Meeting #1     5/1/2020

For our first meeting we discussed the brief chapter “Critical Thinking.” Guiding questions to consider ahead of time were:

• How do you respond to hooks’ definition of critical thinking?
• How do you respond to hooks’ characterization of the rewards and challenges for faculty of teaching critical thinking?
• How do you respond to hooks’ characterization of the rewards and challenges for students of becoming critical thinkers?
• What are the possibilities and limitations of our present “distance learning” model for offering instruction that fosters critical thinking?

This first discussion centered around some of the observations and concerns of faculty requiring students to write research papers as one of the main projects for their courses. Some faculty were struggling with how to reproduce the scaffolds they offer during face-to-face class time in the distance-learning environment. This is important because few students enter our courses with a solid understanding of the purpose and organization of a research paper. Descriptions were shared during the meeting of students struggling with how to write up data that had been collected and faculty concerns that students didn’t really have a personal investment in the projects, and were put off by the lack of a place for personal voice in this kind of writing.

One notion we considered was if, sometimes, there are other writing formats, besides a formal research paper that would make more sense to assign because they allow students to process and communicate what they’ve learned in a more engaging, authentic way. Suggestions for formats for writing that might better incorporate students’ personal voices and that they may become more personally invested in, included: web pages, blogs, zines, letters, and articles. These formats have clearer real world purposes and allow for authentic exchanges with real readers.

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