Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

888 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
this context universality is problematized. Indeed, the more we are aware of those different from
us on a variety of levels, the harder it is to produce naive universal knowledges. In our heightened
awareness, in our crazy wisdom, we produce more sensitive, more aware modes of information.
Once the subjugated/indigenous door is open the possibilities are infinite.
POSTFORMAL KNOWLEDGE: THE BRICOLAGE, DIFFERENCE,
AND SELF-AWARENESS IN RESEARCH
When researchers, for example, encounter difference in the nature of the other, they enter into
symbiotic relationships where their identity is changed. Such researchers are no longer merely
obtaining information, but are entering a space of transformation where previously excluded
perspectives operate to change consciousness of both self and the world. Thus, research in a
critical ontological context changes not only what one knows but also who one actually is. In this
process the epistemological and ontological domains enter into a new relationship that produces
dramatic changes. Returning to the beginning of this chapter, Lev Vygotsky was on the right
track as he documented the importance of the context in which learning takes place—the zone of
proximal development (ZPD). Difference in the sense we are using it here expands the notion of
the ZPD into the domain of research, drawing upon the power of our interactions in helping shape
the ways we make meaning. In the new synergized position, ontologically sensitive researchers
construct new realities where they take on new and expanded roles.
Aware of the power of difference, these researchers develop a new consciousness of the self:
(1) the manner in which it has been constructed; (2) its limitations; and (3) a sense of immanence
concerning what it can become. Self-awareness is a metacognitive skill that has historically been
more valued in Eastern traditions such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Yoga than in the West. Time
and again we see the value of pluralism manifest itself in this discussion of difference and the
bricolage. A pluralistic epistemology helps us understand the way we are situated in the web of
reality and how this situatedness shapes what we see as researchers, as observers of the world.
Such awareness reveals the limited nature of our observations of the world. Instead of researchers
making final pronouncements on the way things are, postformalists begin to see themselves
in a larger interdisciplinary and intercultural conversation. Critical ontologists attuned to this
dynamic, focus their attention on better modes of listening and respecting diverse viewpoints.
Such higher order listening moves them to new levels of self-consciousness.
Of course, difference does not work as an invisible hand that magically shapes new insights
into self and world. Humans must exercise their complex hermeneutic (interpretive) abilities to
forge these connections and interpret their meanings. In this context postformalists as critical
ontologists confront difference and then decide where they stand in relation to it. They must
discern what to make of what it has presented them. With this in mind these critical scholareducators
work hard to develop relationships with those different from themselves that operate to
create new meanings in the interactions of identity and difference. In this interaction, knowledge
producers grow smarter as they reject modernist Cartesian notions that cultural conflicts can
be solved only by developing monological universal principles of epistemology and universal
steps to the process of research. Too often, these scholars/cultural workers understand that these
“universal” principles simply reflect colonial Western ways of viewing the world hiding in the
disguise of universalism. Rigorous examination of the construction of self and society are closed
off in such universalism. Indeed, it undermines the development of a critical self-consciousness.
In the face of a wide variety of different knowledges and ways of seeing the world, the cosmos
human beings think they know collapses. In a counter-colonial move critical ontologists raise
questions about any knowledges and ways of knowing that claim universal status. In this context
they make use of this suspicion of universalism in combination with global, subjugated, and