Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

598 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
is similarly structured and tiered into hierarchies of intelligence and social worth. This reality
constructs particular defenses and expectations in behavior, attitudes, and dispositions most likely
unbeknownst to most students and faculty or staff. If asked some would probably articulate their
boredom, apathy, failure, pressure, lostness, or success and excitement. The more time students
spend in such schools and classrooms the more these less than perfect environments seem natural
and as they “should” be. An alternative is far from imaginable, courage to risk something
different is nonexistent, and the cycle continues. The memories accumulated through the years
(K–12) sediment the normativity of these experiences and the significance of school success or
failure in a young person’s life. When we delve into the psychology of school and schooling,
not just cognitive psychology, we can focus on restructuring the psychological consequences of
getting schooled. By understanding the psychology of memories, memories that are constructed
through more than twelve years dictating how to know, then this awareness can produce proactive
pedagogical reform, particularly of the learning environment. This perspective can not be reduced
to pop psychology, but rather taken seriously as an opportunity to rethink, reconceptualize
the artificial borders built between individual and community, self and other, and cognition and
emotion as discussed by the book editors. The structure of schooling, schedules, curriculum, and
the interactions with teachers, peers, or caretakers all contribute to the quality and intensity of
memories. In closely examining the psychological dimensions of memories all of the above exert
important influences in rethinking the connection between memory, educational psychology,
and pedagogy. Educators in the twenty-first century must carefully attend to the nuances and
possibilities unearthed by this reconceptualization.
REMEMBERING AND REMEMBRANCE
For learning to resonate with us, for us to retain it long enough to make meaning from it, and
apply it to everyday living, there has to be a reason to remember. We tend to make remembering
the linchpin to existing in a life of value. Think of the many individuals living with physical and
psychological conditions that result in memory impairments or loss, which deem them unable
to take care of themselves or classify them as a danger to themselves. Practices of control are
implemented in the name of safety and the individual grows swiftly ill prepared to take care
of the self. The apparent loss of memory should not impair or create a loss in connection,
motivation, purpose, or identity. Sometimes individuals with impaired memory recall the past
vividly but have trouble locating the present. Slowly, of course, the physical or psychological
condition may deteriorate the past as well. But we become extremely upset when loved ones or
we can’t remember names or can’t generate the appropriate emotions to display on cue. Anger
or frustration results as the asynchronicity increases between the reality of the individual and the
external/social world. As a society we rely on the use of our memory significantly to negotiate
our identity on a daily basis and to connect to others, events, or things.
Huyssen defines remembrance as an essential human activity that shapes our connections
to the past and the ways we remember shape us in the present. Remembrance, according to
Huyssen, constructs and anchors our identity. Memories have a past, present, and future. Based
on our experiences and our psychological and intellectual states at the moment of remembering,
forgetting, and engaging we have the capacity to rewrite any given event for ourselves. Yet when
we produce insight or learning the opportunity exists to rewrite/reembody our comprehension
and engagement. Remembrance can be a pedagogical strategy to deter the repetition of unlearned
lessons in history. Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert assert that remembrance, inherently pedagogical,
is implicated in the formation and regulation of meanings, feelings, perceptions, identifications,
and the imaginative projection of human limits and possibilities. The use of memories in the