Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

944 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
as individuals operating within a particular discipline. As they study the methods of diverse
disciplines, they are forced to compare not only methods but also differing epistemologies
and social theoretical assumptions. Such diversity frames research orientations as particular
socially constructed perspectives—not sacrosanct pathways to the truth. All methods are subject
to questioning and analysis, especially in light of so many other strategies designed for similar
purposes.
GETTING STARTED: THE POWER OF THE BRICOLAGE
This postformal defamiliarization process highlights the power of the confrontation with difference
to expand the researcher’s interpretive horizons. Bricolage doesn’t simply tolerate difference
but cultivates it as a spark to researcher creativity. Here rests a central contribution of the interdisciplinarity
of the bricolage: as researchers draw together divergent forms of research, they
gain the unique insight of multiple perspectives. Thus, a complex understanding of research and
knowledge production prepares bricoleurs to address the complexities of the social, cultural, psychological,
and educational domains. Sensitive to complexity, bricoleurs use multiple methods to
uncover new insights, expand and modify old principles, and reexamine accepted interpretations
in unanticipated contexts. Using any methods necessary to gain new perspectives on objects
of inquiry, bricoleurs employ the principle of difference not only in research methods but in
cross-cultural analysis as well. In this domain, bricoleurs explore the different perspectives of
the socially privileged and the marginalized in relation to formations of race, class, gender, and
sexuality.
The interdisciplinarity of bricolage is sensitive to multivocality and the consciousness of difference
it produces in a variety of contexts. Described by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (2000)
in their Handbook of Qualitative Research as “multi-competent, skilled at using interviews, observation,
personal documents,” the bricoleur explores the use of ethnography, historiography, genre
studies, psychoanalysis, rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, content analysis, ad infinitum.
The addition of historiography, for example, to the bricoleur’s tool kit profoundly expands his
or her interpretive facility. As bricoleurs historically contextualize their ethnographies, discourse
analysis, and semiotic studies, they tap into the power of etymology. Etymological insight—a
central feature of postformalism—involves an understanding of the origins of the construction
of social, cultural, psychological, political, economic, and educational artifacts and the ways
they shape our subjectivities. Indeed, our conception of self, world, and our positionalities as
researchers can only become complex and critical when we appreciate the historical aspect of its
formation. With this one addition educational psychologists dramatically sophisticate the quality
and depth of their knowledge work.
Utilizing these multiple perspectives, the bricolage offers an alternate path in regressive times.
Such an alternative path opens up new forms of knowledge production and researcher positionality
(one’s location in the sociocultural, political, psychological web of reality) that are grounded on
more egalitarian relationships with individuals being researched. Bricoleurs in their valuing of
diverse forms of knowledge, especially those knowledges that have been subjugated, come to
value the abilities and the insights of those who they research. It is in such egalitarian forms of
researcher–researched relationships that new forms of researcher self-awareness is developed–a
self-awareness necessary in the bricoleur’s attempt to understand the way positionality shapes
the nature of the knowledge produced in the research process.
The French word bricoleur describes a handyman or handywoman who makes use of the tools
available to complete a task. Some connotations of the term involve trickery and cunning and
remind me of the chicanery of Hermes, in particular his ambiguity concerning the messages of the
gods. If hermeneutics came to connote the ambiguity and slipperiness of textual meaning, then