Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Postformalism and Critical Multiculturalism 877
process is disconcerting, as the cryptic nature of many forms of oppression makes it difficult to
convince individuals from dominant power blocs of their reality. Such subtlety is matched by
cognizance of the notion that there are as many differences within groups as there are between
them.
In the twenty-first century the increased influence of right-wing power blocs have elevated
the need for a critical multiculturalist approach to knowledge production in various academic
disciplines including, of course, educational psychology. The geopolitical and military operations
to extend the American Empire have been accompanied by disturbing trends in knowledge
production that hold alarming implications for the future—the future of research in particular.
Critical multiculturalists are aware that such knowledge work possesses a historical archaeology
in Western culture and U.S. society. David G. Smith (2003) in “On Enfraudening the Public
Sphere” in Policy Futures in Education argues that the twenty-first-century American Empire is
constructed not only around territorial and natural resource claims, but in hyperreality, epistemological
claims as well. Tracing the epistemological claims of the empire, Smith studies Western
knowledge from the cogito of Descartes to Adam Smith’s economics of self-interest. With the
merging of Descartes rationalism with Adam Smith’s economics the West’s pursuit of economic
expansionism is justified by the concept of liberty. Educational psychology cannot ignore these
dynamics in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Postformalists who employ the bricolage described in this chapter have carefully examined
this Enlightenment reason and its relation to oppression and social regulation. Proponents have
maintained for centuries it is this form of reason that frees us from the chaos of ignorance
and human depravity. It is this reason, they proclaimed, that separated us from the uncivilized,
the inferior. Smith (2003) argues that it is this notion that supports a philosophy of human
development or developmentalism used in psychology and a variety of other discourses to oppress
and marginalize the cultural others who haven’t employed such Western ways of thinking and
being. Often in their “immaturity” these others, this rationalistic developmentalism informs us,
must be disciplined even ruled in order to teach them to be rational and democratic.
This psychological developmentalist story about the contemporary world situation conveniently
omits the last 500 years of European colonialism, the anticolonial movements around the world
beginning in the post-World War II era and their impact on the U.S. civil rights movement, the
women’s movement, the antiwar movement in Vietnam, Native American liberation struggles,
the gay rights movement, and other emancipatory movements which inform our critical multiculturalism
and postformalism. In other work I have argued that the reaction to these anticolonial
movements have set the tone and content of much of American political, social, cultural, and
educational experience over the last three decades. In the middle of the first decade of the twentyfirst
century these forces of reaction seemed to have gained a permanent foothold in American
social, political, cultural, and educational institutions.
The future of knowledge is at stake in this new cultural landscape. Few times in human history
has there existed greater need for forms of knowledge work that expose the dominant ideologies
and discourses that shape the information accessed by many individuals. The charge of critical
multiculturalists and postformalists at this historical juncture is to develop forms of knowledge
work and approaches to research that take these sobering dynamics into account. This is the
idea behind my articulation of the bricolage (J. Kincheloe and K. Berry, (2004) Rigour and
Complexity in Educational Research: Conceptualizing the Bricolage) that will be discussed later
in this chapter. Attempting to make use of a variety of philosophical, methodological, cultural,
political, epistemological, and psychological discourses, the bricolage can be employed by critical
multiculturalists and students of educational psychology to produce compelling knowledges that
seek to challenge the neocolonial representations about others at home and abroad.