Critical mass

College starts next week with the usual faculty work week, during which we get ourselves organized and ready.

Students arrive the following weekend. I'm happy about this, and anticipatory.

I'm teaching three content-oriented classes, two sections of our general education Environmental Sustainability class on food, population energy and climate change, and a section of our introductory economics class, all of which makes me very happy because I enjoy the content and students, especially in the economics class.

But as always I'm thinking a lot about skills, especially critical thinking skills, which are a major outcome for Environmental Sustainability.

I've learned that it's best to start by discussing what constitutes critical thinking with students, both to determine their current level of skill, which varies quite a lot by year and individual, but also to make the outcome visible and explicit, a kind of goal-setting exercise.

"See here, this is what we need to try to do, and if you get good at it, these benefits will follow."

Critical thinking is really the difference between a serious college education and imitations. There are plenty of college programs out there that never really succeed in developing this skill. And huge benefits do follow for the individual and society. I've written at more length about this elsewhere on this blog.

And without the particular kind of environmental criticism that is the environmental movement, we wouldn't have any raison d'être for America's Environmental College.

So it's especially important to our work at Unity College.

Of course, one downside to becoming a powerful critical thinker is a kind of loneliness. Critical thinking requires the questioning of "group think," a very pervasive phenomenon in any primate society.

If you question "group think," necessarily you are set apart from the group. You become a loner.

Even in college this group-think is very visible, even in the classroom, as in when all the student tribes and cliques sit together. Sometimes I find it necessary to have students sound off by numbers into new groups, just to break up these old groups, just to get them thinking differently.

It's so easy for folk to be captured by the social milieu in which they spend their time, and so difficult to develop independence of mind.

I teach mostly upper division classes, and so students come to me having developed the reading, writing, math and speaking skills that enable us to explore difficult problems like climate change critically.

At this point in their educations, it's good to try to get them to set aside the patterns of early youth, particularly the identity-building primate socialization that leads to these patterns.

But this can be very painful for those who are insecure in their identity.

That might be one reason I like this part of my job. Not that I get to inflict pain! But that I get to be the midwife at the birth of a newer, stronger, more resilient identity for the brightest of our young people, the identity of an emerging independent thinker.


Here's the Wikipedia list of critical thinking skills:

....observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and meta-cognition... due consideration to:

Evidence through observation
Context
Relevant criteria for making the judgment well
Applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment
Applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the problem and the question at hand

In addition to possessing strong critical-thinking skills, one must be disposed to engage problems and decisions using those skills. Critical thinking employs not only logic but broad intellectual criteria such as clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance, and fairness.