Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Educational Psychology in a New Paradigm 903
student understanding. Postformal educators would ask if their classroom experiences promote
the highest level of understanding possible.
Rochelle: In such a world, education psychologists would understand the power of race and racism to affect
what goes on in school and society that influences student performance. Education psychologists
assume that we live in a just society but a postformal educational psychologist would question
the concept of a just world. Moreover they would work to create curriculum that would provide
the student with the knowledge to read the world, thereby creating a place of possibilities and
belief in self.
Joe: At its worst, mainstream educational psychology reduces its practitioners to the role of test
administrators who help devise academic plans that fit students’ ability. The individualistic
assumptions of this work move practitioners to accept unquestioningly the existence of a just
society where young people, according to their scientific measured abilities, find an agreeable
place and worthwhile function. Thus, the role of the educational psychologist is to adjust the
child, regardless of his or her unmeasured (or unmeasurable by existing standards) abilities, to
the society, no matter how unjust the system may be. Thus, the discipline and the practice it
supports play an important role in maintaining the power inequities of the status quo. Those
children from marginalized racial or class positions are socialized for passivity and acceptance
of their scientifically pronounced “lack of ability.”
Rochelle: The sad and scary part is that as long ago as 1933, Dr. Carter G. Woodson discussed what the
miseducation of a child’s mind could do to that child.
When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have
to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You
do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no
back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary (p. xi)
The phrase “best practices” that seeps through education literature is a form of teaching that
forces students to find the backdoor. I have come to hate that phrase because I know it equates
to those practices that have continuously worked to subvert the intellectual growth of students
instead of attempting to connect teaching and learning to questions of social justice and student
self-reflection.
Joe: The backdoor to life is possible because a form of politically passive thinking is (and has
been) cultivated that views good students and teachers as obedient to mainstream educational,
psychology-based ways of seeing. In such a context neither students nor teachers are encouraged
to construct new cognitive abilities when faced with ambiguity. Piaget labeled this process
accommodation, the reshaping of cognitive structures to accommodate unique aspects of what
is being perceived in new contexts. In other words, through our knowledge of a variety of
comparable contexts we begin to understand their similarities and differences, we learn from our
comparison of the different contexts.
Rochelle: That word makes me uneasy. When I think of accommodation I think of an action that removes
agency from the individual. You know, “I’ll accommodate to your way of being, seeing, or
experiencing the world.”
Joe: I agree with you but politically conscious teachers push Piaget one more sociocognitive step
to produce a critical emancipatory notion of accommodation. Understanding the socially constructed
nature of our comprehension of reality, critical accommodation involves the attempt to
disembed ourselves from the pictures of the world that have been painted by power. For example,
a teacher’s construction of intelligence would typically be molded by a powerful scientific
discourse that equated intelligence with scores on intelligence tests. The teacher would critically
accommodate the concept as she or he began to examine children who had been labeled by
the scientific discourse as unintelligent but upon second look exhibited characteristics that in
an unconventional way seemed sophisticated. The teacher would then critically accommodate
(or integrate) this recognition of exception into a definition of intelligence that challenged the
discourse. Thus empowered to move beyond the confines of the socially constructed ways of