Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

940 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
� Discursive practices are present in technical processes, institutions, and modes of behavior and in their
forms of transmission and representation. Discourses shape how we operate in the world as human agents,
construct our (un)consciousness, and what we consider true.
� Knowledge is interdependent with discourse, in that it acquires its meaning through the context provided
by rules of discursive practice.
� In research and knowledge production, discourses validate particular research strategies, narrative formats,
and modes of representation.
� In the domain of research methodologies, for example, consider the discourse of traditional ethnography.
Such a discourse was quick to exclude nonlinear narratives and surrealistic forms of representation. Like
nineteenth-century gatekeepers of the Parisian art world who rejected impressionistic representations of
reality, ethnographic guardians dismissed literary forms that fell outside the boundaries of the dominant
discourse.
� All language is multiaccentual, meaning that it can be both spoken and heard, written and read in ways
that reflect different relationships to social groups and power formations. When language is used in an
imperializing manner, meaning, as a form of social regulation, this multiaccentual dynamic is repressed.
Power wielders attempt to establish one correct meaning among listeners or readers in an effort to implant
a particular ideological message into their consciousness.
� Such a linguistic act is an example of what is labeled discursive closure—a language game that represses
alternate ways of seeing, as it establishes a textual orthodoxy. In this context discursive practices define
what is normal and deviant, what is a proper way of representing reality and what is not.
� Indeed, this process of definition, inclusion, and exclusion connects discourse to modes of social ordering
and of regulation of knowledge production. For example, mainstream research discourses avoid representations
of the concept of oppression when examining questions of justice or injustice. Often terms
such as discrimination or prejudice are used to represent race, class, and gender injustice—the concept of
oppression being a much more inclusive and damning concept is inappropriate in a discourse complicit
with the dominant power bloc. Thus, discursive closure is effected; the status quo is protected.
� The relationship between discourse and power, Michel Foucault argued, is always contradictory. While
discourse applies power, it also makes it visible. Discourse may carry the meanings of the power bloc, but
it also exposes them to challenge.
� Discourse analysis disputes psychology’s traditional assumption that people possess stable properties
such as attitudes and beliefs. Instead, language is viewed as an arena where identity is continuously
renegotiated.
A POLITICAL EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
Even among many critical of educational psychology these power dynamics, these political
dimensions, are missed. As I documented in the introduction to this encyclopedia, this political
dynamic is erased in the mechanistic articulation of the discipline. Macro-sociopolitical concerns
and the impact they exert on human experience in general and learning in particular are not a
part of the discourse of the discipline. Until the relationship between existing social structures
and power configurations and the questions of educational psychology are addressed, the work
of professional practitioners will mystify and oppress more often than it will clarify and liberate.
In such a depoliticized, power-illiterate context mechanistic educational psychology reduces
its practitioners to the role of test administrators who help devise academic plans that fit students’
abilities. The individualistic, contextually stripped assumptions of this work move practitioners
to accept unquestioningly the existence of a just society where children, according to their scientifically
measurable abilities, find an agreeable place and worthwhile function—leadership roles
for the elite and the rule following domains for the marginalized. Thus, the role of the educational
psychologist is to adjust the student, regardless of his or her unmeasured—or unmeasurable by