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When I first began teaching at the University of Michigan in 1996, I was instructed that my main task was to “teach critical thinking.”  At the time, I considered this only briefly.  I had little idea what this meant, but I also had more pressing concerns:  What should I do on the first day of class?  What if I couldn’t think of anything to say?  (What if there was a piece of spinach caught in my teeth?)  Since then, I’ve found myself returning to the issue of critical thinking, and have come to see it as the central concern of my work as a teacher.

My dissertation centered upon a class I taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.  During this project, I studied the history of critical thinking in American education; my own methods for teaching critical thinking; and the outcomes that occurred when I applied my methods in the classroom.  This research/practice has led to my current understanding of critical thinking as the process by which one becomes increasingly able to recognize and act upon one’s own position, others’ positions, and the ways those positions are shaped by discourses.  Developmentally, most college students are moving from an understanding of the world as a place in which “that’s just the way things are” to a place where their own beliefs, as well as others’, can be analyzed, disputed, and changed.  For example, a student may enter college believing that there is only one “right” way to be a writer (an impression which is, unfortunately, often fostered by their elementary and secondary educations).  My task as a teacher is to help students view knowledge as constructed and ever-evolving, rather than fixed.  To put it another way, I continually strive to help students become active users, rather than simply consumers, of the knowledges available to them at Spelman.

The interaction of the three elements of my definition (recognition of one’s own positions; recognition of others’ positions; recognition of the ways that these positions are shaped through discourse) is constant, recursive, and involves all members of the classroom setting—instructor(s) as well as students.  Here, I offer an example of each of the elements at work.

Recognizing and acting upon one’s own position.  This first step of critical thinking is often the most difficult, because students in college may not be accustomed to the process of defamiliarization it requires.  One method I use to help students gain a critical understanding of their own positions is to ask them to analyze their own experiences as scholarly evidence.  For example, the first essay I assign in English 103 (First-Year Composition) is a version of a personal essay.  Rather than simply asking students to focus on description or clarity, I ask them to consider their experience as evidence—that is, as a data set which can be examined and tested against a hypothesis, and ultimately used in service of a main point (thesis).  This approach serves multiple goals.  First, it allows students to get used to incorporating evidence critically with an easily accessible data set—their own experiences.  Second, it asks students to identify not only where they are but also what they want to argue about where they are—in other words, to take a stance which is supported by their evidence.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it validates the personal beliefs, experiences and knowledges that students bring into the classroom.  Assuming that personal experience can serve as scholarly evidence in appropriate ways collapses the conventional divide between “personal” and “scholarly” pursuits that so often prevails in college classrooms.

Recognizing and acting upon others’ positions.  An inevitable part of gaining awareness about one’s own position and arguments is learning to listen, with critical attention, to others’ positions.  No one thinks in a vacuum; rather, we are all taking part (whether we know it or not) in ongoing conversations and debates about every topic imaginable.  To foster students’ understanding of these conversations and their potential role in them, I assign students in all my classes the task of “critical reading.”  First, I teach them how to annotate.  Annotation, as I teach it, does not mean hi-liting or summarizing.  It means marking up a reading as one goes along, recording one’s paragraph-by-paragraph questions, reactions, and paraphrases.  I require annotation on all course readings, and check students’ annotations regularly.  Beginning with my guidelines, and a few pages copied from my own marked-up books as examples, students learn to develop their own styles of annotation.  In this way, they take an active role as readers, and are able to participate in discussions and incorporate sources into their papers with much greater success.

Recognizing and acting upon the discourses that shape our positions.  This is perhaps the most complex critical-thinking task I teach.  Discourses as I define them are the narratives, often implicit, that guide our ways of understanding the world.  Discourses may manifest in many ways, including visually (for instance, in a photograph of a model that has been digitally altered), linguistically (for instance, in using the term special as opposed to disabled), and kinetically (for instance, in the setup of a classroom where students sit in rows while an instructor stands at the front and lectures).  I teach students discourse awareness in many ways.  For example, when assigning research projects, I ask students to identify the discipline(s) in which their essays will be located.  Rather than imagining a general “academic audience,” I ask them to perform more detailed audience awareness by considering and responding to questions such as these:  What academic areas are most likely to be invested in your paper topic?  What arguments already exist in those areas?  What kind of language will your audience expect you to use?  What kinds of questions or counter-arguments is this audience likely to raise?  Which assumptions can you make when writing for this audience, and which assumptions will you need to reconsider, or explain more carefully?  What other contexts (historical, socioeconomic, geographic, institutional) will you need to consider as you write?

Thus far, I've been using the word writing to describe the activity I teach. However, in recent years I've begun to move away from this term and discuss students' work more in terms of composing. Because many of the projects I assign are delivered in multi-media and through various modalities (visual, aural/oral, kinetic), it feels more accurate to describe these works as compositions. Hence, my focus on critical thinking has begun to emphasize topics such as digital and visual literacies, and my lesson plans now involve a heavier emphasis on the canon of delivery. What does it mean, for example, to deliver a formal paper to a class rather than turn in a single essay to a professor? How might students capture their work in visual and oral/aural modes for delivery to various audiences, and what effect do these alterations in medium and audience have upon their purposes and the quality of their work? What additional critical skills do students need if their work is seen as composing rather than (or in addition to) writing?

One primary goal underlies all my activities in the classroom:  to help students find the relevance of reading, writing, and composing to their own lives and concerns.  My hope is that students will think about how composing can be useful to them, whether their majors are biology or theater, whether in private or public settings.  Thinking critically, I believe, is the process by which one becomes an active participant in the world, and joins one’s own passions to larger communities.  This approach is deeply engaging for both my students and myself, since we are continually learning more about ourselves, each other, and the worlds we construct through our voices.

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Copyright © 2010 Margaret Price.