Breathing Life Into Psychological Theories With Community College Students

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Decolonizing Education in Vygotsky’s and Sociocultural Approaches: Developing Knowledge on the Ground (Table 18)

Abstract

For younger generations, the end of the world as we know it approaches. The on-going climate crisis, epidemic of racism, anti-immigration, and LGBTQ-phobia, the banning of books, school mass shootings, an increase in human trafficking, and the extinction of more than 160 species of plants and animals— are at the forefront of our lives. Developmental psychology’s canons, for the most part, have failed to seriously center these issues in theories and pedagogies (Adams-Wiggins & Taylor-García, 2020; Orellana, 2016; Stetsenko, 2016). The fixation with positivism and scientism permeates the field (Koops & Kessel, 2017) producing knowledge that is decontextualized from how people develop and insufficient to deal with these on-going crises.

One notable exception is Vygotsky, whose works grew out of struggles for creating a more equitable world through overturning the traditional canons of developmental psychology in a time of social turmoil and unpreceded crisis (Stetsenko, in press). In particular, I argue that Vygotsky’s conceptualization of obuchenie (teaching-learning as one process) can be further expanded upon and taken seriously to transform and update theories of human development vis-a-vis the end of the world as we know it. I suggest that the interdependence and co-constitution of teaching-learning, world-making, and theory-making is integral to making human development more accountable to an increasingly dying world. Though normally understood as separate processes, I argue that it is only in the act of transforming theories with students through facing the end of the world as we know it, and therefore imagining the kind of world students are striving to create, that theories become alive and active in the world/our lives.

Drawing on a thematic analysis of three group discussions with community college students and from a critical ethnography of my pedagogy (e.g., student coursework), I explore what becomes possible when the lives, concerns, and hopes of community college students are centered and taken seriously in the theorization of human development rather than focusing on ”facts” or “correct” understanding of development. How do their dreams, struggles, hopes, and fears as working-class, racialized, and “non-traditional” students open up new possibilities for how we conceptualize human development?

Building on the transformative ontology (Stetsenko, 2016) and decolonial cosmologies (Wynter, 2003; Stein et al., 2016; da Silva, 2022), I propose that how community college students make sense of psychological theories bring into being new/revised theories of human development grounded on the realities of students and professor, and the world itself. That is, it is in the process of a reciprocal transmutation of teaching-learning, teacher-student, theory-practice, and self-world that we can collectively come to envision, articulate, understand, and update theories of human development.

Author

• Francisco Medina, John Jay College of Criminal Justice