Beyond logic and argument analysis: Critical thinking,everyday problems and democratic deliberation in Cambridge International Examinations’ Thinking Skills curriculum

It is widely held that, by teaching individuals how to reason through and analyse everyday problems, the teaching of critical thinking develops the deliberative capacities essential to the healthy functioning of democracy. Implicit in this view is the assumption that a certain commensurability exists between the problems presented in such curricula and those that occupy democratic deliberation. In examining one influential critical thinking curriculum, University of Cambridge International Examination’s Thinking Skills, however, this article reveals the contingency of the assumption. With its presentation of problems steeped in discourses of logic and argument analysis, and with little consideration of notions of rightness/wrongness, such a curriculum can only tend towards the development of an instrumental form of rationality that, being morally indifferent and emotionally apathetic, contributes instead to the depoliticization of democracy. Given that the nature of democratic deliberation does not only focus on what is correct, but, more crucially, on what is right, it is argued that the problems on critical thinking curricula need to both engage individuals in deliberations over issues of social good, and allow them to think of themselves in ways that fundamentally tie them to other members of society.     

Teaching Thinking Skills in Context-Based Learning: Teachers’ Challenges and Assessment Knowledge

For an educational reform to succeed, teachers need to adjust their perceptions to the reform’s new curricula and strategies and cope with new content, as well as new teaching and assessment strategies. Developing students’ scientific literacy through context-based chemistry and higher order thinking skills was the framework for establishing a new chemistry curriculum for Israeli high school students. As part of this endeavor, we developed the Taste of Chemistry module, which focuses on context-based chemistry, chemical understanding, and higher order thinking skills. Our research objectives were (a) to identify the challenges and difficulties chemistry teachers faced, as well as the advantages they found, while teaching and assessing the Taste of Chemistry module; and (b) to investigate how they coped with teaching and assessing thinking skills that include analyzing data from graphs and tables, transferring between multiple representations and, transferring between chemistry understanding levels. Research participants included eight teachers who taught the module. Research tools included interviews, classroom observations, teachers-designed students’ assignments, and developers-designed students’ assignments. We documented different challenges teachers had faced while teaching the module and found that the teachers developed different ways of coping with these challenges. Developing teachers’ assessment knowledge (AK) was found to be the highest stage in teachers’ professional growth, building on teachers’ content knowledge (CK), pedagogy knowledge (PK), and pedagogical-content knowledge (PCK). We propose the use of assignments designed by teachers as an instrument for determining their professional growth.     

University Applicants’ Critical Thinking Skills: The Case of the Finnish Educational Sciences

This study investigates the quality of the critical thinking skills of applicants (n?=?77) seeking entry to the faculty of educational sciences in a Finnish university and how these skills are associated with the applicant’s age, previous higher education experience, and matriculation and entrance examination scores. The data consist of the applicants’ responses to problem-solving tasks and their matriculation and entrance examination scores. Critical thinking skills were measured with comparison and argumentation tasks. The results indicate that comparison of the texts and analysis of the arguments they contained were more difficult tasks than putting forward arguments both for and against of one’s personal standpoint. In addition, previous experience of higher education predicted participants’ comparison skills and their matriculation examination grades predicted their argumentation skills. The feasibility of using critical comparison tasks in the entrance examination tests is discussed.     

Race,culture, and pluralism: The evolution of Dewey’s vision for a democratic curriculum

This is the second of four essays discussing John Dewey's short essay, ‘Education as engineering’. Dewey's views are remarkably timely against the background of recent discussions about the role of evidence in educational practice and a call for research that tells us ‘what works’. Dewey's view is nuanced and helps one to see what one should and should not expect from an engineering approach to education. However, Dewey pays little attention to the role of normative judgement in engineering and does not address the question of whether engineering in education might be fundamentally different from engineering in other domains. This paper provides some suggestions for how one may want to articulate this difference and argues that it is important to bear in mind that there are differences between the building of bridges and the ‘building’ of human beings.     

The International Baccalaureate and a framework for class consciousness: the potential outcomes of a ‘class-for-itself’

The International Baccalaureate (IB) examination system in early 2010 was on offer in 2700 schools in 139 countries. Since 1999, the Geneva-registered IB has created a platform for image consolidation, product standardization, and technological linkage. Out of this has emerged a globally branded ‘IB World’, educating the ‘IB Learner’, using an outcomes-based ‘IB Learner Profile’, and ‘IB Community Themes’. It is soon to be aligned within an ‘IB Association’. This creates a potential framework for class consciousness. The ‘IB Learner’, forming a ‘class-in-itself’, might form a self-conscious social grouping, a ‘class-for-itself’. This paper explores possible outcomes, within the context of two ‘agendas’. The ‘agenda for global peace’ desires an irenic class, tolerant and culturally aware. Within the context of an ‘agenda for global business’ a more inner-directed class might appear, sympathetic to globalization and the needs of Capital. Alternatively, a ‘third way’ could appear; a class who is business-oriented but socially-responsible.     

Between ‘pedagogy’ and ‘Pädagogik’: a critique of lived pedagogy

The present paper is an analysis of the recently formulated concept of Lived Pedagogy. With roots in phenomenology and narrative research and research on ‘student voice’, the concept is coined as a way to research participants’ experience of practical pedagogy in school. The main theoretical and methodological challenges in Lived Pedagogy stem from the use of relational theory (i.e. phenomenology and narrative theory) while a priori maintaining a number of divisions that challenge this relational logic. Having outlined these problems, a suggestion is made to inform Lived Pedagogy by way of the German Pädagogik with its central focus on purpose(s) of education. Specifically, I employ Løvlie’s educational transformation of Habermas’s discourse ethics as a framework for structuring the deliberation of what is educationally desirable.     

Thinking in a ‘worldly’ way: mobility,knowledge, power and geography

In order to enhance understandings of the international mobility of researchers and the implications of their mobility for knowledge production and circulation, we need to develop more sophisticated conceptual resources. Here we draw on and seek to develop ideas generated from literary theory and geography in order to highlight the links between internationally mobile researchers, knowledge, geography and power. In particular, we develop three interrelated concepts: ‘geographies of power/knowledge’, ‘empires of knowledge’, and ‘edges of empires’. We also turn to Edward Said's notion of the ‘exilic intellectual’ because it speaks to the manner in which some mobile individuals navigate this terrain, as well as to issues of their links to place, positionality and the academy. The paper puts these concepts to work as we ask ‘What do they look like through the lens of an individual's intellectual biography?’ and ‘How can a biography add nuance to the concepts?’ Overall we adopt what Said calls a ‘worldly’ perspective that involves considering the time and place of ideas.     

Crossing boundaries: Exploring the theory,practice and possibility of a ‘Future 3’ curriculum

In this article, we examine a case of innovation in curriculum and pedagogy at a new school in the UK. We begin by outlining the 3 Futures model, which we use as a methodological heuristic in the case study of the school that appears to be both knowledge-led and learner-engaged; characteristics of the Future 3 scenario. In considering the school's curriculum, we also draw on a number of concepts from the work of Basil Bernstein: classification, framing and the idea of open schools, and a curriculum integration model developed by us to consider the degree of epistemic emphasis in the school's predominantly interdisciplinary curriculum. Together, these concepts provide the means to examine the organising principles of practice operating in the school, as links are drawn between the 3 Futures model, Bernstein's concepts and the data. We theorise this as a form of ‘opening up’, suggesting that even within the context of an interdisciplinary curriculum, access to powerful knowledge may be maintained in a whole-school approach where the demands of both knowledge and knowers are brought into balance. The school's approach and the theorisation we offer may provide insights for other schools embarking on a futures model for education and for twenty-first-century educational discourses more generally.     

International students’ perspectives of a diverse class on multiculturalism

Studying in a foreign country, where one becomes a cultural outsider and where one lacks knowledge of and access to dominant cultural practices, can be a perfect context for challenging students’ values, beliefs, and attitudes, particularly when these experiences are coupled with coursework on diversity. This study explored international students’ perspectives of a diverse class on multiculturalism. Data from 45 students’ reflective journals, course evaluation, and focus group interviews were analysed to identify students’ significant learning experiences. The study provides support for the value of diverse cultural experiences in developing intercultural competence. In addition, the diversity among students contributed to their growing understanding of cultural diversity. The research findings contribute to the development of teacher preparation and enhancement of curricula and practice.     

Using Robotics and Game Design to Enhance Children’s Self-Efficacy,STEM Attitudes,and Computational Thinking Skills

Journal of Science Education and Technology - This paper describes the findings of a pilot study that used robotics and game design to develop middle school students’ computational thinking...     

An organic view of students’ want formation: pragmatic rationality,habitus and reflexivity

Based on interviews with and questionnaires completed by upper secondary school pupils (n = 27) from academic and vocational programmes, respectively, the present paper focuses on some of the social and individual conditions that precede the individual decision-making process in education transitions. The paper shows that an organic view of decision-making is in better accordance with observations than is a hierarchical view, and thus supports previous research claiming that pragmatic rationality (based on habitus and reflexivity) plays a more important role in students’ decision-making processes than does instrumental rationally.     

Phenomenology and curriculum implementation: discerning a living curriculum through the analysis of Ted Aoki’s situational praxis

The argumentation in this paper is grounded in a critical and conceptual analysis of Ted Aoki’s phenomenology, wherein curriculum is read as phenomenological text. The problem explored emerges from Aoki’s critique of the Tyler rationale for curriculum design, implementation and evaluation as it is conceived and practised in contemporary standardized education, which is driven by the ideology of social efficiency. Aoki focuses on the way in which the scientific and technical modes of curriculum implementation preclude particular modes of Being-in-the-world because curriculum implementation, as a technical and instrumental process, reduces both educators and students to epistemological subjects, and beyond, objects of knowledge. By focusing on curriculum implementation as a form of ‘situational-praxis’ as opposed to ‘instrumental-action’, this paper concludes, it is possible to put educators and students in touch with the ontological aspects of their Being-in-the-world. Aoki’s practice of phenomenology reveals an understanding of an attuned mode of human transcendence in learning, which opens the possibility for an authentic educational experience where educators and students dwell in the midst of the curriculum’s unfolding as an ontological phenomenon.     

Hands-on history: towards a critique of the ‘everyday’

The modern Turkish state and society have been greatly influenced by reforms of the education system. Second Constitutional Period reforms can be viewed as the preparatory stage of Republican reforms and a time when many of the later reforms were planned and given limited application. In this way both periods contributed to the foundation of modern Turkey. The innovations pioneered by Late Ottoman intellectuals stemmed from various origins, mostly European positivists and materialist philosophers. American pragmatism was added as an ideological source during the foundation of the Republic. It can be observed that ideological trends took root from Ottoman times according to the degree that intellectuals were affected by them. In this paper, the ideological origins of educational reforms during the Second Constitution Period have been studied in relation to the influence of European philosophers on Ottoman intellectuals of the time and their ideological environments. Late Ottoman intellectuals were found to have been largely affected by France’s positivism, German’s materialism and Comte, Durkheim, Büchner and Spencer. The paper reveals how modern Turkey’s educational philosophy parameters have been shaped by these intellectuals’ ideas.     

Exploring preservice elementary teachers’ critique and adaptation of science curriculum materials in respect to socioscientific issues

The work presented here represents a preliminary effort undertaken to address the role of teachers in supporting students’ learning and decision-making about socioscientific issues (SSI) by characterizing preservice elementary teachers’ critique and adaptation of SSI-based science curriculum materials and identifying factors that serve to mediate this process. Four undergraduate preservice elementary teachers were studied over the course of one semester. Results indicate that the teachers navigated multiple learning goals, as well as their own subject-matter knowledge, informal reasoning about SSI, and role identity, in their critique and adaptation of SSI-oriented science instructional materials. Implications for science teacher education and the design of curriculum materials in respect to SSI are discussed.