Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

862 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
THE INSEPARABILITY OF COGNITION AND SOCIOHISTORICAL CONTEXT
Thus, a key theme of postformalism emerges: consciousness and cognition cannot be separated
from the sociohistorical context. All cognition and action take place in continuity with the forces
of history. Critical constructivism understands that contextualization is inseparable from cognition
and action. The role of a postformal educational psychology is to bring this recognition to
the front burner of consciousness. With such awareness we begin to realize that consciousness is
constructed by individual agency, individual volition and by the ideological influences of social
forces—it is both structured and structuring. Psychologists from diverse traditions did not traditionally
understand the ambiguity of consciousness construction and social action. They failed to
discern the ways that power was inscribed in language and knowledge and the implications of this
for the production of selfhood. Individuals are initiated into language communities where women
and men share bodies of knowledge, epistemologies, and the cognitive styles that accompany
them. Thus, the manner in which our interpretations of the world are made is inseparable from
these contexts, these language communities. The sociohistorical dimension of consciousness is
often manifested on the terrain of language.
Because of these linguistic and other factors hidden from our conscious understanding, individuals
are often unaware of just how their consciousness is constructed. The schemas that guide
a culture are rarely part of an individual’s conscious mind. Usually, they are comprehended as
a portion of a person’s worldview that is taken for granted. It was these ideas that Italian social
theorist Antonio Gramsci had in mind when he argued that philosophy should be viewed as a
form of self-criticism. Gramsci asserted that the starting point for any higher understanding of self
involves the consciousness of oneself as a product of sociohistorical forces. A critical philosophy,
he wrote, involves the ability of its adherents to criticize the ideological frames that they use
to make sense of the world. I watch my colleagues and myself struggle as postformal teachers
to engage our students in Gramsci’s critical philosophical task of understanding themselves in
a sociohistorical context. Many of us are frustrated by our students’ lack of preparation for engagement
in such a rigorous introspective and theoretical task. No matter how frustrating the job
may be, we have to realize how few experiences these students possess that would equip them
for such a task. Indeed, life in hyperreality produces experiences that undermine their ability to
accomplish such undertakings.
A critical constructivist epistemology and a postformal cognitive orientation are very important
in the effort to engage in an ideological critique of self-production in hyperreality. Such a critique
interrogates the deep structures that help shape our consciousness as well as the historical context
that gave birth to the deep structures. It explores the sociohistorical and political dimensions of
schooling, the kind of meanings that are constructed in classrooms, and how these meanings are
translated into student consciousness. Students of cognition often speak of student and teacher
empowerment as if it were a simple process that could be accomplished by a couple of creative
learning activities. One thing our ideological critique of self-production tells us is that the self
is a complex, ambiguous, and contradictory entity pushed and pulled by a potpourri of forces.
The idea that the self can be reconstructed and empowered without historical study, linguistic
analysis, and deconstruction of place is to trivialize the goals of a critical interpretivist educational
psychology, it is to minimize the power of the cognitive alienation that mechanism produces, it
is to ignore history.
In this sociohistorically contextualized postformal effort to uncover the sources of consciousness
construction, we attempt to use such insights to change the world and promote human
possibility. In the spirit of our critical ontology we work to reconstruct the self in a just, insightful,
and egalitarian way. In this context postformal teachers search in as many locations as possible
for alternate discourses and ways of thinking and being that expand the envelops of possibility. In