Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

908 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
Here insights are crested upon the vanishing point of a receding horizon, always within sight
yet never fully known. At this juncture in history, a time when we bear witness to attempts to
formalize most aspects of education, my sense is that we can no longer offer graduate education
without attending to the major changes in cognitive discourses, including teaching, research, and
assessment. More specific, the time has passed when we can make sense of public education
without acknowledging and interrogating the rift that has developed between how educational
psychology is thought about and how it is practiced in educational settings. The theory practice
divide that has brought attention to the politics of intellect and the negative repercussions of
an overinvestment in formalism, a move that more recently moved many educators to ask what
happened to the connection between happiness and the pursuit of further understanding.
My point is postformal theories must be explored if for no other reason than for the creation
of rigorous, nuanced, and critical insights into the ways intellect functions in the present as well
as historically. The aim of this chapter is to offer tentative description of what postformalism
has to offer educational psychology as well as its implications for educational practice. In the
chaos and uncertainty of our current world, the common response involving an increased reliance
upon formalism might be ill-conceived. As an alternative, a postformal approach to educational
psychology offers fresh perspectives on intelligence, descriptions of a multitude of ways of
knowing that, if engaged critically, might offer further understandings of our most pressing
social, political, and economic issues.
Postformalism, as a disposition, can be detected in many elements of what might be termed
a personal-sociocultural outlook—the exposition of thought that has laid bare the assumptions
of Cartesian logic that structures the traditions of educational psychology and how an alternative
disposition—one that eschews structure while retaining direction, gives credence to our imaginary
worlds and tacit knowledge not easily accessed through empirical means. Some would suggest
that the critical perspectives that are key to understanding postformalism began in the 1960s
movements that emphasized multilogicality, multiculturalism, and diverse forms of intelligence
in addition to paradox, complexity and chaos theory, ultimately opening up spaces for those voices
under arrest. The emphasis on criticality broke open customs and traditions as at least, in part,
socially constructed phenomena. Just like a fictionalized text, critical approaches to cognition
illustrated how theories of intelligence and their counterparts, the ignorance we cannot bear to
imagine has anything of value to offer, function according to the arbitrary rules of a language
game that had its origins in culture. Lyotard in his 1984 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge attributed conventional ways of knowing that commonly exceed examination to
metanarratives, theories that attempt to provide a universal, all-encompassing single narrative
“plots” regarding the ways people think, schools are structured, people learn, curriculum is
assessed, teachers practice, corporations become involved, and government intervenes. Before
further exploring the insights postformalism has to offer, a feat we will engage further throughout
the rest of this chapter, it is first important to look at the notion of criticality in more detail.
More recent approaches to educational psychology utilize textual analysis, multilogicality, and
the study of interrelationships between intelligence and ignorance as theoretical approaches to
challenging unjust symbolic and material valuations. As a result, postformal educational psychology
does not choose as a starting point the establishment of the definitive properties of a scholarly
discipline, but instead advances a movement that defies easy categorization, using strands of
thought from cultural studies, narrative inquiry, critical pedagogy, feminist theory, insurgent
black intellectual thought, and queer theory, among others, to produce and circulate theories
of intelligence that will aid in the pursuit of social, economic, political, and economic equality.
Postformal educational psychology teaching practices, research methods, and corresponding
assessment are critical of monological approaches to curriculum and cognition, encouraging
appreciation for nuanced overlays that more closely resemble the layers of an onion, a process