Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

914 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
reasoning based on the intersections of numerous social positions and the willingness to engage
in self-examination. Postformalism grounds educational psychology in the particularities of place
taking seriously Pinar’s description of Currere, the Latin root of the word “curriculum,” involving
the examination of the nature of the individual experience of the public.
Postformalism offers educational psychology the possibility of providing redress for the myriad
of social ills that have plagued formal, developmental theories and the recent recognition that the
very forms of intelligence privileged under formalism, thought to be the remedy for individual and
social pathologies, have been complicit in many of our recent tragedies including the Holocaust,
racial discrimination, genocide, commodification, social elitism, narcissism, indentured servitude,
and corporate welfare. Postformalism offers an alternative to the frame of mind that brought us the
Phillip Morris Czech Report, the overly formal, procedural document that requested a reduction
in excise taxes from the Czech government in response to its findings that “smoking can lead to a
reduced life span of smokers’’ and therefore reduce the money paid out in government pensions
and health care subsidies. It is postformalism that might offer educational psychology ways
to deconstruct the intellectual sensibilities that have allowed for these tragedies as well as the
anti-essentialism required for tentative descriptions of alternative visions. A postformal vision of
educational psychology attuned to alternate forms of teaching, research, and assessment can bring
about changes in symbolic and material valuations necessary for the actualization of equality.
TERMS FOR READERS
Formalism—The term refers to the empirical developmental operations of human thought that can
be evidenced in patterns, rules, principles, and generalizations. Formalism assumes instrumental
development where particular task performances are necessary to the development of more
complex, higher-order task performances.
Hegemonic Articulations—This phrase refers to tentative linkage of social, political, and economic
forces in ways that exacerbate individual and social group inequities by engendering the
naturalization of oppression through nonphysical means. Hegemonic articulations involve allegiances
of dominant cultures in what result in the subjugation of particular cultural styles and
intellects.
Monologic—This term refers to the dominance of a single lens of perception and analysis. Monologic
engages in reductive techniques that often mistake a single orientation toward cognition
as the only way of knowing and understanding the world. Commonly an instrumental logic that
emphasizes rules, procedures, and patterns, this approach to reason in its search for continuity
fails to grasp the importance of abnormalities, idiosyncrasies, and eccentricities.
Multilogicality—This term describes the interplay of many competing, overlapping, and incommensurable
ways of knowing that illustrate the complexity of perception and analysis. Multilogicality
aims for the exploration of numerous axes of reason that hold differing values in society
to illustrate the myriad ways human beings reason. Through attending to more than one form of
knowing, multilogicality illuminates the ways in which particular forms of reason, such as bodily
and emotional intelligence, have been historically subjugated.
Postformalism—The term belies easy categorization but can be safely stated that postformalism
attends to alternate ways of conceptualizing cognition and human understanding. Postformalism
acts as a response to formalism’s search for definitive sets of rules and principles of cognitive
operation. As a reaction, postformalism unearths the idiosyncrasies and abnormalities subjugated
by the domination of developmental, formalist logic.