Critical Thinking@Julia’s blog

It is getting towards the end of the semester and many students are busy writing assignments. There is, I hope, two parts to the process of writing an assignment. One part of the process is the ‘getting it done by the due date’ part; which may involve late nights, stress and quick grabs at various bits of half-done reading. Then there is the other part of the process which will be going on at the same time; thinking.

Yes, academics do set assignments so that they can check students have understood the material presented in the unit, that they have done the readings asked of them, attended lectures and labs and synthesised this information into some form of considered and well thought out approach called: knowledge. And in reading assignments this is what academics are looking for, a considered and well thought out approach.

Unfortunately,  thinking cannot be done in half bites, in late nights and in high stress conditions. Thinking is an activity that takes time. A period of time that may stretch beyond the due date of an assignment, that may stretch beyond the end of the semester and that may stretch on into the rest of your life. So, whilst you finish off the essay or report that is due next week, remember you may be thinking about those ideas that are currently forming and coalescing in your mind, for the rest of your life. So make them good ones!

Building body muscles takes time and effort. I wonder why we tend not to recognise how much time and effort has to go into building our brain’s ability to lift the heavy weight of concepts and ideas at university? Not being a very athletic type myself, I would never expect to be able to swim to Rottnest or ride a bike to Perth, but maybe if I trained every day for a year I might be able to manage the bike ride ( but doubt if I could do the swim!). Yet, students often expect to walk into university and in their first year with little training and immediately begin to make the distance with their critical and analytical thinking.

Slow down, build up those brain “muscles” bit by bit, and don’t worry if you feel confused! That is all part of the training program of being in first year at university.

What is it that we, the lecturers, most want to assist students to achieve at their time at university? The habit of thinking! What do I mean by the habit of thinking? Firstly, the slowing down of the rush of thoughts that mostly fill our heads and send us shooting all over the place.

Oh, we are all so busy! Busy students, busy lecturers, busy people rushing about from one activity to the next, finding a lecture , buying books, on the computer watch us all go, as we run, run, run! It is certainly a valid observation that to juggle study, paid employment and family and friends takes a great deal of time management. But only when we slow down occasionally can we have the space and place, to think! One way to do this is to make a little room inside our brains and spend a short time each day throwing out old thoughts and making room for new ones!

I have read, somewhere, (alas I cannot recall the reference to back up my claim) that it takes approximately three weeks to develop a habitual way of acting. The first three weeks we have to consciously work on remembering to do something ( clean our teeth, get up early) then after that it becomes an easy habit that we do effortlessly. One way to develop the habit of thinking is plan to have ten minutes in your day sitting quietly by yourself and sorting through your thoughts. As they hop into your brain have a look at them and decide if it is an old worn out boring thought you have seen many times and is ready to be thrown in the discard pile or is it a new and interesting thought worth pursuing and exploring. You don’t have to do the exploring right away just start classifying your thoughts, as a start to developing the habit of thinking.

How do we build these creative and critical pathways in our brain? One way is to read a book. Why do you think academics are so keen for students to read? Yes, it is in part because this is a way to pass on information to students, but it is also a way to change and restructure student’s brains. A key outcome of studying at university is that your brain should be different when you graduate as to when you arrived.

If you spent 40 hours a week for 3 years going to the gym, swimming laps, playing tennis or some other sport you would expect your body shape, your muscle tone and your level of fitness to completely different to what it was when you started. University is gym for the brain!

photo credit: Kitty ♥
So next time you sit down to read something that you might think is a boring dry academic text remember: do your warm up exercise first, stretch those muscles before you get into lifting any heavy weights, don’t over do it and work the brain for 15 minutes then take a short 5 minute break and come back to the text, drink lots of water to hydrate all those synapses and expect to have a few aches and pains after a good workout.

photo credit: Smabs Sputzer

Thinking hurts when you start and that is a sign you are developing and improving your ability to lift the heavy weights of great texts and ideas with your mind!

Paradigms are one of those words that are bandied around in academic discourse. However, as I was reminded recently by a Phd student, the word was used in a very particular way by Kuhn (1962) and when I take my battered copy of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions from the bookshelf and re-examine the 1969 Postscript I am again struck by Kuhn’s emphasis on a paradigm as an exemplar. This definition is often overlooked when we reduce the concept of ‘paradigm’ to being equivalent to the concept of a shared theoretical framework.

By exemplar Kuhn is calling attention to that way that repeating actions and thoughts (such as learning how to set up and do standard scientific experiments) molds the way that we perceive reality. We are building a structure within our brain that focuses our perception and cognition in certain ways and leaves out other ways of seeing and thinking. Each time that I repeat an action or a behavior I am growing more connections in my brain and reinforcing that way of thinking. Some wonderful examples of this have been given by Prof Susan Greenfield (Brain of the Future) . She also spoke of this in her address at the Sir Walter Murdoch lecture (September 2008)

The question arises of: how do I step outside of the paradigm that has been created by all the exemplars in my life when I want to think critically and creatively? How do I see afresh and new? How do I create new thoughts? This is both more difficult and more easy that you may imagine, since I would suggest to you that 98% of your thoughts each day are the same. They may be rephrased in slightly different ways but if you pay attention you may be shocked by how little newness arises in daily thinking. Then talk to a small ‘pre-school’ child and notice how much newness arises in their thinking each day! ‘Why is the sky blue?’, ‘Why is the grass green?’ , they ask and so forth. We know the answers to these questions as adults but we tend to not use that same childlike attitude of wonder towards the world, which would assist us to ask: ‘why does this product come with all this packaging?’ ‘Is it necessary?’ ‘What would happen if we, as a country, refused to allow in any products from overseas that had unnecessary and waste producing packaging?’ Why should household consumers be responsible for the waste generated by manufactures through over packaging of products? Suddenly the paradigm of solid waste management looks different when we ask these simple questions of taken for granted roles and responsibilities.

So, critical thinking is also creative and playful thinking;

photo credit: robertrice

it is the possibility of imagining the impossible which allows us to grow new ways of seeing, in our brains.