Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

830 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
questions, detect problems, analyze, reflect, synthesize, and evaluate—all done continuously and
dynamically as deemed relevant by the teacher and student.
Attention to Context and Social Constructivism
A reconceptualized view of education is attentive to context—the context of the individual
student, the context of place, and the act of learning in context. This view is fundamentally a
social constructivist view. In this context, student thinking and learning (i.e., their construction
of meaning) is unique to each student and to the specific circumstances of the context of the
situation in which the learning takes place.
First, a reconceptual view is sensitive to student diversity and difference that manifests itself
in forms involving gender, race, ethnicity, social class, lifestyle preference, sexual preference,
language, special abilities, and disabilities. In addition, all of these forms are mediated by the
political, social, cultural, economic, and spiritual contexts in which the students live. Adding even
more complexity to the teaching and learning process is the increasingly pluralistic nature of
society, which problematizes monocultural educational practice. To educationally accommodate
these differences, reconceptual education employs instructional diversity through an attention
to other individual differences that may manifest themselves as multiple intelligences, cognitive
styles, learning styles, and emotional responses within and to the learning process. Because
each student is viewed as unique, the resultant pedagogical strategies must be student-focused,
humanistic, and personalized.
A second consideration involves the place in which the learning occurs and the student exists.
Reconceptualists are aware that the concept of place mediates and informs all teaching and
learning, and that there are many places that affect the educational process. Place can include the
culture of the individual classroom, the school, the family, the neighborhood, the city, the region,
and the world. The characteristics of place enter the classroom with students, teachers, mass
media, business activity within the school context (e.g., business-supported educational programs,
marketing aimed at students as consumers) and governmental regulations. A reconceptual view
recognizes that teaching and learning cannot be isolated from these characteristics and, in fact,
they overtly and covertly influence all aspects of the educational process. Often referred to
as hidden curriculum, these characteristics and influences offer the potential for authentic and
relevant education to occur.
Reconceptual teachers situate information within the conditions or places in which students
find themselves, thus fostering authentic educational activity. Reconceptual teachers understand
that by situating learning within the places that influence their students, their students experience
learning that is mediated by change. Situated learning is important because, when learning is
situated within real-world contexts, knowledge, inquiry, and learning processes are not static and
controlled entities but change as the learning context changes. This engagement with change
requires the learner to engage change, the dynamic nature of the construction of knowledge and
use of skills, and the complexity that is created by change. In this way, learning becomes less an
artificial exercise conducted within the minds of students and more an authentic learning exercise
within the world in which the students live. This is truly authentic education because there is no
separation of knowledge or learning contexts from the social, political, economic, cultural, and
historical forces that mediate real-life situations.
Besides the motivational value of engaging curriculum within the authentic context of their
local place, students gain more complex understandings about their home, neighborhood, and city.
Utilizing their critical thinking skills and critical dispositions, students can take the opportunity to
develop the capacity to democratically participate within their local context. Within this authentic
learning context, disciplinary knowledge as well as abstract concepts such as social justice, caring,