Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

894 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
CONSTRUCTING A CRITICAL ONTOLOGY:
A POSTFORMAL SELF
Employing an understanding of complexity theory, Maturana and Varela’s Santiago Enactivism
as the process of life, a postcolonial appreciation of indigeneity, critical theoretical foundations,
the critique of Cartesianism, and poststructuralist feminist analysis, we can lay the conceptual
foundations for a new mode of selfhood. Such a configuration cannot be comprehensively delineated
here, but we can begin to build theoretical pathways to get around the Cartesian limitations
on the ontological imagination. With Humberto Maturana and Francisco Valera’s concept that
living things constantly remake themselves in interaction with their environments, our notion of
a new self or a critical ontology is grounded on the human ability to use new social contexts
and experiences, exposure to new knowledges and ways of being to reformulate subjectivity.
This reformulation of subjectivity is a central dimension of learning in a postformal context—the
inseparability of ontology and cognition. In this context the concept of personal ability becomes
a de-essentialized cognition of possibility. No essentialized bounded self can access the cognitive
potential offered by epiphanies of difference or triggered by an “insignificant” insight.
As we begin to identify previously unperceived patterns in which the self is implicated, the
possibility of cognitive change and personal growth is enhanced. As the barriers between mind and
multiple contexts are erased, the chance that more expanded forms of “cognitive autopoiesis”—
self-constructed modes of higher-order thinking—will emerge is increased. A more textured, a
thicker sense of self-production and the nature of self and other is constructed in this process. As
we examine the self and its relationship to others in cosmological, epistemological, linguistic,
social, cultural, and political contexts, we gain a clearer sense of our purpose in the world
especially in relation to justice, the indigenous-informed notion of interconnectedness, and even
love. In these activities we move closer to the macro-processes of life and their micro-expressions
in everyday life. We are developing the postformal self where cognition and identity are never
seen as separate dynamics.
A key aspect of the life processes is the understanding of difference that comes from recognition
of patterns of interconnectedness. Knowing that an individual from an upper-middle-class
European background living in a Virginia suburb will be considered culturally bizarre by a group
of tribespeople from the Amazon rainforest is a potentially profound learning experience in the
domain of the personal. How is the suburbanite viewed as bizarre? What cultural practices are
seen as so unusual? What mannerisms are humorous to the tribespeople? What worldviews are
baffling to them? The answers to such questions may shock the suburbanite into reorienting her
view of her own “normality.” The interaction may induce her to ask questions of the way she is
perceived by and the way she perceives others. Such a bracketing of the personal may be quite
liberating. This interaction with the power of difference is another example of Maturana and
Valera’s structural coupling that creates a new relationship with other and with self. In Maturana
and Varela’s conceptualization a new inner world is created as a result of such coupling.
Such explorations on the ontological frontier hold profound curricular implications. As students
pursue rigorous study of diverse global knowledges, they come to understand that the identities
of their peer groups and families constitute only a few of countless historical and cultural ways to
be human. As they study their self-production in wider biological, sociological, cultural studies,
historical, theological, psychological, and counter-canonical contexts, they gain insights into their
ways of being. As they engage the conflicts that induce diverse knowledge producers to operate
in conflicting ways, students become more attuned to the ideological, discursive, and regulatory
forces of power operating in all knowledges. This is not nihilism, as many defenders of the
Eurocanon argue; this is the exciting learning process of exploring the world and the self and
their relationship in all of the complexity such study requires.