Constructing Critical Resources for Research and Professional Practice with Young People: Feeling, Thinking, Learning, and Neuroscientific Narratives

Abstract

This article is a contribution to the continuing project of a critically informed psychology—in particular, relating to direct work with young people conducted by researchers and practitioners. Despite the development and ongoing reformation of critical thrusts, the incorporation of critical ideas within regimes of professional practice remains difficult to achieve. I attempt to move beyond the “semiotics of accusation” (Motzkau 2009) in critical work relating to practice while at the same time engaging with discursive repertoires from which practitioners can not distance themselves quite so easily. Rather than explore any specific practitioner situations, however, a theoretical arena is constructed around discourses of feeling, thinking, and the ways in which they can link to learning. Almost paradoxically, narratives from neuroscientific research are utilized as a means of reinvigorating resistance to reductionist accounts of young people. Although susceptible to essentialist positions in relation to knowledge and power, it is argued that some forms of neuroscientific research are challenging long-held epistemological assumptions circulated within psychology and are opening up possibilities for critical approaches in the professional training, research, and practice of child, educational, or school-based psychologists.

Keywords:

• child
• cognition
• educational and school psychology
• emotion
• learning
• neuroscience
• psychopathology