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Troubling the concept: students’ experiences of critical thinking in higher education

SHRE Newer Researcher’s Conference 2013

Emily Danvers, Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER), University of Sussexe.danvers@sussex.ac.uk

+The research in progress

2nd year of ESRC funded PhD

Interviews with 15 students at the beginning (Oct) and end (May) of their 1st year at university with email interviews twice in between.

2 cohorts - an academic and a professional social science course at a University in the South of England. Participant(ish) observation of both cohorts in a compulsory module.

Following around the concept, interrogating what it makes possible/not possible using Ahmed’s work on sociability and affect (2010, 2012), Berlant’s (2005) work on (un)happy futures and Barad’s (2003, 2007) work on materiality and ontoepistemology.

+Critical thinking as…

A mechanised skill for employability akin to problem solving

A cognitive product of ordered, logical thinking

As an individual process of self-reflection

As the force behind social transformation

…As a tacit social practice (Bailin et. al, 1999)

‘Part of the furniture’ in Higher Education. Conceptualised in a number of ways:

‘I got kicked out of school when I was 15 and moved to another school. And there were a lot of technicalities that went on…For the large part I got told the truth about it but there were a couple of small facts that were left out or not exaggerated enough and it ended up casting a completely different light on the situation. So where I’ve had it done to me and have got the brunt of it, I’d like to be able to do it to someone else. To basically make myself look better because I know how to speak. I’d like that, I would really like that. Just because it is very unnerving when you see it unravelling and you know the way that a situation is going to go but you can’t think quick enough to know how to be critical about the way someone is speaking to you. To be able to turn their argument on its head when they least expect it would be pretty cool I think.’

+Reading data with Ahmed

‘To basically make myself look better because I know how to speak’

‘If we take the shape of what is given….we experience the comfort of being given the right shape’ (2010: 79)

Ahmed explores the affective tensions of occupying a counter-hegemonic space and the tension between sociability and social critique

A story of noise becoming voice (Biesta, 2010).

Are there normative models of criticality? What might these look like? What might they make possible? Who might they exclude?

+Reading data with Berlant

‘So where I’ve had it done to me and have got the brunt of it, I’d like to be able to do it to someone else…To be able to turn their argument on its head when they least expect it would be pretty cool I think’

Cruel optimism ‘names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility’ (Berlant, 2001:21)

What does it mean to place hope in the transformative power of criticality? What is the relationship of critical thinking to the ‘good life'?

+Reading data with Barad

‘Casting a completely different light on the situation’‘It is very unnerving when you see it unravelling’ Intra-action – ‘it is not about matter supporting

discourses but matter comes to matter through the iterative intra-activity of the world in its becoming’ (Barad, 2003: 823)

Critical thinking understood as an assemblage of the human-discursive-material

The materiality of critical thinking could include things such as voice, bodies, words, physical environments and also could be explored through the analogies used e.g. light, unraveling, brunt of it, turning it on its head

Initial Conclusions

Critical thinking is not a straightforward ‘doing’ – it is a continually negotiated performance – between words, matter and bodies.

It is anything but ‘rational’ – brimming with affect

Playing around with theory allows me to trouble the seemingly transparent intellectual values of higher education: ‘the value of theory lies in its power to get in the way: to offend and interrupt…it stops us from forgetting that the world is not laid out in plain view before our eyes’ (MacLure, 2010).

+References Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham [N.C]: Duke

University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press.

Bailin, S., Case, R., Coombs, J. & Daniels, L. (1999). Conceptualising Critical Thinking. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 31(3): 285-302.

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3): 801-831.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press.

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press.

Biesta, G. (2010). Learner, Student, Speaker: Why it matters how we call those we teach. Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(5-6): 540-552.

Maclure, M. (2010). The offence of theory. Journal of Education Policy, 25(2): 277-286.