Session Information
13 SES 10 B, Parallel Paper Session
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
This paper will address the question: what different ways of thinking are possible in education? In recent years, questions regarding the nature of thinking have become a key issue for educators and educational researchers in many countries. This paper will seek to exemplify the understandings of thinking currently active in education utilising, as a point of departure, the notions of “critical thinking” and “thinking skills.” It will argue that current understandings of thinking exemplify a commitment to a particular kind of thinking – and one that has a tendency to prevent other ways of thinking from being recognised or adequately understood. The aim of this paper will be to offer a renewed investigation into the nature of thinking, one that does justice the different possibilities of thinking that are open in education.
To this end, the paper will critically engage with key characteristics of the prevailing account of thinking which include (but are not restricted to): a focus on processes of reasoning and “problem solving” models of reasoning; an estimation of “geometric” patterns of thinking; a focus on the clarity of thought; a concern with criteria through which we can assess and test how thinking is improved; a stress on a priori ways of understanding the world (and therefore on thinking as the representation and determination of experience). A key question to be explored is the extent to which these characteristics, while useful within the scientific domain, prove adequate when applied to the tasks of thinking within other discipline areas such as the humanities. Drawing upon key philosophical accounts of thinking as found in the works of Ryle, Heidegger and Derrida, the paper will consider how an alternative account of thinking – one that do more justice to the open and productive nature of thought – might be articulated. It will explore whether this alternative conception of thinking proves more fruitful for approaching the subject matter of the humanities wherein a number of distinctive capacities, such as the exercise of judgement and diverse forms of critique, are required. A key claim to be defended will be that such an alternative account of thinking should not be viewed as a loose or vague conception. On the contrary, it will be argued that this conception of thinking is in fact more rigorous than the current impoverished view of thinking that prevails in education on account of the fact that it seeks to do more justice to the concrete ways in which our thinking actually takes place. In this way the paper will seek to demonstrate that the ways of thinking active in the humanities, whilst often downgraded in the face of the so called “rigorous” approach of the sciences, form an integral part of education in the new millennium.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bonnett, M. (1994). Children's Thinking. London: Cassell. Derrida, J. (1974). Grammatology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time. Kundli, India: Blackwell Publishing. Ryle, G. (1929). Heidegger's 'Sein Und Zeit'. In J. Tanney, Collected Papers Volume 1: Critical Essays (pp. 205-222). Oxford: Routledge. Ryle, G. (1932). Phenomenology. In J. Tanney, Collected Papers Volume 1: Critical Essays (pp. 174-185). Oxford: Routledge. Ryle, G. (1953). Thinking. In J. Tanney, Collected Papers Volume 2 (pp. 307-313). Oxford: Routledge. Standish, P. (1992). Beyond the Self: Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Limits of Language. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Group. Winch, C. (2010). Dimensions of Expertise. London: Continuum
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