Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

870 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
This tentative description of postformal educational psychology transpires from a particular
vantage point within educational psychology and is also shaped by the position and identifications
of the author. Understanding that any description of higher order thinking does not constitute
closure on the subject, this chapter acts as another guidepost on the journey toward understanding
cognition as a personal-sociocultural production, a postformal attempt to draw individual
ways of knowing into relationship with symbolic and material practices and the search for their
equalization. If postformalism offers anything to educational psychology it is a device for peeling
back the layers of reality, revealing uncommon truths and tacit assumptions and the relationships
between ostensibly different realities.
TERMS FOR READERS
Critical Consciousness—The phrase refers to the ability to perceive social, economic, and
political oppression and to take action against such subjugation in organizations, culture, and
social consciousness. Critical consciousness involves exposing the systemic elements that lead
to banking models of education where students are passive recipients of knowledge; educators
enforce pedagogies involving drilling, memorizing, and repeating information; knowledge is
thought of as a gift from the educated to the ignorant; teachers, administrators, and officials
choose the curriculum and students adapt to it; and students are rewarded for storing information
in ways that the most successful students are those who lack the heightened awareness necessary
to intervene in society for the pursuit of social equality.
Intellectual Enactment—This term refers to theoretically informed actions that are guided
by certain values and principles. Intellectual aims under postformalism are not simply about
self-improvement or establishing a career trajectory. Instead intellectual enactment emphasizes
actions guided by a moral disposition that furthers human well-being and improve the quality of
life. Postformalism is not a complete denial of cognitive truth but recognition that intelligence,
perception, and thought involve competing truths that most appropriately might be guided moral
and ethical considerations grounded in critical notions of participatory democracy.
Liberatory Teaching Practices—This term refers to the development of critical consciousness
in students and teachers through dialogic interactions that involve the reciprocal process of expressing
experiences and understandings of social justice theme. From this angle, instructors often
pose problems to the class that bring learners to heightened understandings of social, economic,
and political issues and enfolded power relations. Liberatory teaching practices involve dialectical
pedagogies that thread personal knowledge and understanding with critical perspectives and
disciplinary scholarship within a search for self-direction and understanding the conditions of
one’s own existence.
Multilogicality—This term describes the interplay of many competing, overlapping, and incommensurable
ways of knowing that illustrate the complexity of perception and analysis. Multilogicality
aims for the exploration of numerous axes of reason that hold differing values in society
to illustrate the myriad ways human beings reason. Through attending to more than one form of
knowing, multilogicality illuminates the ways in which particular forms of reason, such as bodily
and emotional intelligence, have been historically subjugated.
Postformalism—The term belies easy categorization but can be safely stated that postformalism
attends to alternate ways of conceptualizing cognition and human understanding. Postformalism
acts as a response to formalism’s search for definitive sets of rules and principles of cognitive