[Note: Due to the
length of this material, it will be presented over two postings: this one and the next one which will be
posted on 9/9/16.]
With descriptions of behavioral and cognitive psychologies
presented over the last three postings, this posting will present, in a
rudimentary fashion, a “psychology” that not all in the discipline recognize as
a psychology. That would be
humanist/phenomenology psychology. Yet despite
this reluctance by fellow educational psychologists, it has had an observable
influence on many teachers and curriculum developers.
Some have called it the “third force” – another way to
visualize psychological factors that affect how and what a person learns. It is criticized as being a “soft relative”
of the more “scientific” approaches to educational psychology. The practitioners who engage in this approach’s
research do not depend on sophisticated experimental designs to gather their
data, but on testimonials and interviews.
The information gathered by these qualitative techniques ventures into personal
accounts of what the “I” experiences are in learning and/or in handling other challenges.
Those who adhere to this psychology place great importance on
self-definition – how we view ourselves.
They see this introspective determination as highly influential in how
one will function in life, generally, and in the classroom, more
specifically. This is true both for
students and teachers and even administrators.
And this self-awareness, or lack of it, is not a quality that is abstracted
out of one’s psyche, but instead a quality that takes in the whole person and the
whole environment in which that person is situated.
Perceptions become central: does the person perceive him/herself as a
learner, a scoundrel, a lover, a hater, a leader, a follower, an actor, or a
dropout? These are various
self-inflicted titles that then evolve into illustrative behavior that manifests
their meanings. An actor will act and a
self-perceived dropout will, more than likely, be a dropout in real life. This describes the phenomenological aspect of
this psychology. And these perceptions
are not of a temporal nature, but instead define the whole person – a summary
of who the person is through his/her own eyes. The longer and more established these
perceptions exist, the harder they are to dislodge.
Therefore, an educator, in order to be successful, needs to
be conscious of this reality, be able to plan for it and, in a humanistic way,
account for it as the educator interacts with the student. The aim, of course, is to encourage and
enable a person to perceive him/herself in ways that are rewarding to the
person, not debilitating or self-destructive in any way or to any degree.
With this approach, the emphasis is not on how one responds
to this or that stimulus or how the brain’s structure processes
information. The emphasis is on the Gestaltic
aim to see and understand the total interaction between the individual and
his/her environment – less analysis and more synthesis is this psychology’s
orientation. This view is particularly
sensitive to the interpersonal relations that mark a person’s space. In this, humanistic psychology leads teachers
and curriculum developers to be more attuned to communication qualities such as
connotations, symbolism, and configurations of interactions among subjects of a
given “field” (a field being those aspects of a space that provides any effect on
an interaction).
Learning, therefore, is viewed as complex. There are mental processes that take in what
a field has to offer; the elements have to be analyzed in order to identify any
problem(s); the mind has to discriminate and tease out what is important from
what is not and it has to see and understand the consequential relationships
among the people and things present or potentially present. Curriculum is not seen as a set plan, but an
evolving concern which is better designated by the verb, currere, than the
noun, curriculum. This is the central
ideal of reconceptualism which is usually associated with more recent
expressions of reconstructionist philosophy.[1]
And by referring to the people and things present, the
concern is not only with the physical proximity to the situation in question,
but also includes those elements that can have an influence from afar. All of this is a dynamic reality which calls
on the person to accommodate to the changes that are constantly taking place. Nothing is set in stone, making all perceived
knowledge or beliefs unreliable and subject to questioning and critique.
But what is maintained, throughout the instructional
interchange, is framing the teaching effort toward addressing the whole, the
whole person and the whole environment.
Truth is not only in the detail, but also in the entirety of the
situation, not just in external elements (rewards and/or punishments) or in
internal mental elements (the structural processes of the mind and brain), but
in the whole interactive reality. All
this does not lend itself to measurement or analytic diagramming, but to “gut”
senses that can get a hold on the whole (see fn 1 above).
[1] As I described in the posting, “Formal Critique of
Critical Theory,” what I named reconceptualism is a branch of critical theory,
the leftist, to varying degrees Marxist construct. Most educators who ascribe to critical theory
today adhere to this line of thought. A
quip that I believe summarizes this view is to just marry Marxian thought to
natural rights biases that idolize the individual, and you have
reconceptualism. With reconceptualism
and its reliance on postmodernism and post structuralism, there is a call for
self-referentiality and a rejection of any grand narratives or ideologies. It is subjectivism on “steroids.” Adherents call for a serious approach to
seeking the truth through historical interpretation that relies heavily on
contextualizing the information gathered and delving into subjective forces
about historical characters and the researchers themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment