Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

866 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
voices, exposing postformal foundations to ongoing deliberation over the assertions made in its
name, questions that bring cause for humility. Clearly some could relate formal presuppositions
to the beginning dialogue in Plato’s The Symposium and postformal precepts to the interventions
that occur with the entrance of Dionysius. Others find in postformalism a melding of the
pre-formal with the formal to form a hybrid synthesis, possibly an emphasis on uncovering the
tacit relationships and hidden assumptions that reveal larger life forces within the universe. Such
universalizing discourses, as Eve Sedgewick described them in the 1990 book, Epistemology of
the Closet, when thought of tentatively, open up the possibility for seeing relationships between
ostensibly different entities as opposed to minoritizing discourses that tend to reduce narratives
into their most simple parts. The emphasis of the latter on reductionism as a precursor to examination
limits the opportunity to see relationships in the relentless search for establishing control and
reason. As Kincheloe, Steinberg, and Hinchey explained in The Post-Formal Reader: Cognition
and Education:
We might be better served to think of the mind not in terms of parts, but in terms of connecting patterns,
the dance of interacting parts. This initial consciousness of the ‘poetic’ recognition of this dance involves a
nonverbal mental vibration, an increased energy state. From this creative tension emerges a perception of
the meaning of the metaphor and the heightened consciousness that accompanies it. Post-formal teachers
can model such metaphoric perception for their students (1999, p. 69).
It is with explanation that we can find a clear relationship between the description of postformal
educational psychology that Kincheloe offers and phenomenologist Alfred Schutz when he
highlights a “fundamental anxiety” associated with an expressed concern that our lives might
be essentially meaningless, that through our interaction on this earth we might impress so little
as to leave without having mattered at all. Such anxiety does not have to lead to paralysis
but can be a psychologically motivating factor, spurring ideas for projects and plans of action.
Through the generative process of making such plans, arranging ahead for their enactment, and
bringing them to fruition we can recognize how cognition involves the creation of identifications
within particular social contexts in which our lives take place. Postformal educational psychology
embraces such understanding.
While the postformal movement in educational psychology is certainly in alignment with other
paradigms of thought, engaged in critique of theories of intelligence that attempt to bracket our
culture, a process of neutralization that can be evidenced in the work of Jensen, Murray, and
Herrnstein, it joins forces with Baudrillard and his opposition to one-dimensional depictions of
reality; Dewey and his critique of positivism; and Foucault and his insistence on power as recurrent
at the point of human interaction—it also seeks to move beyond these points, recouping these
oppositions and extending these insights toward the generative process of tentatively describing
intellectual possibilities. The work of Kincheloe, Steinberg, and Hinchey in The Post-Formal
Reader: Cognition and Education (1999) and Eisner in Curriculum and Cognition Reconsidered
(1994) provide valuable insight into the transformations that occur in educational psychology
when postformal dispositions not only offer a language of critique but spaces of opportunity
for reenvisioning cognition as a sociocultural construct and, therefore, the key to an effort to
end symbolic and material inequities. In response to the success of modern, formal movements
and the terror invoked through the certainties of metanarratives, we need more than “reactionary
countermoves,” responses based on the underlying assumptions regarding developmental psychology
that fail to extend beyond the binaries established in the reasoning of the preceding
position. As such, the totalizing structures stand in the way of the imagination that arises from
the unrestricted play of ideas, the “wide-awake-ness” that comes from opening up opportunity,