I may be off the mark on this one, but I think we may all need to take a closer look at Critical Literacy rather than critical thinking in the adult education classrooms (and volunteer-based programs), which was popularized by Freire.  There is a lot of new literature about critical literacy and a lot to be learned about critical literacy in the k-12 literature that can be valuable to us. If we look at critical thinking through the lens of critical literacy we may have more options and resources with which to teach these skills.

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From: professionaldevelopment-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:professionaldevelopment-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of Bonnie Odiorne
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 11:43 AM
To: The Adult Literacy Professional Development Discussion List
Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 2230] Re: What do we mean bystudentinvolvement and critical thinking?


I'm very interested in writing and critical thinking at the moment. Stay with me here: this may get a little convoluted. Don't get me wrong: I don't for a heartbeat think that most ESOL students, even fairly "advanced" ones who might be taking college courses, have the language capacity to express clearly and concisely the critical thinking that may be going on in their heads but they just can't express. I'm thinking of agency and writing, and got into a bit of a conundrum in an English class recently. I'd always though an "argument" paper was one in which one stated a position and supported it with evidence, documented, or from personal experience. It turns out that the author of our text thought the argumentative paper is one that seeks to convince someone to change a thought or value or to do something, and the writer can use many strategies to effect this task.

    So I'm wondering whether critical thinking is taught in how I used the argument, the abiity to connect thoughts, support them, and come to a sustainable conclusion: could be called expository, the presentation of information, that could demonstrate many levels of critical thinking. The argumentative or persuasive paper, on the other hand, would be to convince, and therein lies agency, I think, the "active" part of "activism": actually doing something to change a situation.

    I'd relate these ideas in writing/thinking to Bloom's Taxonomy, and the verbs that are associated with various positions on the pyramid. For a good link to that, go to http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/learning/bloom.htm

Just thinking out loud, critically or not.... :-)

Bonnie Odiorne



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