Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

868 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
Engaging Problem Detection
The reduction of intelligence to problem solving has long been a problem of formalism the
effects of which can be evidenced in the everyday curricular practice of presenting preformed
riddles with the aim of drawing closure at existing solutions. When the focus is on problem
solving, students become trapped in reductive politics of instrumental rationality and cause and
effect linear logic where students learn to seek out given solutions to given problems, an appeal
to explicit orders of reality by curriculum developers that suggests the best solutions to social,
political, and economic ills already exist. When the work of children and youth is reduced
to the search for extant answers, the opportunity to engage in meaningful and potent acts of
improvisation associated with creatively defining problems are thwarted. The focus on problem
solving in curriculum as well as learning assessment fails to attend to the process of questioning
that leads to the establishment of the problem in the first place. Postformalism embraces problem
detection as a process that involves imaginatively coming to critical consciousness through
determining the character of a dilemma in explorations of the relationships between ostensibly
different elements, charting associations that are more holistic and capable of moving us toward
symbolic and material equality.
Recognizing Implicit Orders
The idea of “looking beyond convention” helps us understand an aspect of postformalism that
illuminates hidden forces and tacit assumptions with notions of explicit and implicit curriculums.
Explicit or formal curricular orders involve easily recognized patterns, events that seem to occur
with little variation and consistently within similar physical spaces. Through patterns that arise
out of simple comparison and contrast, the explicit curricular order is often the product of the
sorting and categorization function of formal cognition. Of a different order, implicit curriculums
address a much deeper sense of reality. It is the tacit level of operation in which the interspaces
of relationships become evident, where two ostensibly different entities are shown to be part of
a larger web-like structure of reality. Recognizing the value of interspaces as worth analysis in
their own right, Perrow in his 1999 book Normal Accidents: Living with High-risk Technologies,
a study of nuclear power plant disasters, highlighted their important role in understanding tightly
coupled organizations. Drawing from postformal forms of analysis, he examined the difficulty in
knowing, knowledge that shifts in the interspaces between intention and reception, difficulties in
intelligibility the effects of which he termed “normal accidents,” and the errors that occur among
discursive realities that exceed attempts at relational understanding.
Unearthing Tacit Knowledge
Postformal thinkers look beyond substantive reality to access our hidden assumptions and work
to make subjugated knowledge visible. In Perrow’s study of nuclear power plants mentioned
above, explicit curricular orders were in place for sharing information across the organization.
What Perrow found, however, were deeper implicit orders of reality that involved recognizing the
significance of the interspaces between thoughts, the discursive moments where the nonrational
occurs: tighter controls by leadership result in increased errors and what was believed to have
been communicated effectively utilizing a formal, transmission model of reality, was caught up
in implicit curricular orders, the cacophony of multiple competing, contingent realities, heard
differently or simply not heard at all. Similarly, in the classroom, postformal educational psychology
recognizes the importance of implicit curricular orders where tacit realities are searched
out in hermeneutical pedagogies that encourage students to seek out meaning, draw relationships