Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Alternative Realities in Educational Psychology 913
regulated and controlled. Formalism led to an assembly line mentality regarding ways of knowing,
bringing intelligence to operate as a standard against which human ability could be easily
quantified and ranked in a never-ending search to mark winners and losers.
Postformalism, as a response to formalism, uses a language of critique to question the principles
of developmental paradigms and, through the nurturing of critical consciousness, provides
new ways to conceptualize intelligence. Postformalism works to unearth subjugated knowledge,
exposing the ways various assumptions regarding human cognition, including the pursuit of objectivity
and neutrality, shield educational psychology from more critical interrogations. Through
postformalism, ways of knowing previously thought of as based in ignorance cross within the
bounds of intelligibility, working to give evidence to historically subjugate forms of knowledge.
The way intelligence operates under convention is rendered suspect as previously excluded voices
offer until that time unheard questions regarding the agendas served through instrumental understandings
of cognition. When the metanarratives of the field are ruptured, intellect no longer
exists in an originary state but instead comes to be seen as a form of knowing structured by the
unintelligible: the ways of knowing we cannot bear to know or the ways of knowing to which
claims of ignorance result in the substantiation of a right to recognition, working the borderlands
into irrelevance so that the highest forms of cognition can be upheld as recognizable.
Postformal educational psychology seeks new ways of knowing that transcend empirically
verifiable facts, monologic, and the use of cause and effect arguments to operationalize intelligence
in reductive and over determined ways. When educational psychology moves beyond reductive
techniques that equate intelligence with IQ testing and the results of high stakes testing with
knowledge acquisition, we can begin to address cognition critically as the generative process
of building critical consciousness, weaving together a context for realities founded upon hope,
possibility, and radical transformation: participatory democratic systems of meaning are central
to conceptualizing intelligence as situational, the effects of social relations and everyday practices
in and out of schools that either extend or limit the capacity for self-direction and understanding
the conditions of one’s own existence. With postformal emphasis not just on description but also
on invoking a language of possibility, intelligence evolves from a highly individualized abstract
mental aptitude to the practice of attaching meaning to and then altering the social contexts
in which the mind has traditionally resided, dismantling hegemonic articulations that thwart
the creation of symbolically and materially just communities that place difference at the core of
viable, sustainable social relations and relations of intellect. Understanding how worldviews, selfconceptions,
and ways of knowing that are valued have come to be constructed, postformalism
provides educational psychology with a theoretical toolbox that is quite capable of facilitating
the transformation of how we understand knowing in public education.
Postformalism, then, assists in understanding the changing nature of how we think, know, and
interact in the world, providing a language of possibility that moves beyond the boundaries of
instrumental rationality to value new realities that seem to be cropping up all around us in a
new world order where images of war overlap seamlessly with images found in videogames and
love affairs begin in virtual worlds where each person ceases to exist in a physical sense, born
again into an alternate reality. Postformalism describes a new era in human psychology that helps
to reconceptualize education as it takes place in schools and other cultural sites. It invokes the
realization that those who continue to invest wholeheartedly in formalism will, in the end, be
found naïve. Educators who have yet to acknowledge the impact of postformalism fail to realize
they can no longer offer narratives from an omnipotent perspective, as each human being resides
in a particular location in the web of reality and, as a result of these competing realities that are
sometimes overlapping and just as often incommensurate, must reveal their own subjectivity, the
identifications that constitute their particular social and historical vantage point. Intelligence no
longer involves a single rationality, with the birth of postformal thinking, but infinite ways of