Critical Thinking: Class or Curriculum?

One of the conversations focused on college curricula and student learning, in which I perennially -- though thankfully not perpetually -- seem to find myself involved takes on the form of a false dilemma, a forced option, which all too often gets used as the framework for thinking out the role of foundational disciplines should play -- and the shape they ought to take -- in higher education.  Whether it is a matter of Critical Thinking, Ethics, Writing, or other similar disciplines, the same basic problematic arises:  should students be introduced to, and practiced in, that subject matter in a specific course?  Or should it be infused throughout the curriculum?

My answer, put in one word, is simply this: BOTH.  I've got my reasons to say that, and to assert it so emphatically -- which I'm going to set out in detail below.  I'd like to observe first, though, that there are also reasons why so many people find themselves constrained to frame this sort of issue in terms of an exclusive Either-Or.  Maurice Blondel, a great dialectical philosopher of the early 20th century, observed and critiqued this tendency to frame  matters important to us -- whether in metaphysics or moral theory, politics or education, aesthetics or religion -- through such rigid dichotomies, where choices are seemingly constrained to opting between one of the two poles.  Concealed by this, he notes over and over, is that, at a deeper level, often unrealized by those making it, another option, another choice gets made -- one between setting up the terms in abstract opposition to each other, or seeing that neither term is sufficient on its own, and demands the complement of the other term for its very own adequacy.

Lessons From the Ethics in Business Education Workshop (part 2 of 2)

Back at Fayetteville State University last spring, I developed and delivered a workshop for faculty of the School of Business and Economics, titled Best Practices for Addressing Challenges in Teaching Ethics.  It was the third of a set of workshops I provided as part of the Ethics in Business Education Project, a collaboration between philosophers -- brought in as subject-matter experts in Ethics -- and business educators, the main goal being improvement of teaching and assessment of Ethics in FSU's Business courses and curriculum. 

For this particular workshop, I reflected on my years of teaching a variety of Ethics courses -- some of them straight-out theory courses, some of them various "applied" ethics courses -- as well as other courses in which ethical content either inevitably entered into components or key concepts of the course (e.g. Intro to Philosophy, Social-Political Philosophy, World Religions, and all the history of Philosophy courses) -- or where discussions involving Ethics always seemed to arise, whether I'd intended them to or not (e.g. Critical Thinking, Religion in American Culture, and other Religious Studies classes).  What I learned through experience in the classroom, thinking about what had worked and what had failed, broader-scope comparison and rumination, and redesigning courses, components, and content was that -- at least in our educational culture -- there were certain critical junctures, certain potential roadblocks, certain places in discussion where students would raise challenges, present problems, present objections, often exhibit strong emotional reactions.  These supply, to use that worn-out phrase, "teachable moments," and my goal for the workshop was to supply business educators with some tools and insights for transforming them into educational opportunities.

Back from the Conference Season: Notes from POD

It's a tad flip, ad hoc, made up on the spot, just for this occasion, for me to joke about now having made it through the "conference season," as if I've been out on the road, hitting place after place, speaking, meeting people, then moving on to the next location, the next audience. There are some people who do live like that, on the circuit, spending less time at their home base with their core of friends and family than they do at a string of scattered stops -- but I'm not actually one of them.  It only feels a bit like that because I've (or really, we've, since my partner and I have done all of this together) traveled to and presented at three very different conferences in the last month -- sort of like taking a lifestyle out for a test-drive, the best part about which is that after you're done, you do get to hand back the keys.

Early in October, it was the CUNY Supplemental Instruction conference -- a local conference, mainly faculty and administrators concerned with developing, using, or improving  that type of pedagogical resource.  When asked, I did end up finding something to first think about, then talk about:  how a Virtue Ethics perspective can inform and complement the other ways of looking at SI (slides, draft paper, and video available).  I just got home from the MAPACA conference over in Philadelphia, where I talked (slides, video coming later) about how Aristotle's moral theory (understood broadly, through the two Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, and Poetics) can illuminate George R.R. Martin's epic and still unfinished Song of Ice and Fire.  Sandwiched between them, just two weeks ago, down in Atlanta, was the Professional and Organizational Development network conference, which is what I'm going to write about today.

Where I've Been and Where I'm Going

It has been slightly over a week since I posted my last blog entry, which tantalized by promising further translations of Saint Anselm's writings and sayings about humility. I'm thankful that, over the eight months of its publication so far, Orexis Dianoētikē has developed -- for an academic blog written part time by a scholar admittedly and indulgently ranging all over the map of topics -- a solid readership. Doubtless a portion of the numerous reads of the posts and glances over the pages were one-time, non-repeat clicks. A core of devoted readers -- who subscribe, comment, wait for announcements of new posts (on Facebook, Twitter, Academia, and LinkedIn), and praise, condemn, argue or ask questions about the posts in those electronic forums -- has also developed, and continues to grow. Interestingly, a good portion of that readership is international -- particularly from The UK, Canada, Japan, Russia, Germany, South Korea, Brazil, Spain, and China.

I feel as if I owe some explanation to my readers as to why my posts have slowed over the last weeks and perhaps may not resume their normal rate for a little while longer. I am right in the middle of the process of leaving my post at Fayetteville State University, where for the last three years I have taught, researched, started a new projects, and even taken on some administrative, advisory, and assessment positions. Not only am I step by step extricating myself from the University -- grades are in, but I still have four reports to write, and was being called upon to provide information in meetings yesterday and just a few minutes ago (I'm writing this during my last meeting) -- and not only have I been continuing or making good on a number of scholarly projects and commitments -- even more importantly, I am finally moving up to the Hudson valley in New York to end the painfully-long-distance phase of the relationship with my wife-to-be, partner, and collaborator in work, writing, and life. I am very excited to be leaving with my wagon packed to the gills with the first load later on today.

Infusing Critical Thinking through the Curriculum: FSU's QEP

One of the requirements for reaccreditation of an educational institution -- at least at the college and university level -- if you are under SACS (the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools), since 2004, has been producing a Quality Enhancement Plan. This is supposed to be a institution-wide, comprehensively worked out, step by step, multidimensional means of improving education at as college or university. It is interesting that the original idea behind requiring institutions to develop a QEP was to remedy a seemingly widespread view that SACS was more reactive than proactive, more about assessing past performance than about fostering future improvement.

Even those who are interested in, who "buy in" to, (some forms of) assessment -- like myself -- do admittedly often look at the sorts of requirements SACS imposes upon its constituents, at the reams of data it falls upon us to generate, to organize, to report upon, as onerous make-work. Having been drawn in to the ongoing process of generating our Quality Enhancement Plan at Fayetteville State University -- first as a subject matter expert in both Critical Thinking and CLA Performance Tasks, a purely advisory role, and then afterwards as a member of the QEP Writing Committee -- I was afforded an illuminating vantage point from which to observe at least some of the workings of SACS and the QEP activity.

For me, as a philosopher, this involvement has been very interesting on a number of different levels.Our plan itself thematically focuses on critical thinking and practical reasoning, two areas in which philosophers are not the only experts and disciplinary practitioners, but definitely fields in which we make central contributions. Going beyond the content of the plan, the very process of our QEP's development, our attempts to interpret and meet requirements imposed by SACS by drawing upon our available faculty strengths, leveraging our current involvements, and setting up tracks for future ongoing faculty development -- that very process has been a sort of set of test cases or experiments in practical reasoning -- and reasoning in difficult circumstances, less resources available than we would have liked, consensuses yet to be formed, buy-ins to be achieved -- basically, the sort of real-life circumstances in which most practical reasoning really does take place -- far from the clean contours of classroom examples, or the highly abstract thought-experiments and textbook cases with which most philosophers tend to be more comfortable.

Beyond 3,000: Thanks to Orexis Dianoētikē's Readers

Sometime last night, Orexis Dianoētikē's total number of total page views passed the 3,000 mark.  It might appear a rather arbitrary occasion for me to to stop and take note, celebrate, retrospect, reflect, and actually, in certain ways it is.  I started the blog in September, and by the end of October, it had 500 views. It passed 1,000 in December, then 2,000 in January.  At each of these small milestones, my partner, encouraging in so many needful ways, pointed out the growth in readership to me, and we chatted about prospects for new posts, interested readerships.  She reminded me that many blogs go on consistently for over a year before provoking a single comment, and  -- except for allowing vacation, visits with family, and a few other projects to distract me from blogging much in December --  I stuck with the writing, willing to see where it might go.

There's two main reasons why this round number takes on a different meaning to me.  One, which I'll write about momentarily, is that I feel as if Orexis Dianoētikē now has not only its space, not only a small but persistent readership, but also its groove, a clear direction, lines to follow out.  The other reason, much more of the moment, is that last night -- or so Bloggerstats tells me -- my blog attained an international readership of a different depth and diversity than ever before.  Here's a readership map of the last 24 hours:

For once, the USA was not the location of the majority of my readership.  27 readers hailed from the UK, 20 from Taiwan, 16 from Mexico, 11 from South Korea, 7 each from Australia and the USA.  Others read from Germany, Greece, India, and Kuwait.  Oddly, nobody from Russia yesterday -- I do seem to have some readership there, and even to have made it into a Russian search engine.

New Year, Old Blog, New Name?

Over roughly the last month, my blog has laid fallow.  The end of last semester piled on not only the typical final exam/project preparation, grading, answering student complaints about grades, but also much basically administrative and governance work for my university.

As the person at FSU arguably with the most experience in the many possible permutations and features of the CLA, I was drawn into the still rather murky and messy process of writing our university's Quality Enhancement Plan.  The funding for the Writing Across the Curriculum pilot program on Close Readings I'm coordinating finally trickled down to my level, two months later than expected.  The last three weeks of the term also saw Faculty Senate, Academic Affairs, and COACHE report meetings.  I've also been preparing for teaching my typical load of four Critical Thinking classes, with two of these incorporating service learning and focusing on food awareness.  Final presentations and reports for my Chesnutt Library Fellowship (in Information Literacy) -- reporting a very mixed success (about which I'll blog in a later post) brought my on-campus obligations to a close.

Crossing The Tracks: Ethics in Business Education

Or, why I enjoy working with the FSU Business faculty on Ethics education.

Today, over in the School of Business and Economics, we held a second workshop emerging from a fairly new, needed, and exciting partnership, the Ethics in Business Education Project (EBEP).  Since I provide the history and initial purposes of  the project on our website (which is still under construction), I'll skip over it here, other than to mention three things:

First, EBEP is a collaborative partnership between philosophers and businesspeople.  Second, the model of collaboration EBEP relies on and embodies involves philosophers, as subject matter experts in Ethics, assisting business faculty to develop high levels of competence and confidence in teaching Ethics and in assessing student learning and development in Ethics. Third, the project arose symbiotically both from needs perceived on the side of the businesspeople and from opportunities grasped on the side of the philosophers.

The first and most pressing specific project we saw the need to tackle was reviewing, then developing a better version of, a scoring rubric used for grading student essays responding to typical ethically problematic cases in Business. Again, the history of that process, including the developmental stages of the rubric, is summarized on the EBEP website, so rather than cover that same ground, I'd rather think and write about why this particular exercise took on importance for a philosopher and for business professors, and what took place between us in today's grading workshop.

There is a stock joking response to any mention of Business Ethics:  "Isn't that an oxymoron?" It reveals a common, longstanding, and doubtless not entirely unmerited perception of businesspeople, even Business faculty, as not knowledgeable about, as uninterested in, and as unmotivated by ethical principles, concerns, values, let alone theories, figures, and texts. 

The reality is that those involved in business have always had some sort of  interest in ethics.  Admittedly, this may well have often taken the form of explicitly worked out ethical stances which academics (particularly in the humanities) and the intelligentsia have found less than congenial.  There certainly have been many cases of businesspeople clearly and deliberately acting unethically.  Plenty have used moral language and concepts as window-dressing for what they wanted and aimed to do anyway.  It may well be that due to the nature of business and business education, there are some environments particularly corrosive to ethical standards and reasoning, more seductive in their temptations. . . .

"CLA" as an Analogical Term

"What is the CLA?" I get asked by colleagues at Fayetteville State and from other institutions, on an almost weekly basis these days.  Their stances vary, not surprisingly, according to the character and intellectual dispositions of these colleagues (some people are less curious, some more, some attempt to get the big picture, others shy and wriggle away from it).  But their interest, their receptiveness, their attention, their "angle" also varies in dependence with two other factors:  what they think they might do with the CLA and why they think they might (or ought to) do whatever they have their mind set -- vaguely, to be sure, but set on.

A few nights ago, as I composed an email to a Czech colleague affiliated with a neo-Aristotelian journal and interested in the Collegiate Learning Assessment, I realized that a set of linguistic distinctions (which we share because of our philosophical formation) and work open up one particularly felicitous way to set out the scope of what the term "CLA" covers.  "CLA" is an analogous term.

(notice, not quite the same thing as analogy in general, a type of argument, trope, or form of inference)

There is a distinction whose first tentative technical conceptualization ultimately goes back to Aristotle, later refined by Medieval philosophers and theologians (and put to a lot of uses, particularly in theology!), then expanded in modernity by those studying language, argument, and metaphor (for example, the hermeneutic scholar Paul Ricoeur or the semiotician Umberto Eco) and now fairly routinely applied all the way by those whose philosophical formation includes a good solid basis in the classics of Philosophy.

The basic idea behind it is this:  a term which is analogous has multiple meanings, all of which are connected with each other in some way(s).  There is some core meaning to the term from which the other meanings derive and to which they remain connected, but this core meaning does not capture the entire fullness or range of meaning of the term.  The other, ancillary, spun-off meanings make their own contributions, expand the scope of the term, interconnect it with other terms and concepts.

For one hearing about analogy and analogical predication -- as I know from the experience of bringing it up with colleagues and teaching students about it -- at first this can be a bit confusing.  So. . .  the term does have a meaning, right?  . . .  but it's got other meanings, and these are all somehow connected with each other? So. . . Huh?

What I (and pretty much everyone else I know who teaches about this) do when faced with this initial confusion is explain the contrast between analogical terms and two other sorts:  univocal and equivocal. 

Univocal terms have one single meaning, and all not-simply-metaphorical uses of that term relate to that single meaning.  It's actually not that easy to come up with terms that in every and any context are univocal, not least since without realizing it we often rely upon analogy.  In clearly delineated contexts, it becomes much easier to find examples.  "HTML code" is an univocal term.  Granted it applies to an awful lot of objects or things, but the term is used the same way (as far as I know) in referring to that vast set of things.

"Seal" is a now-classic example of an equivocal term.  When teaching about equivocation, I'll ask the class for different meanings of the term, and they'll usually come up with four very quickly:  the animal that we see in the zoo or on television; the emblem of the state, country, or other office ; the action of closing something up (or sometimes the portion itself  that closes); and, this guy

The meanings of the terms are not related to each other.  The word "seal" refers to very different, unconnected things.  Of course, you might tie them all together in one sentence, for example:  "Seal took the baby seals and the state seal of North Carolina, and sealed them in a bag.  Still, all you would have done with this is heaped together words which denote different senses of the word "seal".

Of course, it might also refer, as they occasionally point out, to Navy Seals -- and now with that sense of the term we start getting back to the analogical.  Why are they called Seals, after all?  Because they are like the swift-swimming carnivorous animals, among other reasons.  These different senses of the term are connected analogically.

"Paper," which can mean the material, the material configured in various shapes, genres of writing set down on those configured materials, or a type of publication also put down on (differently) configured materials, is another good example of an analogous term.  "Health" and "healthy" are a classic example.

So, back to the CLA.  Many of the faculty (and even some of the students -- but different motivational structures for them) I end up talking with about the CLA understandably want to wrap their head around it, and to do so right away.  The context of discussion can change -- it  might be a faculty development seminar, a consultation with a program about incorporating the CLA into their major, a meeting about our five year Quality Enhancement Plan, or just conversation with an individual faculty member.  But the governing assumption remains the same, sometimes explicitly stated ("but the CLA is just. . . ."), sometimes just lying dormant, implicit, silently generating confusion in the hearer's mind.

Two approaches, oriented around different anchor-points, suggest themselves:

The CLA has its origin in the CLA test, used by schools for assessment of advancement of student learning,  graded and reported on by CLA Assessment. All the other meanings and referents of "CLA" derive historically from their relations with this testing tool.

Or, the CLA is a determinate approach, developed and taught by CLA in the Classroom, then implemented concretely by individual institutions, programs, faculty members.  All the meanings of "CLA" are tied together by their greater or lesser alignment with this approach.

In classic structural linguistics, or in semiology/semiotics, this contrast is immediately recognizable as the difference between adopting the diachronic perspective or the synchronic perspective. The first looks at history, development and change in time, the second at the articulated system as a whole, abstracting from time.  Adequately engaging the reality of a term, a thing, a phenomenon, of course, requires attention to both perspectives.

All of the meanings -- at least the ones germane to pedagogy -- of CLA relate back to these two core meanings.  The CLA is a form of test marked by several consistent general features and a growing number of instantiating exemplars.   It can be an "official" CLA Performance Task employed for assessment of "value-added," indexed to other measures such as incoming students' SAT scores, the results compared over time and to those of other institutions.

It can be an assessment tool like FSU's Rising Junior Examination, used as a second, independent means for institutional assessment of student learning.  That exam itself as a CLA, but we considered several "different CLAs" (i.e. Performance Tasks) as possibilities before settling on one.  We have already been assigned the task of creating another "CLA," this time incorporating the topic of personal responsibility.

It can also refer to an individual student response, so that one can speak of "having graded 20 CLAs today."  It can refer to the general approach, as when we say someone is "really good with the CLA" or "just started learning about the CLA".  This is the meaning somewhat erroneously used in advertising the Saturday Academy workshop I will provide in roughly four weeks, which has been billed as being on "CLA," but which will really focus on one main element of the CLA, the rubric, and the practice of grading.  Of course, learning more about one element, dimension,  or concept of the CLA does entail learning about the CLA more generally, since the parts do cohere.  Still, the confusion I anticipate when new junior faculty show up expecting a workshop which will introduce them to and lead them through all of the elements of the CLA, and find out that I will mainly talk about and provide them resources dealing with rubrics and grading shows that the term can be used in a more proper sense, closer to the core, and a less proper, more derivative sense.

So, long story short:  the CLA means a number of interrelated things.  It is not, like the old trope -- very old, in fact, going back to Jain polemics with Hindus and Buddhists in ancient India --someone brought up at a recent meeting, about the blind men discussing the elephant, up for grabs, meaning radically different things for different people.  It is possible to attain a synoptic, holistic understanding of what is comprised by the term, and what  its primary senses are.  So, when someone says they work with, or know, or use the CLA, perhaps the most prudent thing to do is to ask them precisely what they mean by the term.

the CLA at FSU: a model for incorporation

First a bit of stage setting: Several years ago, my institution, Fayetteville State University, deliberately became involved with a powerful and flexible assessment and teaching/learning tool, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Over the last two years, through faculty development, ongoing course redesign by individual faculty, a variety of faculty-driven efforts, administrative support and leadership, and deliberate shifts in assessment, the CLA has quickly burrowed many deep roots into the soil of FSU.

When I first arrived at FSU two years ago, transitioning from six years of teaching for Ball State University in a maximum security prison to a small southern historically black college where we Philosophy profs teach 3-4 Critical Thinking classes per semester, I had never heard of the CLA. Nor had nearly all of the other professors, staff, and administrators. A few professors had been shipped off to a CLA Academy, and were ready to lead a workshop on it that Fall. Our new Provost glimpsed the potentials of this new mode of assessment based on performance tasks, rubrics, and involving "authentic assessment" of Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Writing skills, He decided not only to support but to invest his long-earned institutional capital into advocacy for adopting the CLA at FSU.