Strategies for Developing Critical Thinking

Interviews

• What did you understand from your interviews?
• Why do you think I asked you to interview staff or faculty for this assignment?
• How did the interviews relate to your experience at AU?
• In what ways did you agree or disagree with the interviewees?
• Why might other people disagree with the person(s) you interviewed?

Learning How to Think

At what age do student start thinking critically?

Apply: Activity

Directions

• Group member A: pick a quote and read it aloud. Everyone else LISTEN, do not read it.
• Group member B: choose a question from category 1, read it aloud. Everyone else LISTEN, do not read it.
• Group member C: answer the question, then choose a question from category 2, read it aloud.
• Group member A/D: answer the question, then choose a question from category 3.
• Continue until you're finished with the questions, then choose a new quote and start again.
• Try to get through as many quotes as possible: at least 10.

Class Discussion

Untitled Slide

Untitled Slide

Consider Higher Ordered Thinking

Naomi, at this, reached some kind of internal barrier. Yes, there was camaraderie in foxholes. Yes, there was humor (usually black) on the barricades, but only in proportion to the deadly serious matter at hand. Civil rights. Free speech. Women’s liberation. Vietnam. Reproductive rights. Gay liberation. Animal rights. Let the refuseniks go. Euthanasia. Gun control. And this was supposedly about one guy not getting tenure? What was going on here?” (page 101-102).

“Where are you from?’ she asked him, without even thinking” (page 103).

“It won’t happen if you won’t’… Talk, she wanted to say. Open your fucking mouths with their years of orthodontia and use those expensively educated voices to articulate your pathetic complaints about this…this halcyon, evolved, rarified, creative, and intellectual college campus, where you are free to learn and nap and make things and have sex and get high and change your fucking gender even, and clean water comes out of the tap and you wave your school ID under a scanner to help yourself to smorgasbords of food (meat! Meat alternative! Vegan! Lactose-sensitive! Nut-free! Gluten-free!) and all we expect of you is that you pass your classes and don’t hurt anyone else. But she didn’t say these things. Of course she didn’t say them” (page 106).

"Plagiarism, plagiarism, Naomi thought...it was an ugly word, ugly to anyone who'd ever attempted the delicate but gut-wrenching task of setting words onto paper..." (page 118).

“The theft of words, however, stalked every university, no matter its prestige, and fighting it felt, at times, like whacking away at the Angel of Death from Cecil B. DeMilles’s Ten Commandments: thick of green smoke winding its way down every hallway and into every classroom” (page 118).

“…now it was a place of rigorous intellectual discourse, profound diversity, thrilling social conscience—a place where young and engaged people took injustice so personally that they were willing to sleep out in the cold and the mud to register their dismay. This was the Webster Naomi herself had come to love, and the one she was honored to lead. She wished that Oksen Sarafian were still here to be walked around the campus, introduced to what he’d made, and to the Jewish female (feminist!) scholar who now sat at his old desk. She wondered how he’d be handling the kids out at the Stump. She wished she could ask him” (page 124).

“Trauma and trauma, as difference as traumas could be, and yet both still were traumas for young and sensitive human beings” (page 142).

And yet, you refuse to do more than give the impression of hearing me” (page 145).