Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

652 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
continue to destroy) human creativity in the context of our relations with our social and natural
environments.
In colonial relations of power, hegemonic knowledges have allowed colonizers to secure
their dominance through a fictional creation of sameness and commonality at the expense of
difference and heterogeneity. To discuss therefore, the possibilities of educational change in North
America we must first understand the power of discursive interruptions to conventional practices
of schooling that fail to account for difference in relation to ethnicity, gender, class, religion,
language, and culture. Such identities are inextricably linked to schooling and to knowledge
production. To understand the nature and extent of colonial/colonized discourse and practice at
school we must interrogate and hear the voices of different subjects as they speak about their
schooling experiences. Colonialism when read as imposing and dominating never ceased with
the return of political sovereignty to colonized peoples or nation states. Indeed, today colonialism
and recolonizing projects are (re)produced in variegated ways. For example, within schools the
manifestation of this process takes place in the different ways knowledges get produced and
receive validation, and the particular experiences of students who are counted as (in)valid in
contrast to the identities of those that receive recognition and response from school authorities
and discursive curricular practice. Through an examination of the power dynamics implicit in the
evocation of culture, histories, knowledges, and experiences of the diverse bodies represented
in the school system, we see how colonialism and colonial relations can be masked under the
conventional processes of knowledge production and validation. In other words we are speaking
of questions that seek answers to who counts, what counts, and why, in terms of different
knowledges, multiple ways of knowing, identities, and experiences.
EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY CRITIQUE AND BRIEF
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
Historically, the field of mainstream educational psychology has viewed teaching and learning
through a cultural lens that is predominantly Eurocentric in nature. Consequently, its conceptualization
of how people learn, think, and develop ways of knowing in relation to their natural/social
world, rests largely on post Enlightenment notions of deductive reasoning, cause and effect,
stimulus/ response, and sensory/cognitive definitions and understandings of intelligence and
knowledge acquisition. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), for example, argued that the cognitive
connections a person makes between particular concepts is correlative to the frequency
with which they are encountered (Driscoll, 1994). So for example the mental response a person
may make to the stimulus of bread with the mental idea of butter will be governed by the
number of times the person has experienced these two concepts in association with each other.
In other words, learning and remembering is contingent upon frequency and repetition. Edward
Thorndike (1874–1949)—the “father of educational psychology”—in pursuing the theory of
stimulus/reflexive response, asserted that when a mental connection is made between a given
situation and a response, the strength of the connection is increased as it is further used, practiced,
or exercised (Joncich, 1962). Thus, the child who says “apple” at every sight of the fruit increases
(according to Thorndike) his or her tendency to think and say apple at its every future appearance.
The notion of stimulus and reflexive response with regard to learning became associated in
turn with the idea that within all animal organisms a basic learning mechanism exists that can be
conditioned by socio-environmental factors. The most notable example of this theory to be studied
under experimental conditions can be found in the work undertaken by Ivan Pavlov (1849–1946).
In his experiments with dogs Pavlov observed that after several experiences of hearing a tone just
before food was placed in its mouth, the dog would begin to salivate in response to the tone even
before it received any food (Driscoll, 1994). From then on the dog began to expect food when