and Cocking, 2000; Flower and Hayes, 1977; Graff, 2004; Kurfiss, 1988; Sommers, 1980; Voss, 1989). Novice/expert theory provides perhaps the most hopeful of all explanations because it implies fairly quick improvements in student writing derived from improved teaching practices. In this view, students simply have not been taught the kind of writing admired in the academy. “And then” structures, “all about” structures, and data dumping are the result of poorly designed writing assignments and uncoordinated teaching.
For example, many teachers report improvement in their students' writing when they explain how expert academic writers construct an introduction (Booth, Colomb, and Williams, 2008): early in the introduction the writer must identify a problem, show why the problem is problematic, and motivate readers to see the problem's importance. Other teachers report the benefits of teaching students what Graff and Birkenstein (2009) call “the moves that matter in academic prose.” Building on Graff's (2004) earlier analysis of students as outsiders to academic prose, Graff and Birkenstein set out to demystify academic prose by showing students how to insert their own voices into academic conversations. (Later in this chapter we summarize some of the “moves” taught by Graff and Birkenstein, 2009.)
Pedagogical Strategies for Promoting Critical Thinking
This overview of writing and critical thinking points toward a consistent set of teaching practices aimed at engaging students with subject matter problems. If we are to create a pedagogy truly aimed at the development of thinking skills, we should consider adopting the following strategies.
Create Cognitive Dissonance for Students
According to Meyers (1986), “Students cannot learn to think critically until they can, at least momentarily, set aside their own visions of the truth and reflect on alternatives” (27). A good way to promote this process is to create what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, which undermines students' confidence in their own settled beliefs or assumptions. Research in neuroscience, as summarized by Zull (2002), offers a material explanation for how cognitive dissonance helps restructure neuronal networks in the brain. Zull explains how knowledge exists as elaborate networks of neurons and synapses. Because learners build new knowledge on existing neuronal networks, these existing networks must be partially dismantled if the learner is to create new networks that embrace fuller, more detailed knowledge. To encourage new networks, Zull recommends assignments that help students dismantle an older mistaken or inadequate view. Thus in a first‐year seminar in cultural studies, students might be asked to write a thinking piece on alternative views of hip‐hop as revealed in Imbram X. Kendi's (2019) How to Be an Antiracist:
Thinking Piece Task: When Kendi was a teenager, his parents and grandparents warned him of the dangers of hip‐hop, expressing a view similar to that of linguist John McWhorter: “By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly ‘authentic’ response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success” (87). How does this view differ from Kendi's own experience with the hip‐hop scene on the Ave in Jamaica Queens? To what extent does Kendi's distinction between assimilationists (who discourage hip‐hop) and antiracists cause you to rethink any of your ideas about structural racism?
Another strategy is to create “decentering” tasks that encourage students to see a phenomenon from an unfamiliar perspective. Here is an example of a possible thinking piece assignment from nursing:
Most public discussion of the coronavirus has focused on the medical model of infectious diseases concerned with the pathology of COVID‐19, methods of transmission, advances of treatments, and search for vaccines. However, in the founding days of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale championed an environmental/miasma model of infectious diseases. Based on your understanding of Nightingale's writings, how might public discussion of the coronavirus differ today if more emphasis were placed on her theories?
Still another approach is to ask students to play what Peter Elbow calls the “believing and doubting game” (1973, 147), a strategy that we explain in detail in chapters 8 and 9. The believing/doubting game—like other heuristic exercises based on pro/con brainstorming—is specifically designed to induce cognitive dissonance. The point of all these strategies is to present students with conflicting interpretations of material and to encourage them to confront the inadequacies and contradictions lying dormant in the views they bring to college.
Present Knowledge as Dialogic Rather Than Informational
In addition to creating cognitive dissonance for our students, we need to show them that our course readings, textbooks, and lectures are not simply “information‐to‐be‐remembered,” as if nothing were at stake, but contingent perspectives embedded in a field of inquiry, analysis, and argument. Suppose a history textbook enumerates the “five causes of the Civil War.” Novice students are apt to regard these five causes as facts or “right answers” to be memorized for a test. To grow as critical thinkers, they need to see these causes as interpretations by historians—as meaning‐making analyses open to revision and debate. In many academic disciplines—particularly the humanities and social sciences—teachers can easily situate course readings within a dialogic view of knowledge by showing students, for example, how existentialists are in conversation with Plato, how psychologists engage the nature/nurture debate, or how in literature and art postmodernists dismantle the meanings found by earlier critics. In other disciplines—particularly in STEM fields—introductory courses must transmit a disciplinary knowledge base of information that students must indeed commit to memory. But much of what is now “known” in the sciences—and passed on to students as current knowledge—was once unknown and subject to theory, hypothesis, and empirical research. If STEM teachers can promote awareness of the historical development of knowledge—the original questions that gave rise to the currently accepted facts—they will be foregrounding what we mean by a dialogic or questioning epistemology.
To illustrate the difference between information‐to‐be memorized and information situated within a dialogic structure, consider the approach of a much loved and now deceased historian at John's institution. In advance of a unit of lectures, this master teacher gave his students a series of controversial theses that brought the course's subject matter into problematic focus. The students knew in advance that they would need to use what they learned from lectures and readings to address each thesis in a short writing assignment. Typical theses used by John's colleague included the following:
The essential theme of the French Revolution was human freedom; Napoleon Bonaparte killed the French Revolution by reversing its thrust toward freedom.
The Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth at the expense of brutalizing European labor and colonial producers.
The ultimate victors in the English Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution were the economically conservative property‐owning classes.
In all cases, the writing assignment is the same: “present an argument that supports, rejects, or modifies the given thesis, and support your response with factual evidence.” This teacher's goal was to help students see the difference between history as one damn thing after another and history as a constructed argument based on data and interpretation.
Teach the Academic “Moves” and Genres That Are Important in Your Discipline
Another strategy for promoting critical thinking is to teach students the academic “moves” and genres that are important to your discipline. Certain moves of academic writing are generic
