his now classic study of pedagogical strategies that make a difference, Richard Light (2001) examined the connection between writing and student engagement. “The results are stunning,” he claims:
The relationship between the amount of writing for a course and students' level of engagement—whether engagement is measured by time spent on the course, or the intellectual challenge it presents, or students' level of interest in it—is stronger than the relationship between students' engagement and any other course characteristic. (55)
More recent research, conducted jointly by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), has shown that for promoting engagement and deep learning the number of writing assignments in a course may not be as important as the design of the writing assignments themselves (Anderson, Anson, Gonyea, and Paine, 2009). Good assignments, this research has shown, give students opportunities to receive early feedback on their work, encourage meaning‐making, and clearly explain the instructor's expectations and purpose. (We discuss this research in depth in chapter 4.) The aim of this book is to give professors a wide range of options for bringing the benefits of engaged learning to students. Our premise, supported by an increasing body of research, is that good writing assignments (as well as other active learning tasks) evoke a high level of critical thinking, help students wrestle productively with a course's big questions, and teach disciplinary ways of seeing, knowing, and doing. They can also be designed to promote self‐reflection, leading to more integrated, personally meaningful learning. Moreover, the benefits do not accrue only to students. Professors who successfully integrate writing and other critical thinking activities into their courses often report a satisfying increase in their teaching pleasure: students are better prepared for class, discussions are richer, and student performance improves.
But the use of writing and critical thinking activities to promote learning does not happen through serendipity. Teachers must plan for it and foster it throughout the course. This chapter suggests a sequence of steps that teachers can take to integrate writing and critical thinking into their courses. It then addresses four negative beliefs that often discourage teachers from taking these steps—the beliefs that integrating writing into a course will take time away from content, that writing assignments are not appropriate for some disciplines or courses, that assigning writing will bury a teacher in paper grading, and that assigning writing requires specialized expertise. Because these beliefs raise important concerns, we seek to supply reassuring responses at the outset.
This chapter provides, in effect, a brief overview of the whole book; subsequent chapters treat in depth each of the suggestions or issues introduced briefly here.
Steps for Integrating Writing and Critical Thinking Activities into a Course
This section surveys seven steps teachers can take to integrate writing and critical thinking activities into a course.
Step 1: Become Familiar with Some of the General Principles Linking Writing to Learning and Critical Thinking
To appreciate how writing is linked to learning and critical thinking, we can begin with a brief discussion of how we might define critical thinking.
Critical Thinking Rooted in Problems
Although definitions in the pedagogical literature vary in detail, in their broad outlines they are largely elaborations, extensions, and refinements of the progressive views of John Dewey (1916), who rooted critical thinking in the students' engagement with a problem. Problems, for Dewey, evoke students' natural curiosity and stimulate learning and critical thought. “Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding [their] own way out, does [the student] think” (188).
Part of the difficulty of teaching critical thinking, therefore, is awakening students to the existence of problems all around them. Meyers (1986), who agrees with Dewey that problems are naturally motivating, argues that teachers ought to begin every class with “something that is a problem or a cause for wonder” (44). Meyers quotes philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi, who claims that “as far down the scale of life as worms and even perhaps amoebas, we meet a general alertness of animals, not directed towards any specific satisfaction, but merely exploring what is there: an urge to achieve intellectual control over the situations confronting [them]” (41).
Presenting students with problems, then, taps into something natural and self‐fulfilling in our beings. In his fifteen‐year study of what the best college professors do, Ken Bain (2004) shows that highly effective teachers confront students with “intriguing, beautiful, or important problems, authentic tasks that will challenge them to grapple with ideas, rethink their assumptions, and examine their mental models of reality” (18). Set at the appropriate level of difficulty, such “beautiful problems” create a “natural critical learning environment” that engages students as active and deep learners. Similarly, Brookfield (1987) claims that critical thinking is “a productive and positive” activity. “Critical thinkers are actively engaged with life” (5). This belief in the natural, healthy, and motivating pleasure of problems—and in the power of well‐designed problems to awaken and stimulate the passive and unmotivated student—is one of the underlying premises of this book.
Disciplinary versus Generic Domains for Critical Thinking
Not all problems, however, are academic problems of the kind that we typically present to students in our classrooms or that we pose for ourselves in doing scholarly research. Academic problems are typically rooted within a disciplinary conversation: to a large extent, these problems are discipline‐specific, because each discipline poses its own kinds of questions and conducts inquiries, uses data, and makes arguments in its own characteristic fashion. As Anne Beaufort (2007) has shown, to think and write like a disciplinary expert, students must draw not only on subject matter knowledge but also on knowledge about the discipline's genre conventions, its methods of argument, its typical kinds of evidence, its ways of referencing other researchers, and its typical rhetorical contexts and audiences. Chapters 3 and 4 develop strategies for helping students think rhetorically about their purpose, audience, genre, and discourse community. Chapter 10 addresses Beaufort's novice‐expert schema in more detail by drawing on rhetorical understanding to teach undergraduate research.
Although academic problems typically have discipline‐specific features, certain underlying aspects of critical thinking are generic across all domains. According to Brookfield (1987), two “central activities” define critical thinking: “identifying and challenging assumptions and exploring alternative ways of thinking and acting” (71). Joanne Kurfiss (1988) likewise believes that critical thinkers pose problems by questioning assumptions and aggressively seeking alternative views. For her, the prototypical academic problem is “ill‐structured”; that is, it is an open‐ended question that does not have a clear right answer and therefore must be responded to with a proposition justified by reasons and evidence. “In critical thinking,” says Kurfiss, “all assumptions are open to question, divergent views are aggressively sought, and the inquiry is not biased in favor of a particular outcome” (2).
The Link between Writing and Critical Thinking
Given this view of critical thinking, what is its connection with writing? Quite simply, writing is a process of doing critical thinking and a product that communicates the results of critical thinking. As we show in chapter
