OLDaily

Doing critical thinking to others
Philip Kerr, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2022/04/21

Philip Kerr says "some sort of reasoning must be involved" for an activity to be a part of critical thinking, but to me this is a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of critical thinking. To me, critical thinking is picking up on a phrase like "it seems highly unlikely that the students' ability to notice or express opinions will be developed" and wondering on what basis such a statement was thought to be true. This is a , or if well-internalized, a disposition, and it's on this basis that I reject conclusions such as Sweller's "education researchers have spent over a century searching for, and failing to find evidence of, transfer to unrelated domains by the use of generic-cognitive skills." To say that there is no evidence of transfer of, say, language skills, categorical reasoning, deduction, or mathematics, is to say something that is on the face of it absurd, and it makes me wonder why it would be said. It seems to me that it expresses a desire to ensure 'everybody stays in their lanes', or some such thing.

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The humanities are facing a credibility crisis
Aaron Hanlon, Washington Post, 2022/04/21

Hopefully this post is not blocked for you (it's not blocked for me). The argument here is that researchers in the humanities are undermining their position by being advocates for political change rather than neutral researchers and commentators. "The idea that humanities scholars are activists first and only then scholars leaves much of the public skeptical of the work we do," writes Aaron Hanlon. "It's clear there's a fork in the road. Down one path is understanding the humanities foremost as knowledge work and therefore requiring institutional and civic credibility to function and thrive... down the other path is understanding the humanities as a kind of pure activism committed to rejecting the values that govern institutional and civic credibility." To be honest, I'm not interested in either path. If the choice is to either capitulate or to agitate, I choose neither.

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How journalists and news organizations can measure their distance from neutrality
Roy Peter Clark, Poynter, 2022/04/21

What does it mean to be 'nonpartisan' or 'neutral'? Certainly, there's an inherent conservativism (small c) in being non-partisan. And there is the sense that "many who embrace it seem oblivious to how a self-imposed insulation from political expression is in itself an ideological viewpoint." Roy Peter Clark calls this 'zero' on the measuring stick and says it "falls outside the boundary of neutrality." The characterization of 'neutral', though, suffers many of the same flaws, suggesting "some interest in diversity, with expectations that everyone, in spite of differences, would operate with the same news judgment." To me, fully 'neutral' means fully diverse. To me, the most 'neutral' stance in the scale is what he calls 'engaged', which included "heavy fact-checking, especially on the powerful... labels designed to make opinion transparent... evidence is weighed and presented proportionally." The same holds true, I would argue, for teaching. Zero is too far on one direction; five is too far in the other. But it is up to the individual teacher, I think, to make the call (especially at higher levels).

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Teaching approaches for decolonising and diversifying the curriculum
Sílvia Pérez-Espona, Fiona Borthwick, Louise Connelly, Susan Rhind, Teaching Matters blog, 2022/04/21

This article describes some practical steps that can be taken to decolonize and diversify learning. These include (paraphrased): increasing representation in audio-visual material of women and people from different ethnic backgrounds and countries of origin; including examples of research conducted by women and researchers from different countries; and encouraging students to consider local communities and the cultural and socioeconomic context of the areas of study. These are all recommendations I attempt to follow in my own work and things I think are worth doing. They should not be requirements, though, and equally, they should not be prohibited.

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Academic freedom can’t be separated from responsibility
Karine Coen-Sanchez, Academic Matters, 2022/04/21

In my opinion, the first step people take to eliminate a freedom is to tie it to some sort of responsibility. But freedoms are not commodities you have to pay for. Otherwise they wouldn't be freedoms. Anyhow. In this article, we read that academic freedom isn't actually a right, "but rather a right or a privilege bestowed by an institution of higher learning." It is better thought, it is argued, as an ethical right, which brings with it ethical obligations. "There is an ethical responsibility by professors to provide space for challenging discussions. This necessarily includes not perpetrating old structures that were built on casting out marginalized groups," argues Karine Coen-Sanchez. "Professors have a responsibility not to humiliate racialized students or use racist or discriminatory language." All good, but we need better clarity on what is a limit to as freedom (eg., free speech does not include hate speech) and what is a responsibility instead of a freedom (eg. not perpetrating old structures).

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