El pensamiento crítico es uno de los objetivos generales de la educación, pero poco se conoce acerca de cómo se puede trasladar al aula. Este estudio explora la conceptualización de pensamiento crítico de los formadores/as de maestros/as y los ambientes de aprendizaje que diseñados para promoverlo. Se analizaron cinco entrevistas semiestructuradas a formadores/as de maestros/as mediante análisis de contenido. Los resultados mostraron que el pensamiento crítico se aborda implícitamente fomentando un aprendizaje activo contextualizado en problemas de la vida real. Este (...) estudio revela algunos desafíos relacionados con el diseño de ambientes de aprendizaje y procedimientos de evaluación. (shrink)

Building on the long-standing tradition of challenging oppression and questioning whose interests are being served in the field of language education, we report on a study that involved a group of U.S.-based graduate students who collaborated with a ninth-grade English teacher in Nepal. The study comes out of a larger project that sought to internationalize the curriculum of a graduate educational linguistics course at a U.S. university. At the heart of this internationalizing curriculum endeavour was a commitment to expose graduate (...) students in the U.S. to the issues of language teaching outside of the U.S. This was done through co-designing of a unit of lessons, with six graduate students meeting virtually with their teacher partner, Ditya, in Nepal over the course of a semester. The graduate students and Ditya constitute our research participants. The graduate student participants learned about the need to develop pedagogical materials that were relevant to the local context in Nepali classroom, and not attempt to transplant a Western-centric curriculum onto the Nepali classroom. In keeping with recent calls to decolonize higher education, we illustrate how critical theory in general and decolonizing pedagogy in particular can be infused into a U.S. graduate curriculum by drawing on the rich, indigenous knowledge and resources of a teacher collaborator from the Global South. We do this by reporting how this critical, decolonizing goal was realized through collaborative professionalism, which is characterized by the sharing of knowledge, skills, and experience to improve student achievement, reflection, dialogue and collective responsibility. (shrink)

Virtue epistemology is among the dominant influences in mainstream epistemology today. An important commitment of one strand of virtue epistemology – responsibilist virtue epistemology (e.g., Montmarquet 1993; Zagzebski 1996; Battaly 2006; Baehr 2011) – is that it must provide regulative normative guidance for good thinking. Recently, a number of virtue epistemologists (most notably Baehr, 2013) have held that virtue epistemology not only can provide regulative normative guidance, but moreover that we should reconceive the primary epistemic aim of all education as (...) the inculcation of the intellectual virtues. Baehr’s picture contrasts with another well-known position – that the primary aim of education is the promotion of critical thinking (Scheffler 1989; Siegel 1988; 1997; 2017). In this paper – that we hold makes a contribution to both philosophy of education and epistemology and, a fortiori, epistemology of education – we challenge this picture. We outline three criteria that any putative aim of education must meet and hold that it is the aim of critical thinking, rather than the aim of instilling intellectual virtue, that best meets these criteria. On this basis, we propose a new challenge for intellectual virtue epistemology, next to the well-known empirically-driven ‘situationist challenge’. What we call the ‘pedagogical challenge’ maintains that the intellectual virtues approach does not have available a suitably effective pedagogy to qualify the acquisition of intellectual virtue as the primary aim of education. This is because the pedagogic model of the intellectual virtues approach (borrowed largely from exemplarist thinking) is not properly action-guiding. Instead, we hold that, without much further development in virtue-based theory, logic and critical thinking must still play the primary role in the epistemology of education. (shrink)

Thinking, the process of considering or reasoning about something, is one of the most distinctive qualities that set humans apart from other species. Philosophers around the world, such as Socrates...

Virtue epistemology is among the dominant influences in mainstream epistemology today. An important commitment of one strand of virtue epistemology – responsibilist virtue epistemology – is that it must provide regulative normative guidance for good thinking. Recently, a number of virtue epistemologists have held that virtue epistemology not only can provide regulative normative guidance, but moreover that we should reconceive the primary epistemic aim of all education as the inculcation of the intellectual virtues. Baehr’s picture contrasts with another well-known position (...) – that the primary aim of education is the promotion of critical thinking. In this paper – that we hold makes a contribution to both philosophy of education and epistemology and, a fortiori, epistemology of education – we challenge this picture. We outline three criteria that any putative aim of education must meet and hold that it is the aim of critical thinking, rather than the aim of instilling intellectual virtue, that best meets these criteria. On this basis, we propose a new challenge for intellectual virtue epistemology, next to the well-known empirically-driven ‘situationist challenge’. What we call the ‘pedagogical challenge’ maintains that the intellectual virtues approach does not have available a suitably effective pedagogy to qualify the acquisition of intellectual virtue as the primary aim of education. This is because the pedagogic model of the intellectual virtues approach is not properly action-guiding. Instead, we hold that, without much further development in virtue-based theory, logic and critical thinking must still play the primary role in the epistemology of education. (shrink)

In today's complex world, influenced by information bombardment and rapid technological development, professional training cannot remain limited to the idea of passing knowledge. There is a need to shift the students’ view towards the true spirit of research, which targets the scientific thought on certain social phenomena, and to form critical thinking skills to produce effective individuals in the current labour market, who not only receive information, but go further and analyze problems in the workplace, presenting solutions to identified problems (...) and applying these solutions in concrete situations. For this reason, critical thinking is considered a top skill, being highly appreciated by the business world and organizations. But to think critically is a capacity that does not develop by itself, it must be practiced and encouraged in a correct learning environment. Critical thinking has become one of the most important educational goals, which must be achieved by the different educational institutions through all the programs studied by students in the different educational cycles, but also by students in the university environment. Starting from this, this article analyses the types of specific actions which target the introduction of the abilities of critical thinking in the training activities in Romania, and in society in its entirety, by identifying the setbacks encountered, and the limits of such an endeavour. (shrink)

A longstanding assumption within higher education is that there is a clear link between argumentative writing and critical thinking. In this paper, I challenge this assumption. I argue that argumen...