A Praxis of Entry: First-Year Writing as the Critical Thinking Course
Adam Katz Quinnipiac University
Double Helix, Vol. 6 (2018) DOI: 10.37514/DBH-J.2018.6.1.05
It is common to hear college instructors, in discussing "critical thinking," shift the discussion from defining critical thinking to identifying "features" of it and, especially, methods for encouraging it in their students. This is perhaps wise, as definitions of critical thinking generally tend to be banal: we use terms drawn from cognitive science (problem solving, drawing upon alternative perspectives, judgement, and so on) and informal logic (drawing conclusions based upon evidence—but only "carefully weighed" evidence) in eclectic and ultimately arbitrary ways. This tentativeness in defining "critical thinking" indicates some confusion regarding the provenance and purpose of the concept. There is no real intellectual genealogy of the concept. Nor do we use the term in normal academic work: we don't refer to our colleagues' work as good examples of critical thinking; we don't, in examining the history of the disciplines, discuss, say, the dispute between logical positivism and Wittgenstein in terms of which side did better "critical thinking."
In fact, we use the term "critical thinking" only for pedagogical purposes. We want our students to be better critical thinkers, and what we mean by this is that we want them to think more like we do. Or more like we think we do. So, many instructors can easily use ultimately empty terms like "analyze" and "evaluate" in discussing what students do (or, more often, fail to do) because we assume that is what we, or perhaps those whose work we admire, are doing, and we use that as an implicit model to assess student work. All pedagogy is mimetic, but it's not at all clear that we know what we are asking students to imitate. What are we doing when we "analyze" and "evaluate"? No doubt most of us could offer by way of explanation what would essentially be synonyms of these words. Eventually, we would get around to looking at an example—an exemplary text or something of our own. This is what an analysis of a poem looks like; this is what an analysis of data acquired from the laboratory looks like. A word like "analysis" can now function normally because it is working within a discipline. Now there is a practice we can ask students to imitate.
In that case, is there something called "critical thinking" that is irreducible to all the different, disciplinary-specific uses of words like "analyze," "evidence," "conclude," and so on? Does the concept of "critical thinking" ever add anything of account to the reasoning process that leads, or fails to lead, to the creation of a new concept or the observation of a new fact? To be blunt, is "critical thinking" anything more than a branding initiative on the part of institutions of higher education—something we can tell students and their prospective employers that they will be good at (along with being "effective communicators")?
I think it can if we see critical thinking as the replication of instances of successful thinking in learning settings. After all, if we ask students to imitate a good example of a lab report or literary analysis, we are just sorting the students into those who are good at imitating these respective modes of writing and those who aren't. We really aren't teaching them anything. If we really want to teach, that is, if we want to make it possible for the student for whom imitating a lab report or poetry analysis doesn't come easily to nevertheless learn how to do so, we must generalize about how the exemplary mode of thinking was carried out in the first place so as to make it replicable. We must take what might have been a prolonged, leisurely trial and error and imaginative process for someone well situated within some disciplinary space and reduce it to a series of steps that anyone could carry out. This means that teaching critical thinking depends completely upon devising assignments that take the students through these steps. But that means that critical thinking takes place not in the disciplines themselves (where practitioners would speak about the use of disciplinary-specific concepts) but in pedagogical preliminaries to entrance into the disciplines.
What makes some intellectual work, a piece of writing for instance, exemplary is that it clearly follows the rules of a discipline—that is, participants in that discipline see the work as a clarification and revision of previous efforts to follow the rules. This is what we notice when we say that a particular writer has a "project." As academics, which is to say, as those who have entered the discipline by more effectively and less obviously imitating our teachers than others, we take up a project by addressing questions framed but not yet answered by the existing practice of knowledge in the discipline. To understand the relationship between disciplinary rules and knowledge, consider Thomas Kuhn's distinction between "normal science" and "revolutionary science." In normal science, the rules of the discipline are largely tacit, and they remain so because scientists tend to acquire these rules by having imitated their teachers' practices rather than explicitly learning the rules that govern those practices. But science also has anomalies, that is, questions that are generated by following the rules of science but cannot be answered within the framework of those rules. As the anomalies accumulate, they continue to "stretch" the rules of science, which appear less and less "natural" until they are made explicit, at which point "revolutionary science" can change the rules in order to normalize the anomalies as objects of inquiry within the new framework of rules. Now, few of us may ever do revolutionary work in our respective disciplines, but even normal work, if it is to be other than utterly irrelevant, must be able to recall, at least tacitly, the revolutionary origin of the discipline within which the work is being done.
Kuhn drew upon Wittgenstein's notion of language games, which locates knowledge within shared rules of reading, writing, and speaking. If we consider disciplines to be language games, then entering a discipline is a form of language learning. As Michael Tomasello showed, we learn language by tacitly assimilating its normal usage as unanalyzed chunks, or routinely collocated words, what David Bartholomae called "commonplaces," that take on their meaning through social interaction rather than some externalizable set of rules about the meanings of words and application of grammatical conventions. Learning the language of a discipline, including particular grammatical rules and various ways of using and combining words, can, however, proceed through the experience of anomalies, where the commonplace no longer works as expected.
If, as Robert Ennis argued, universities should have an introductory course in critical thinking, the centrality of reading and writing to the disciplines suggests that First-Year Writing, properly understood, is that course. What our assignments need to do, then, is place students before anomalies and ask them to normalize them—that is, to have students recognize the otherwise tacit rules governing their understanding and how these rules need to be amended or revised in order to participate in a project of inquiry. In other words, the process of entering the disciplines cannot be taught within the disciplines—all the disciplines can teach are its particular practices. If, as I am suggesting, teaching critical thinking is ultimately teaching disciplinarity, then the First-Year Writing Course, properly understood as the sustained confrontation of commonplaces with anomalies, is the only place for a critical thinking course.
Pedagogically, this entails placing the students in some relation to texts such that their commonplaces no longer work, in which case they have to generate a new language game, or what we might call an "idiom of inquiry," out of the materials of the text, the assignment, and the space created by the students' shared work on some assignment. What we are modeling, then, is the entrance into a discipline, itself modeled on the process of learning a language, and doing so through immersion. The assumption we make is that we can teach disciplinarity rather than propose either some generic form of idealized thinking or a case-by-case introduction to specific disciplines. To learn disciplinarity includes acquiring the ability to develop strategies for noticing the specific ways questions are asked and answered in particular domains of knowledge making. When one enters a disciplinary space, one needs neither to make true/false statements nor to agree/disagree with other statements nor to express preferences (good/bad, like/dislike)—moves often exhibited by first-year writers—rather, one needs to know that all of these intellectual acts are embedded in specific, historically evolved practices, and that one must enter those practices by learning the rules of the game. We can think of that praxis of entry as critical thinking.
My first-year writing courses are set up so as to stage such an engagement for the student with language and disciplinarity. For the last two years, I have had students work with Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, giving them the assignment "to make the stanza grammatical." Here is the course introduction, in which I frame the articulation of language and disciplinarity for the students:
An understandable response to a difficult text is to declare that it makes no sense; a more considered (and rewarding) response might be to get to work making some sense of it. This course is aimed at encouraging you to take the latter approach and providing you with some means of doing so. A text seems to make no sense because it is made up of words articulated in unfamiliar ways (it can't be the words themselves because, after all, looking up words in the dictionary now takes about two seconds); in other words, the difficulty lies in the grammar of the sentence. You are probably used to thinking of grammar as an issue for writing but, in fact, it is just as significant an issue for reading. As we read, we process texts through, or translate them into, sense-making frames and grammatical constructions we have already learned and become habituated to. Words or parts of sentences that cannot be processed or translated this way tend to be set aside, while those parts of the sentence that can be processed or translated are transformed into the already known. Indeed, one thing I have learned from many years of reading student writing is that when student readers produce reductive readings of texts it is because they focus on the more familiar elements of the text at the expense of the unfamiliar ones. In so doing, they take some of the words in the sentence, as many as possible, and place them in the kinds of sentences they are used to reading and writing. If you read in this way, even if you have a dictionary definition of every word in the sentence you have read, you are practicing reading as chunking, that is, fitting new material into prepared templates. Academic writing, meanwhile, involves "de-chunking," that is, generating new ways of articulating textual materials. Since academic reading and writing depends upon directing your attention to that which doesn't fit your familiar templates, this distinction between two different modes of processing text is absolutely central for learning to conduct inquiry and research. This course is designed to help you train your attention as a reader and writer to notice and invent different ways of reading a text—it is designed to teach you how to de-chunk. The project of the course, to "make grammatical" a stanza from the American writer Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, will keep us focused throughout the semester on the dense network of relations between grammar and meaning, and grammar and inquiry. Each of you will approach this problem on your own, while the research component of the class will entail your commenting on and learning from each other's efforts. Doing research, at its most basic, means being able to adopt at least two ways of seeing the "same" thing and explore the consequences of seeing it one way or the other. This course will have you practice that basic research move many times, and in many ways.
The assignment involves a series of steps that direct students' attention to the text in ways that are perhaps more fundamental and productive than a question about students' "beliefs and biases," which one might find in textbook accounts of critical thinking and reading. If students are engaging a text, then that question doesn't arise, other than implicitly, insofar as their beliefs and biases are evident in the commonplaces reproduced through their readings. Rather than focusing on students' beliefs and biases, we can look at the relation between the student's reading practices and a text that resists those practices. In this case, my approach is somewhat more radical, insofar as, rather than generating discrepancies between familiarizing readings and the unfamiliar text, the assignment removes all possibility of a familiarizing, or commonplace, reading, thereby placing students in direct confrontation with anomalies in the text.
To make the stanza grammatically correct, students are allowed to add any punctuation they wish, while being forbidden to remove the punctuation already there (which is, at most, only a few periods). Once they have "sentences," that is, series of words ending with periods, they are to account for what is grammatical and what is not grammatical in each sentence. I provide them with a set of grammatical resources and allow them to find others as needed. It might take up to several weeks for students to familiarize themselves with the basic subject-predicate relationship constitutive of the declarative sentence and with the understanding that every word in the sentence must have a demonstrable grammatical relation to another word. Much of their work ends up being similar to what a traditional grammar class would have provided them with, which is to say something akin to sentence diagramming. This itself would be a useful intellectual exercise, but it reaches its limits in the ungrammaticality in many of the sentences the students compose. It's also easier to explain what a word's grammatical place in a sentence is than to explain why it doesn't have a grammatical place. To do the latter, one must test out possibilities, which requires a kind of inquiry into the range of possible uses of words. Would a particular word work as an adjective? Well, perhaps, and in fact the dictionary shows a rare use of the word in that form—but, then, another word would have to function as a noun, which means we'd have to see another word as . . . They have to keep moving back and forth between the words in "Stein's sentences" and between those words and the external resources they are making use of.