Critical Thinking in the Introductory Sociology Classroom: Some Teaching Techniques.

Introduction

Critical thinking, as a challenging, questioning, and testing practice, helps us to understand our actions as a reflection of underlying realities. These forces may have long since passed as historical events. However, what critical thinking demands is that we perceive, trace, challenge, sustain, or reject the social arrangements in which we find ourselves based upon their enduring effects on our social lives. Set in an Introductory Sociology class, the overall objective of techniques is to engender critical thinking so that students can become empowered to query the discipline, the text, the instructors, and the "rules of the game." Having the capacity to question the repressive power that structures the existence of our classroom also makes critical thinking a liberating experience. Anderson's (1996:10) insightful view explains:

   Becoming a critical thinker can help you take fresh approaches to familiar,
   taken-for-granted beliefs and understandings. It allows you to cast your
   explanatory net widely. Yet there are some shortcomings and pitfalls to be
   aware of. By its very nature, all of critical thinking produces tentative
   and temporary solutions and explanations. Here lies both its greatest
   strength and weakness. Taking a critical perspective and engaging in
   critical thinking can be a liberating experience. It can also be marked by
   an all-dissolving destructiveness (Bauman, 1992, viii). In becoming
   critical thinkers, we come face to face with Dostoyevsky's warning that if
   there is no God, everything is permissible, Emile Durkheim, one of the
   nineteenth-century founders of sociology secularized Dostoyevsky's warning
   by replacing "God" with "society." For Durkheim, if the controlling grip of
   widely accepted social customs, beliefs, and values are to be undermined,
   then the entire moral order of society would collapse (ibid: xvii).

Formulating critical thinking as "education for liberation and empowerment" (Siegel, 1988:76) comes down to students gaining skills engendered by an intellectual orientation that challenges faulty premises about the social world. For example, understanding how seeing "others" as different from, and less desirable than "insiders," and everything is a "naturally occurring" but seriously flawed human quality that is derived from our need to reduce uncertainty by producing categories and their attendant concepts. To employ critical thinking means to practice personal freedom, means asking why we see "others" as different from, and less desirable than ourselves by connecting sociological concepts to one another and to the larger categories that inform them (Hooks, 1994:13).

In sum: as an intellectual orientation, critical thinking embraces the possibility for liberation and empowerment by coalescing learning and experiencing, being and becoming. The point is that sociology is a process and, therefore, initial learning about sociology demands constant substantiation of existing knowledge in the context of incorporating new ideas. Our responsibility, as instructors in the Introductory Sociology classroom, is to undertake two tasks. This first is to outline to our students the procedures by which knowledge has been produced in the text. The second is to make transparent the means by which the everyday speech and actions of others is transformed into data by emptying academic concepts of some of their unnecessary distance and power.

In this paper we offer some clues as to what can be done in the Introductory Sociology classroom to teach critical thinking. In doing so we take the position that critical thinking cannot start being enacted by either the acquisition of a body of knowledge that reflects the content of a discipline or by having the text merely pay passing homage to Mills's concept of sociological imagination. Rather, critical thinking must enhance liberation through self-expression and understanding (Bell and McGrane, 1999:68-84), what might be better explained as self-reflection and empowerment principles of critical thinking. We begin by discussing our use of a graphical metaphor of becoming a critical thinker. Following this depiction are two implications that follow it. We then describe some techniques for teaching critical thinking in the introductory sociology classroom. We favor a description of these techniques, as opposed to presenting convincing evidence of their merit. In promoting critical thinking, this paper is an inherent critique of the system of exams and predetermined answers that permeates the culture of our classroom and reproduces the factory as a metaphor.

Critical Thinking: a Graphical Metaphor

Graphically speaking, we begin an Introductory Sociology course in the bottom left hand corner of a graph, in an area called the taken-for-granted. The taken-for-granted draws on general ideas commonly shared within the society (beliefs, assumptions, customs, traditions, values, norms, and emotional states) to make sense of something unfamiliar. Complacency about taken-for-granted beliefs eschews a critical stance and allows one to find comfort and meaning in practices whose premises remain undisclosed. The students' task here is their development to the right (towards critical thinking) and upwards (toward social theorizing). Social theorizing, a guiding image or explanation of society, is usually the domain of professional social theorists. However, its source is often those without credentials, those for whom, as Lemert (1993:1-24) suggests, theory is a basic survival skill. Students contemplating a move directly upwards from the taken-for-granted are alerted to the fact that this leads to common sense, a dangerous area that eschews dialogue. Think about the point this way. If someone wants to stop a dialogue dead in its tracks all they need to do is say that a previous person's point is "just common sense." The question to ask next is, "What are the specific techniques that can be employed to develop critical thinking in the classroom?"

Employing Student-authored Autobiographies

Richardson (1994) and Stoddart (1991), among others, explain that personal empowerment comes through writing, and this means two things. First, a lot of class time and effort must be devoted to explaining the textual strategies that constitute the genre's rhetoric while not discouraging experimentation. Second, the myth that writing is an innate ability must be challenged. Overall, we feel it is important to offer students an opportunity to appreciate the grading criteria and often unstated conventions against which essays or research papers are graded. In addition, our notions of writing posit it as a method of inquiry or a mode of "telling" about the social world: a way for students to find out about themselves and their topic. Finally, writing is an opportunity for students to question the idiosyncratic and complicated ways that sociologists use words to name different realities.

This major assignment is a two-part paper that asks students to critically examine an activity (job, hobby, pastime, or sport) that they engaged in during their high school years. The purpose of the assignment is to uncover the social forces that were at work in the students' having made decisions about a job, hobby, pastime, or sport in high school. The first stage of the assignment calls for a rich description of this activity rather than analysis as the checklist for this part of the assignment suggests (see Appendix 1).

In the second stage of this assignment, we ask students to think about what this suggests about our personal autonomy, and, while these decisions appear to be individualistic in origin, students are challenged to think otherwise. They are asked to use text, reader, and library, and uncover at least two or three sociological studies related to their chosen activity. Students are then asked to compare their activity with patterns of activity among the sample populations that the studies researched, using a thesis and a theoretical perspective (see Appendix 2 for checklist). For example, if they choose watching television as the activity they wished to write on, then they had to critically inquire into the role of subjective and objective factors at work in individual decisions to watch television (e.g., gender). In general, student responses suggested that, once disturbed, individual choice appears to be another example of common sense theorizing, an unexamined social life.

Returning to the metaphor of the graph, the student-authored autobiography asks students to adopt the position that critical thinking understands the private orbits in which we live--the close-up scenes of job, family, and neighborhood--as inhibiting. Like the graph, the writing assignment sponsors a direct link between the emergence of sociology and ongoing formulations of the self. The result is that identity is portrayed as closely tied to the choices and decisions we make. Once this idea is forwarded, our task is one of providing cautionary notes for students. This means explaining that it is often quite painful but necessary to realize that what is happening to the individual is a matter of social forces, largely outside the daily consciousness of individual actors -- a job we relate to explaining why it is that Weber likened sociology to staring at the sun -- because we acknowledge the inevitable discomfort with the "human condition" that a close examination warrants.

Cognitive Mapping and Concept Presentations(1)

Lesser used but still important is the combined use of cognitive or mind maps and concept presentations. Used as a "diagrammatic representation of `meaningful' relationships between concepts" (Watson, 1989:265), cognitive mapping elaborates relevant sociological concepts (e.g., society, social structure, and culture) by using images instead of text. Cognitive maps may be single images, such as the scales of justice, or a network of arrows, circles, and/or boxes that "picture" salient concepts and show how they are related to one another. Lectures are occasionally organized in this fashion, framed as an alternative to standard note taking for students. It is also possible to present major concepts as an overarching outline for the Introductory Sociology course as a cognitive map.

We have found that concepts are more accessible when they are related to as metaphors, shorthand descriptors for the larger categories we use to divide and control reality. Indeed, when the power of knowing what something "is an example of" is invoked, there is much better recall. In addition, concepts often refer to unobservable entities and are therefore central to the taken-for-granted. The idea is to make apparent what is real so students can see, in their effects, what powerful forces are at work, despite their going unspoken.

Related to cognitive mapping, concept presentations involved students making brief (five-minute) offerings to the rest of the class. The objective is to apply a concept, important to the chapter and currently being discussed in class, to the everyday world.

What is being evaluated is the ability to reflect, in a concise and engaging way, the adequacy of students' understanding of a concept. Again, we encourage students to focus on the relationship between concepts and categories by focusing on the way that sociological matter (social forces that are seemingly independent of the actor) is formulated and organized.

Aside from more standard fare, students have used brief questionnaires, quizzes, and mock newscasts to present concepts. Some even appeared reluctant to leave the front of the classroom, gladly fielding questions beyond the allotted time. Kenton, a shy first-year student, discussed his sibling's disability as part of his concept presentation. In his end-of-the year self-assessment, he said of his experience:

   I look at my concept presentation as a turning point, within both this
   school year and the last few years of my life. At that point everything
   seemed to click, or make sense. My openness seemed like a point of growth.

The bonus here is that cognitive mapping and concept presentations reinforce the issue of time and story respectively, and, by returning to the graph, we can appreciate this feature. As mentioned before, the bottom line of the metaphorical graph connects the taken-for-granted to critical thinking by using years to reveal the chronological movement of ideas. For example, it is possible to begin tracing the concept of society by discussing Plato or Aristotle. This might sound daunting, but if the concept's legacy as an idea can be simplified, then the details are less weighty. Society, for example, is really about certain people being concerned about the changes they saw going on in society, and wanting to study these societies in order to improve their own. Sociology largely specializes in this concern as it relates to industrial societies. The point is that both cognitive mapping and concept presentations work because the chronological recall of a history of ideas fits with sociology, which is a cumulative social science. The other salient factor is that it is useful to explore the historical conditions for the emergence of sociology as it potentially dovetails with the individual students' current relationships with society, social structure, and culture. Ideally, concepts like alienation or cultural capital signals both the progress of the discipline and the development of the individual student at that point.

Weekly Reviews

One or two page weekly "reviews" are employed to address the outstanding questions and concerns that students had of the readings, lectures, and discussions during the previous week. For example, a typical review for week four or five reminds students to recognize how one's worldview (the way we understand everything that we experience in the world) is not "natural" or common to all human beings. The review connects this idea to the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The review will then go on to explain that Heidegger attempted to answer the "question of being" (Seinsfrage), first posed by ancient Greek philosophers, by arguing that humans are embedded in concrete situations of action that promote inauthenticity.

The point is not that students know the ideas of Heidegger; however, a short introduction to him allows them to see the extent to which sociology's concern for "taken-for-granted" beliefs and "critical" thinking is rooted in earlier philosophical concerns. So while they may never see or hear Heidegger again in a sociology course, variations of his ideas will reappear in the work of the German philosophers Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), and in the work of one of his students, Hans Georg Gadamer. Husserl and Dilthey influenced Heidegger, and all three influenced Gadamer. Together the four have inspired phenomenology, an approach/theory in sociology that focuses on the everyday world and how it is constructed according to shared meanings. In this way, weekly reviews promote critical thinking by an historical exploration of sociological methods for producing knowledge (phenomenology).

The redeeming quality of weekly reviews is that ownership of the classroom does not remain solely in the hands of the instructors as student queries drive the content of the weekly reviews. This challenges students to take control of their own education, to empower themselves by not being afraid to ask questions, and to probe the limits of understanding by increasing self-expression.

Concluding Remarks

The intent of this paper is to identify some essential characteristics of critical thinking and the developmental process, which leads to their acquisition. This was then intended to serve as an epistemological foundation and justification of the pedagogical techniques which the authors then employ in trying to foster critical thinking in an Introductory Sociology course. As the graphical metaphor asserts, there is a need to overlay personal development on sociological content. This allows two cornerstone questions, which link critical thinking and sociology, to be asked. First, what constitutes sociological knowledge about the world we live in? Second, how does one take a critical stance toward the production of sociological knowledge?

Endnotes

(1) Ironically, we are relying on concepts (i.e., education, liberation, and empowerment) to describe critical thinking and make our points. These concepts are necessary to help us say something about critical thinking, but we recognize that their invocation makes us vulnerable to the critical thinker who may quite correctly note the paradox of our relying on concepts to bear the weight of our pedagogical techniques.

References

Anderson, Karen L. (1996). Sociology: A critical introduction. Toronto: ITP Nelson.

Bell, Inge & McGrane, Barnard. (1999). This book is still not required: An emotional survival manual for students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge.

Hale, Sylvia. (1995). Controversies in sociology: A Canadian introduction. Toronto: Copp Clark.

Hooks, Bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress. New York: Routledge.

Kendall, Diana; Murray, Jane; Lothian, L. & Linden, Rick. (1997). Sociology in our times: First Canadian edition. Toronto: ITP Nelson.

Martin, Ann. (2000). "Telling into wholeness." Teaching Sociology, 28(1), 1-11.

Piccolomini, Michele. (1996). "Sustainable development, collective action, and new social movements." pp. 183-207 In Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change. Michael Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann (eds). Greenwich, CT.: JAI.

Richardson, Laurel. (1994). "Writing: A method of inquiry." pp. 516-529 in Handbook of Qualitative Methodology. N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Selman, Mark R. (1987). "Another way of talking about critical thinking." Philosophy of Education, Second Concurrent Session: 169-178.

Selman, Mark R. (1988). "Another way of talking about critical thinking." Philosophy of Education Fifth Concurrent Session: 169-178.

Selman, Mark R. unpublished. Critical Thinking, Rationality, and Social Practices. Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Education, The University of British Columbia. Vancouver, British Columbia.

Spencer, Metta. (1990). Foundations of modern sociology. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall.

Siegel, Harvey. (1988). Educating reason: Rationality, critical thinking, and education. New York: Routledge.

Stoddart, Kenneth. (1991). "Writing sociologically: A note on the teaching and construction of a qualitative report." Teaching Sociology, 19(2), 243-248.

Watson, Gordon R. (1989). "What is ... concept mapping?" Medical Teacher, 11(3), 265-269.

Appendix 1. Checklist for Writing Assignment Stage #1

A. Explain the activity:

1. What was it?

2. How long did you do this?

B. Who or what influenced your decision to choose this activity. Was it?

1. Family

2. Friends

3. The media

4. Other

C. Prevalence of this activity according to:

1. Time spent

2. Personal interest

3. Its impact on your life

D. Reasons for disengaging from this activity. Was it?

1. Other interests

2. Particular experiences

3. Influential others

Appendix 2. Checklist for Writing Assignment Stage #2

Prevalence of this activity according to:

1. Sex/Gender

2. Social class

3. Race/Ethnicity

4. Age

Reasons engaged in activity--briefly explain how each explanation applies:

5. Culture

6. Socialization 

7. Roles and Interactions

8. Other reasons

Theoretical analysis:

9. In your own words, a brief explanation of the theory you select.

10. Explanation of why that theory seems best suited to explain your experience.

11. Causal relationships presented in the theory.

12. Specification of how your experience exemplifies the causal relationships presented in the theory.

13. Explanation of which parts of the theory do not apply to your experience or are incorrect, according to your experience.

14. Description of the parts of your experience that are not explained by the theory.

Robert VanWynsberghe, University of British Columbia, Canada Marc Cassivi, University of British Columbia, Canada