Approaches to School Psychology

School and educational psychology has a political attitude towards its activity. In its etymological root, politics is related to two words, both Greek: polis (city, state) and ethics, that is, polis-ethics: politics, which designates an ethical, moral attitude in the polis, and which can be expressed by the question : what should I do in the city, as a citizen? What is the best citizen action in your community?

The field of psychological knowledge is an epistemological field in which the ethical question cannot be excluded, as well as its political position.

As we know, politics, in its democratic system of government, is partisan, divided into political groups.

Psychology, a field that therefore includes ethical-political issues, also shows itself as a field of discussions in which there are positions that do not subsume the others. Psychological approaches or theories are such positions.

So that both in school and in the broader educational field, approaches were used in order to explain learning and non-learning (the problems or learning disorders), as well as a professional practice.

What, then, is this political posture that belongs to the school psychologist? An attitude that is at the service of change and transformation and not exclusion is in order.

Five are these most popular approaches to psychology: the traditional, the behaviorist, the humanist, the cognitive and the socio-cultural.

Still widely used, the traditional approach is one in which the verticality in the student-teacher relationship is evident, so that teaching is conceived as a process of retaining and memorizing the contents passed from the teacher to the student, who receives them passively, and must reproduce them in assessments, tests and tests. So, to criticize this model is to undertake a path in which all regular education must be rethought. Not only primary and secondary education (primary and secondary education) is mainly composed of this proposal, but also the University. The path that could come to replace this proposal is the path that aims at the autonomy of the student as a student, and it is the proposal that considers the individuality of this student, as well as his insertion in a given group, in a given community. Paradoxically, it could be said that this proposal is one that considers the individuality of a group, of a community.

Carrying out this criticism there is an approach to Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, which is one of the main exponents of the socio-cultural approach. In other words, according to Mizukami, “problematic or conscientious education, unlike banking education, aims at the development of critical awareness and freedom as a means of overcoming the contradictions of banking education, and responds to the essence of being of consciousness, which is its intentionality”.

As for behaviorism, the elements of teaching and the student’s responses must be analyzed in their behavioral components, and knowledge is a direct result of experience, in this sense, the empiricism of this approach is evident, Locke’s placement, about the psyche as tabula rasa, clear. The ultimate goal of education is for individuals to be the dispensers themselves of the reinforcers that elicit their behavior. According to Mizukami, “Skinnner criticizes the existing school for its common use of aversive control (…) which does not lead to effective learning”. So that this approach, considering the empiricism of all learning, helps in an important way, for example, in new technological implementations, which can greatly facilitate this learning process. But, however, a criticism can be made regarding the worldview of this type of thinking, that is, a worldview – or cosmovision – of the subject as a product of the environment, which disregards a very important part that is the subject himself. , his life, his singularity and his thought (which, although not placed as non-existent, is considered inaccessible, which is, in a way, a tiring way of considering it “disregardable”).

For the humanist approach, personal and subjective experience is the foundation on which knowledge is built in the course of the process of becoming of the human person. This approach is fundamental in the previous criticism of behaviorism, since the primacy of education is the student’s responsibility, the human being-student, and his own education process is his responsibility. The teaching-learning method will therefore be a non-directive method, although leading the student to his own experience in order to act, to learn. This approach, in addition to showing a well-founded critique of behaviorism, considers the student as an agent of his own educational process and responsible for it.

Another approach that undertakes the same path of criticism of behaviorism is cognitivism, especially in its forceful position of viewing teaching as beyond the merely external and learning as corresponding to cognitive processes, studied in this approach, and which are seen as a process that develops throughout the learner’s life history. According to Mizukami, “interactionist constructivism is based on the theses of Piaget”, who is an author coming from Biology, with an interest in epistemological questions. This interest made him empirically study how knowledge develops in children. In his biography, this author tells how his plan was to study this subject for a short time, but that in twenty years he had not finished his work. The knowledge established by this author is very important in several areas of learning in general. To cite just one example, the creation of school curricula takes into account the phases of the child’s cognitive development. For this author, most of the so-called school failures are due to not observing the phases.

As is known, in what could be considered the beginning of learning in the Western world, that is, Greek philosophy presupposes autonomy and willingness from beginner to philosopher in search of wisdom. Regardless of the method that was considered indispensable to knowledge, the beginner should seek knowledge. In a world where the student, the aspiring philosopher was considered without light (a-luno, a-lux, as the prefix a indicates negation) and teaching was considered compulsory and obligatory, the responsibility for teaching was placed on the teacher, since, of course, not everyone wants to learn everything that is transmitted to them, and in this way, the interest and will of the student is waived.

Therefore, the political and ethical posture that belongs to the school psychologist is one that takes into account the individuality of the student and the group to which he belongs. An attitude that, obviously, if you are going to work in a school institution, you will not carry out a clinic at the school, but will give education professionals and students autonomy, freedom to act and will also give them subsidies for mental health at work, in the case of professionals, and in learning, in the case of students.

Bibliographic references

Mizukami, GN Teaching, process approaches

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