Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Knowledge or Multiple Knowings 653
it heard the tone and began watering at the mouth. These ideas of what came to be known as
“classical conditioning” are still very much a part of schooling practices today. The school recess
bell represents perhaps the most evocative contemporary example.
Basic learning mechanism theories have been particularly influential however, in studies related
to infants. Possibly the most famous (or infamous) of all studies in this regard is that performed
by Watson and Rayner (1920). Watson, an early member of the behaviorist school argued that
if behavior is conditioned it could, as a consequence, be modified or changed by experience,
either through punishment or rewards. In order to demonstrate their theory that children’s fears
of animals were not innate but were in fact shaped by their environment, they exposed a ninemonth-old
boy to several white-colored animals such as a rat, a rabbit, a dog etc. The baby at
first proceeded to play with the animals with no apparent sense of fright. They then hit a steel bar
with a hammer just behind the baby’s head as he reached for the rabbit. The boy subsequently
cried with fear at the loud noise. After several repetitions of the hammer hitting the bar, the baby
proceeded to cry whenever he saw the rabbit. Watson and Rayner reported that the child’s fear of
the white rabbit extended to the many white, fuzzy objects he was also shown, including a dog,
a fur coat, and even a Santa Claus mask. Fear of white rabbits, fur coats, and Santa Claus masks
is not inherited, they argued, it is learned.
Despite the profound ethical issues raised here, the overall idea that behavior can be conditioning
through rewards and punishment has become a staple of Western concepts of teaching
and learning. We see this in the hierarchical allocation of rewards and punishments in the schools
and specifically the operation of merit badges. One of the main proponents associated with this
area of educational psychology is that of B. F. Skinner (1904–1990). According to Skinner, the
process known as “operant conditioning” (that is to say, learning through rewards and punishments)
“shapes behavior as a sculpture shapes clay” (Cole and Cole, 1993, p. 16). The implication
here is that all students enter the schools as disembodied lumps of clay. As such, the teacher’s
role lies in shaping these mere lumps into a fixed, institutionally sanctioned, cultural entity of
what counts as the norm. Where there is deviation from the norm it is to be hammered back
into normal shape. But what does this mean for student subjectivities that do not conform to this
preset (and pre-invented) cultural norm? What does this mean for students entering the schools
and classrooms whose “shapes” are formed through the embodied knowledges of difference?
As Philip Corrigan (1990, p. 156) has rightly pointed out schools not only teach subjects they
also teach, and make subjectivities. In this sense, hegemonic discourses of superiority/inferiority
are invested and constituted in the racialized bodies of students through the epistemic and
material violence of colonial knowledge and through the violent routines of normalization. Oppressive/repressive
messages proclaiming what is culturally/racially legitimate and what is not
are pervasive in discourses of normalization. They are structurally grounded in the hidden culture
of the schooling institution itself. They become explicit/implicit in forms that project a “deep
curriculum” (Sefa Dei et al., 1997, p. 144) that is to say, those formal and informal aspects
of the school environment that intersect with both the cultural environment and the organizational
life of the school. As a result White/Eurocentric neocolonial dominance is spoken loudly
and unequivocally in the formations of normalizing routines that are institutionally supported.
Minoritized students are constrained into disembodied silence and their capacities of expression
and communication severely regulated by cultural/racially charged discourses of what is considered
acceptable, appropriate, or what is approved and not approved. It is the educator and more
accurately the “deep curriculum” that determines which bodies should speak and which should
not. What is considered speech and what is not. What should be spoken, for how long, in what
form, and in what language. As Corrigan (1990, p. 160) has noted, it is through this process
that “we can begin to see how schooling hurts.” We begin to see how normalizing routines are
productive of “active wounds,” that is to say wounds that are seared into the struggles of students