Each action opens alternate micro-worlds, while expanding
people’s confidence and recognition of the group’s capacity to influence other systems. This
experiential learning is continually inventive, and also filled with conflict and contradiction.
Then, how is the educator implicated in these processes? Radical action emerges in social
movements in ways that it cannot in schools and postsecondary institutions, themselves contested
spaces of transformative and reproductive impulses, to create spaces for inventive transgressive
knowledge and alternate visions for society. Some have argued that an important catalyst for
radical impulse within education institutions lies in its alliance with social movements: just as
institutions need the political energy and grounded struggle that social action engenders, social
movements need the resources of formal education. This might be not just a plea for collaboration,
but also perhaps as a complexified awareness that struggle and social change is possible when
educators view themselves as diverse parts of the system, not its rescuer, and when mutual
interaction and adaptation is enabled with other system parts.
These theoretical dimensions of coemergence, desire, and struggle explored through complexity
science, feminist/psychoanalytic theory, and collective social action encourage a view beyond
individual learning subjects separate from the objects of their environments and the objects of
their thoughts, to understand knowledge as constantly enacted as they move through the world.
They focus on the relations, not the components, of systems, for learning is produced within
the evolving relationships among particularities that are dynamic and unpredictable. They help
explain how part and whole cospecify one another, and how participation in any shared action
contributes to the very conditions that shape these identities.
These dimensions offer a way out of the individualization and fragmentation that can lead to
commodification of experiential learning in the classroom and the workplace. They also suggest
useful starting points for conceiving roles for educators in experiential learning. Rather than
limiting their focus to planning experiential occasions and assessing the learning produced in
experiences, educators might think of themselves, their classroom activities and texts, and learners
as part of experiential activity systems. These intersect simultaneously with each other’s and many
other sub- and suprasystems, influencing and being influenced by one another, in learning that is
ongoing and expansive, at biologic, psychic, social, and political levels.
TERMS FOR READERS
Cartesian—Referring to ideas of Rene Descartes, 1596–1650, who proposed in his longinfluential
Principles of Philosophy that material substances (bodies) and mental substances
(thought) both exist, but do so separately as quite distinct entities.