The Visual As the Critical

Moeller et al. “Visual Thinking Strategies = Creative and Critical Thinking.” Kappan 95.3 (2013): 56- 

             60. EbscoHost. 12 Feb. 2014.

Although Moeller et al.'s article addresses K-5 teaching, I found the strategies and conclusions to be naturally transferrable to college-level teaching. The article lays out an experimental teaching method at Camelot Intermediate School in South Dakota known as Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). While the practice was originally intended to foster student writing abilities, it has in fact branched far beyond the composition classroom: students have improved in everything from critical thinking to creativity to communication skills (57). The VTS methodology is really quite simple. It provides “time and space where students learn to create meaning from art” (58). Although we've talked in class about such methods (i.e. Sirc), what immediately attracted me to this article in particular was the concrete examples of children from the school employing VTS. It quickly became clear that the students had to spend little time memorizing rote definitions of visual analysis or procedures of close reading. Instructors from this school asked simple questions: “What's going on in this picture? / What do you see that makes you say that? / What more can you find?” (57).  Our culture being an increasingly visual one, the students had an instantaneous toolbox for analysis: their own perception. I'm tempted by this idea, that instead of overwhelming learners with theories and definitions of analysis, we toss them in the water feet first. The process of critical thinking becomes less like an assignment and more like an inspired exigency.

Naysayers might claim that children have no qualms about expressing their thoughts, which is true enough. But it is the way VTS plays out that served to solidify my belief in the practice. Veteran students who had been exposed to VTS began exhibiting openness to alternative views and non-competitive debates. This was not only after hearing alternate perspectives from the teacher, either. Rather, Moeller et al.'s study shows evidence of children naturalizing the critical thinking process without instruction. They would reevaluate their thinking when confronted with opinions different from theirs (instead of refuting their peers' thoughts). They began to think about their ideas before they barreled in with analyses. Perhaps the most inspiring facet of the article, though, was the fact that students would apply the skills learned through VTS to areas outside of the image-analysis classroom: to other courses, to other assignments, to student government meetings. When thinking about how to justify to our students what they can take from our classroom that they can actually use, this article seems to answer in the positive. We are giving them abilities that will serve down nearly any avenue life takes them (59-60).

VTS takes the form of discussion in which the teacher plays a pivotal role. By accepting all ideas, though of course asking students to qualify their responses, and by paraphrases student comments, the instructor models what it means to think and hear critically. There is no judgment in response to other ideas, only new perspectives to incorporate. “Because teachers paraphrase each discussion,” note Moeller et al., “students feel appreciated.” In other words, the process itself shows students the benefits of putting it into practice. Even more importantly, though, is the fact that this discussion opens a space for students to make mistakes. It shows students the real-world limits of what counts as a feasible interpretation as opposed to what is merely a fly-by-night remark. Yet such remarks are not disallowed. Rather, students come to understand the activity of thinking as “a long-term cycle of small-successes and frequent mistakes” (59). Missteps no longer feel so detrimental to students. A gaffe becomes an opportunity to try again – to “rewrite”, to revise – and is recognized as a necessary step in the modus operandi. The notion that there is no right answer is internalized, encouraging students to try again – and on their own. A desire arises to implement changes to one's thought process until s/he arrives at a reasonable middle-ground.

I enjoyed this text in part because I start my semester with image analysis. I've felt the visual medium to be an accessible, and therefore necessary, entry point to the process of critical thinking. But after reading this article I realize that there is much more I could be doing, including not isolating image analysis to one section of the semester. There are questions that linger, however, which is impossible to avoid in a text meant for the teaching of younger children. But in terms of college-age students, I wondered how we go further than simply providing the opportunity for learners to understand what it is they're doing. In other words, how do we give them an awareness that this is what critical thinking looks like? How do we then get them to carry the process into areas that might be less inclined to incorporate critical thinking? There are many good suggestions in the article. I wonder, though, how to update it to a higher education curriculum.  

"A Model for Critical Thinking"

Update 2: Emerson, “A Model for Teaching Critical Thinking” 17 Feb. 2014

Emerson, Marnice K. “A Model for Teaching Critical Thinking.” (2013): 1-24. ERIC. ED540588. 15 Feb. 2014. <http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED540588>

Marnice Emerson takes on the pedagogy of critical thinking in this recent publication. Though his text reads more as a catalogue of various theories and definitions, he doers offer pertinent strategies in the instruction of critical thinking today, something that directly informs the thesis question at work in my project. Emerson defines critical thinking in four major ways. In order to be critical, thinking must be reflexive (“metacognitive”), personally invested, contextualized with other thinkers, and suspicious about assumption (3-4, 6-7). The paradox of these skills for instructors is that “the ability to dig deeper and question is not an innate trait in most people” (4). The question then becomes: how do we teach this skill to people disinclined to it? Emerson sees most students as resistant to critical thinking, whether it is an innate trait or not, for a number of reasons: “Some students perceive critical thinking as a difficult process that does not yield benefits that outweigh the effort”, some “do not want to discover information that might make them question their existing beliefs or introduce gray areas in which there is no right answer”, while others “do not have confidence in their ability to critically think and would prefer to rely on the thinking of those whom they perceive as expert or authority figures” (4). Though his tone may be bleak at times, these characterizations address at least some of the reasons students balk at critical thinking. I have had classrooms with each of these personas in one form or another. And it is such personalities that call for a pedagogy of critical thought.

Emerson's solutions to these issues draw on theories of educational motivation and expectancy-value. This means that we must motivate students if we expect them to exercise more effort than they are use to in employing deeper operations of thought and simultaneously display the use critical thinking has within their own lives (6). To do this, Emerson recommends “a mixed approach, in which critical thinking [is] taught as a separate unit within a course of other content” (8). This approach works best when critical thinking is taught explicitly instead of implicitly. Teaching the technique explicitly entails making students fully aware that critical thinking is an outcome and practice of a course, while implicit instruction means that teachers utilize exercises to enhance students' critical contributions without ostensibly stating that such a practice is at work (8-10). What would this look like in the classroom? To take a mixed, explicit approach would ask students to apply deeper levels of thought to a course (unrelated to critical thinking) with the goal of analyzing the ways in which they think about the topic. Emerson advocates the techniques of surprise and equilibrium as keys to this approach. Surprise is evoked when we evince “the tendency to believe statements … about the self when they could easily apply to anyone”, while disequilibrium arises when our “challenging of learners' current beliefs plac[e] them in a conflicted mindset” (11). Above all, critical thinking must be taught incrementally through praxis, offering students the opportunity to concretely utilize the thought processes we discuss in class on a scale of increasing difficulty so that we do not overwhelm them with too much at once, all while we offer feedback on their performance and encourage them to reflect on their habits of thought throughout these exercises (10-14).

There is certainly a good deal of sound advice offered by Emerson. I like the idea of practice, especially when critical thinking is pursued in stages. This would demystify the aura of critical thinking into a practical, achievable skill that can be learned instead of inherited. But I must admit that the article was more troubling for me in its recommendations, raising questions of the ethics behind methods of teaching students to think critically. My largest concern lies with Emerson's framing of emotion and thought as two entities locked in Manichean warfare. Several times throughout the text he puts forward a claim of this order: “emotional thinking quite often blocks the ability to critically think about most topics” (5). But I don't believe that affect can be removed from the thinking process. Our visceral reactions are constitutive of what we think and how we think it. This must be incorporated as part and parcel of the critical process – a different kind of thinking but an essential contemplative reaction no less. Though I understand that emotions can at times be used to mask the thinking process, this does not mean they are divorced from it. It is a matter of attuning students to emotion as a component of thought. And, after all, isn't affect constituent of Emerson's call for “personal investment” in the critical thinking process?

I was also troubled by some of the strategies Emerson recommended, particularly the surprise and disequilibrium techniques. In one example, he explains that a teacher might “think aloud how [the class] would use basic questioning strategies to evaluate a specific credible website, separating factual elements from opinions” and then for homework “[a]ssig[n] the learners a different website – one that appears to be credible but is actually not” (12) in order to show them that their thinking processes were misguided and needed to be reconsidered. Though Emerson claims that his research finds this task to be effective, I am not sure I would be comfortable with this level of manipulation. It almost seems as though I would be proclaiming to teach students something when in fact I was merely setting them up for a hoax, which raises problems of student-teacher trust.

In all, these questions interrogate the consequences of how I teach – through what means and to what end. What methods of teaching critical thought are appropriate to the task? What are the limits? How can I gauge whether students are thinking critically or merely aping the exercises we cover in class? I don't doubt that there are many viable techniques that could be used, but I question their worth if they value chicanery at the expense of the confidence of our students. I prefer to see myself in a partnership with students, not in an autocracy.

Joseph Harris: Rewriting

Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts. Logan: Utah State UP, 2006.

Much like the project at work in They Say / I Say, Joseph Harris' Rewriting seeks to place student writers in conversation with other texts and authors. His first concern is avoiding the automatization of writing by arcane rules and strictures: “This kind of work often gets talked about in ways – avoiding plagiarism, documenting sources, citing authorities, acknowledging influences – that make it seema dreary and legalistic concern” (2). This was a point to which I definitely related, as at times it feels as though I am the harbinger of such tedium, especially on documentation and formatting days. It is worthwhile, then, to consider Harris' revision to this stasis, instead recognizing that “writing hinges on this idea of a move” (3, his emphasis). A move. Action. Reaction. Energy. Momentum. A process Harris denotes as “rewriting.” Sounds a lot better in the composition classroom.

Harris outlines five modes of rewriting: “coming to terms, forwarding, countering, taking an approach, and revising” (4, his emphases). He tackles each one in the subsequent chapters. Coming to terms deals with utilizing, or to use Harris' term “re-presenting” (17), other texts in a way that is not arbitrary or combative but, above all, useful to a writer's goals. The key here is that, while texts are something that enable a call-and-response conversation, they do not dictate the course of one's thoughts and arguments. They are merely there to enhance one's understanding of complex ideas through generous reading (16-28). Harris prefers the language of “forwarding” a text to that of “responding” to a text, since often (and especially in the case of dearly departed authors) we are not answering the authors we cite as much as we are forwarding their ideas to embolden our own ideas. In this process of forwarding, “you begin to shift the focus of your readers away from what its author has to say and toward your own project” (38), keeping the process of writing motivated for the writer. While Harris goal in the chapter on countering is to show writers how to extrapolate the limitations of someone else's text, he is critical of “the sort of argument whose goal is simply to vanquish your opponent” (67). This is a particularly useful notion in that I have found it difficult to shift students away from the “I'm right, you're wrong (about everything)” model to more of a believing game model. My favorite chapter dealt with taking an approach because it dealt with perhaps the highest order of writing skills. Harris here advocates for not simply responding or “rewriting” a text, but adopting an author's methodology. I appreciated most the qualities he suggest in such an approach: acknowledging influences, turning an approach on itself, and reflexivity (79). These tactics, it seems to me, offer the most potential for creative thinking. At least in my experience, reflexivity begets reflexivity, and in thinking about the methodology behind your text, it is difficult not to think about the reasons why you're writing in such a way, about the very subject one is dealing with, in fact. Which leads to the practice of revision. Now obviously these skills have immediate benefits on one's writing. But the true importance of these techniques is in gleaning a new perspective on one's own writing. They enable a writer to question his or her own text, to think critically about the larger project at hand and the meaning(s) behind such a task (98-9). And as he notes in his introduction, these “moves do not by any means compose a fixed sequence for writing a critical essay” (5), enabling a writer to call on an arsenal of tools that strengthen them not only through the writing process, but through the (critical) thinking process as well, if these two processes can even be delineated.

Harris text lead me to question the kinds of research projects I am assigning students. Perhaps the issue with critical thinking is not so much that students are resistant to it. Though there will probably always be a few insurgents, maybe the real matter is challenging them material that is actually meaningful to them. This raises questions about what the “interdisciplinary classroom” might actually look like. But I wonder if critical thinking would be more amicably embraced if students were freer to engage with sources that touched closer to their home discipline than ones that feel too Englishy. To think critically about environmental science equations is not the same as thinking critically about new kinds of accounting methodologies, which is not the same as thinking critically about Pre-K pedagogy... etc, etc. I question if it might be better to give students a reason, as Harris calls for, “to engage with and rewrite the work of other thinkers” (2), thinkers in whom students are actually interested, not thinkers I force upon them through the medium of my syllabus. For even I would have a hard time thinking critically about a subject with which I had little interest, much less one upon which I had even less grasp.