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The (affirmative/negative)'s appeal to Strong Data, and the researchmethodology behind it, is a monocultural construct that seeks to reduce andcategorize all difference in life into individual sects. This marginalizes andexcludes all that doesn't fit the 'theory' which empirically is restricted to thepoor, non-white bodyrejecting them is a moral D-ruleKincheloe '06 (Joe Lyons, Professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education at McGill University in Montreal, anda prolific authorrecieved three graduate degrees from the University of Tennessee The Power of Difference in Knowledge Production:

Multiologicality in the Bricolage and Postformalism)

Postformalism operates to develop new ways of cultivating the intellect and defining intelligence, while concurrently working for socialjustice and a democratic redistribution of power. It takes its name from the effort to move beyond what Jean Piaget labeled, formal thinking.In many ways postformalism involves the application of a critical theoretical system of meaning to the cognitive or socio-cognitive domain.This multilogical system of meaning draws upon critical theory, critical hermeneutics, post/anti-colonial modes of historical understanding,feminist notions of passionate knowing, subjugated knowledges, liberation theological ethics, and progressive pragmatist concerns withjustice, liberty, and equality. In this theoretical bricolage we begin to lay the foundation for a new mode of cognition (Kincheloe, Steinberg,

and Villaverde, 1999). Piagets formal cognition involved an uncritical acceptance of a Cartesian-Baconian-Newtonian mechanistic worldview that is caught in a reductionistic cause-effect,hypothetical-deductive system of reasoning . This Eurocentric, monocultural cognitiveconstruct was unconcerned with questions of power relations and the complex ways theystructure our consciousness . In this context so-called formal operational thinkers accept an

objective, depoliticized mode of knowing that breaks a social , psychological, or pedagogicalsystem down into its component parts in order to understand how it works. Operating in aculture of positivism such formalism emphasizes certainty and prediction as it organizesverified facts into certified theories. The facts that do not fit into the theory are eliminated,and the theory developed is the one best suited to limit contradiction in knowledge. In thiswayformalism assumes that resolution must be found for all contradictionsone truth existsand the scientific discovery of that truth is the goal of all rigorous research. Accepting this formalistmonologicality many schools and standardized test makers assume that formal cognitive operations represent the highest level of humancognition. Thus, they focus their efforts on its cultivation and measurement. Many researchers and educators who work to transcendformalism are often unrewarded and sometimes even punished in a neo-positivist evidence-based era. As they move to postformalism,psychological and educational researchers politicize cognition. They begin to understand the race, class, gender, and sexual dimensions of allcognitive acts. In this context they attempt to disengage themselves from socio-personal norms and ideological expectations. The postformalconcern with questions of meaning, emancipation via ideological disembedding, and attention to the process of self-production rises aboveformalist thinking and its devotion to prescribed procedure. Postformalism always engages larger questions of purpose in the process

focusing on questions of human dignity, freedom, authority, and social responsibility. Many may argue that postformalism with its emphasison difference, multiple perspectives, and multilogicality will necessitate an ethical relativism that subverts efforts to engage in social action.Those who would offer such a perspective do not understand that postformalism is a critical theory of cognition. In this context it isinterested in multiple perspectives for their insight into helping us cultivate the intellect in ways that eventuate in the alleviation of injusticeand human suffering. In this context postformalism is an ethically informed theory of cognition. Postformalisms emphasis on differenceexpands the boundaries of what can be labeled intelligence or sophisticated thinkinga concern that never has been but should be a central

concern of a critical multiculturalism.When we begin to expand these boundaries under the banner ofmultilogicality, we find that those who are excluded from the community of the intelligentbegin to cluster around exclusions based on the notion that the poor and the non-white asopposed to the affluent and the white live in separate and hierarchical cognitive domains . Inmonological and mechanistic modes of cognitive theory intelligence and creativity are seen asfixed and innate dynamics found only among the privileged few. Mainstream psychologysgrand narrative of intelligence has stressed biological fixities that can be altered only by

surgical means. Such an essentialism is a psychology ofnihilism that locks people into rigidcategories that follow them throughout life . Thus, the ethic of difference that postformalismbrings to the cognitive table changes the nature of knowledge production in the psychologicaldomain. Such changes hold profound ethical and action-based consequences for endingoppression based on ill-considered and prejudicial attributions of cognitive inability.

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The alternative framing is to embrace the bricolagethe juxtaposition of theAffirmative and Negative provide the necessary lenses of difference to allow forcritical insightKincheloe '06 (Joe Lyons, Professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education at McGill University in Montreal, anda prolific authorrecieved three graduate degrees from the University of Tennessee The Power of Difference in Knowledge Production:Multiologicality in the Bricolage and Postformalism)

The concept of difference is central to the bricolage. Gregory Bateson uses the example of binoculars to illustratethis point. The image of the binoculara singular and undivided pictureis a complex synthesis between images in both the left and rightside of the brain. In this context a synergy is created wherethe sum of the images is greater than the separateparts . As a result of bringing the two different views together, resolution and contrast areenhanced. Even more important, new insight into depth is created . Thus, the relationshipbetween the different parts constructs new dimensions of seeing (Bateson in Newland, 1997). Employingsuch examples of synergies,bricoleurs maintain that juxtapositions of difference create abonus ofinsight . This concept becomes extremely important in any cognitive, social, pedagogical, orknowledge production activity. Indeed, one of the rationales for constructing the bricolageand theorizing postformalism in the first place involves accessing this bonus of insight.Thispower of difference or ontological mutualism transcends Cartesianisms emphasis on thething-in-itself. The tendency in Cartesian-Newtonian thinking is to erase this bonus of insight

in the abstraction of the object of inquiry from the processes and contexts of which it is a part.In this activity it subverts difference. The power of these synergies exists not only in thecognitive, social, pedagogical, and epistemological domains but in the physical world as well.Natural phenomena, as Albert Einstein illustrated in physics and Humberto Mataurana and Francisco Varela laid out in biology andcognition, operate in states of interdependence. These ways of seeing have produced perspectives on the workings of the planet that

profoundly differ from the views produced by Western science. What has been fascinating to many is that these post-Einsteinianperspectives have in so many ways reflected the epistemologies and ontologies of ancient non-Western peoples in India, China, and Africa and indigenous peoples around the world. In the spirit of valuing difference, therefore,bricoleurs seek not onlydiverse research methodologies but search for ways of seeing thatprovide a new vantage point on a particular phenomenon. As opposed to many mainstreamCartesian-Newtonian scholars,bricoleurs value the voices of the subjugated and marginalized .The idea of subjugated knowledge is central to the work of the bricoleur. With such an idea in mindbricoleurs do not assume that experts in the disciplines possess the final word on a domain of study. Sometimes what such experts report

needs to be re-analyzed in light of the insights of those operating outside the discipline. As a scholar of education andmulticulturalism I have often observed how some of the most compelling insights I haveencountered concerning pedagogy come from those individuals living and operating outsidethe boundaries of educational scholarship. Sometimes such individuals are not formalscholars at all but individuals who have suffered at the hands of educational institutions . Suchexperiences provided them a vantage point and set of experiences profoundly different thanmore privileged scholars. This phenomenon is not unique to the study of education but can be viewed in a variety of disciplines(Pickering, 1999; OSullivan, 1999; Malewski, 2001; Thayer-Bacon, 2000, 2003; Kincheloe and Weil, 2004).

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