Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

The State of the Soul in Educational Psychology 849
free from constraints of the imposed dominant society, enabled a musical revolution. If Hendrix
were a current music student, I doubt the cognitive perspectives that characterize educational
psychology that ignore the numerous ways students spontaneously think, feel, act, and learn
would enable him get away with literally turning the genre around. His unique way of expressing
his genius would somehow been trampled with the needs of standards-driven testing procedures
and strict methodology that would have prevented him from expressing his soul.
With Hendrix in mind, and the implications for pedagogy, educational psychology needs a
healthy session of self-reflection. It seems frightening that so many of us need to relinquish our
cultural and ethnic identities to gain success in academic endeavors. There are more victims
than beneficiaries when linear forms of carefully tailored, unthreatening knowledge that fails to
approach issues from many angles is provided. Educational psychology has developed a “formula”
for learning, and the more this formula is used as the only “valid” means of teaching and learning,
the more it becomes a form of intellectual redundancy. Schools, curricula, and pedagogical
practices have to encourage the inclusion of new languages by welcoming different grammars
and creating new music (so to speak) for souls forgotten or silenced by educational discipline and
potentially by society at large. Does this mean that educators should encourage children to turn
their musical instruments upside-down? Not necessarily. But should it exclude the possibility that
a beautiful sound could emerge from an instrument held in an uncommon position? Absolutely
not. Educational psychology appears to have misplaced a diverse and nuanced generation in a
complex and often confusing society. There are egregious blind spots in our curricula. To begin to
remedy the intellectual redundancy (the “anti-Hendrixness”) of our current educational system,
we must rebel: Our goal should be to create imaginative alternative strategies that allow us as
teachers and students to embark on the journey to uncover and come to know our soul.
In Pedagogy and the Politics, Henry Giroux asserts that we must question the kind of society in
which we want to live and what kind of teachers and pedagogy can be informed and legitimated by
a view of authority that takes democracy and citizenship seriously. In reframing these questions,
we should search ourselves to discover what we want and how we want to get it. Giroux refers to
teachers as “transformative intellectuals” and schools as “development spheres.” Thus, thinking,
doing, producing, and implementing gives teaching the dialectical meaning that such a vision
requires, or in the Jimi Hendrix sense, turning the educational psychology genre upside-down and
backwards. To become a transformative intellectual, a phenomenological hermeneutic universal
of soul is required. Soul seems to resonate, weaving itself through postformal educational psychological
questions suggested by Kincheloe in The Post-Formal Reader of how we should deal
with the meaninglessness and sociopsychological pathology that affects all of us individually and
institutionally with the intention of developing a more holistic psyche expression and production
or transmission of knowledge.
Soul is part spirit, desires, and self-esteem. Soul has rage, passion, grace, elegance, sensuality,
sexuality, anger, longing, loneliness, confusion, transcendence, and spirituality. G.B. Madison
elegantly broaches this subject in The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity by stating that there does
indeed exist a “soul” and a “body,” but the body is a human body only by being the very foundation
of the soul, the visible expression of a “spiritual” life.
Soul allows us to approach problems in a new way by adding an element of creativity. Creativity
is transformative knowledge through its quality of seeing things in a new way, or updating an
older concept, and perceiving connections between the unconnected. Its vision could be dynamic,
stimulating, chaotic, or even wrong, but at least it brings new life energy and takes risks by
expanding individuals’ and communities’ worldviews. A unique aspect of creativity is that it
is an all-inclusive domain—rich or poor, healthy or sick, creativity is an infinite commodity
where all can take as much as one wants to ultimately produce or enact new epistemological
paradigms. It is not enough, however, to create a culture that encourages creative thinking.
Educational psychology also must develop mechanisms that channel creative energy and give