COURSES
Teaching Critical ThinkingThe TCT program includes courses taught in both “horizontal” and “vertical” modes. What that means is that some courses will operate within the usual semester format (horizontal); other courses will operate across semesters (vertical), to provide greater continuity across course experiences and to blend content between and across separate courses. These “vertical” courses will be taught in two two-hour units, Fall and Spring – but to students they will reflect a consistent and continuous syllabus across those semesters. This “vertical” model allows each 2+2 class to articulate with, and help integrate, each of the 4 hour classes with which it coincides.
The other benefit of this structure is that it will allow students to maintain a six-hour minimum enrollment for financial aid purposes.
Courses:EPS 412: Critical Thinking for Teachers
In this course, we will first address the significance of critical thinking in liberal and deliberative democratic education. Making a distinction between “rationality” and “reasoning,” the first part of the course provides a justification for why we need critical thinking for academic success more generally, but also
in public schools within a liberal-democratic society. In the next section we will consider briefly what critical thinking is, with some discussion of educating towards building critical thinking dispositions. The focus of the rest of the course is on reasoning. We will examine the difficulty language and diversity
present to the making of meaning and claims to truth thus presenting a challenge to questions of “fairness” and objectivity.” These values are often considered necessary to the making of proper, if not right, judgments that impact our moral and political decisions and provide the foundation for a
deliberative liberal democracy. We will examine some strategies for critical thinking with a view to deciding what we might reasonably believe and know. That is, we will consider strategies that might help us evaluate educational research, make reasonable judgments in complex teaching situations, as well as inform the teaching and practice of citizenship. In sum, the course is designed to provide an introduction to the significance of critical thinking within liberal-democratic educational contexts, the philosophical issues that underlie critical thinking techniques, and practice in using these techniques in educational settings. Every effort will be made during the semester to provide examples of critical thinking from non-Western thought.EPS 590: Disciplines, Dispositions, and Critical Thinking
EPS 590: Critical Thinking and the Internet
In this course we will be looking at the topic of critical thinking in relation to the Internet. As everyone knows, the Internet is a tremendous collection of incredibly useful information and resources; and a huge pile of junk.
The problem is, useful material to me may be junk to you, and vice versa!
The class starts with a typical critical thinking issue, how to assess the credibility of information, and builds from that into a larger way of thinking about critical thinking in technologically mediated environments. Thinking critically in this context involves understanding, in part, how these environments work. It means understanding the multimedia quality of web-based resources. It means learning about distributed systems and their networked character. And it means thinking about the Internet as a Great Community (to use Dewey’s term), composed of many smaller communities, each with their own standards and mores about what counts as useful information.
If the class as a whole has a thesis, it is that the Internet is both a potential resource to promote and improve critical thinking – and a potential threat to critical thinking. Helping learners take advantage of it in productive ways is our central challenge.
EPSY 400: Psyc of Learning in Education
EPS 590: Critical Thinking, Citizenship, and Social Justice
This course explores key concepts with which to critically analyze what it means to be a citizen: what are the rights of citizens? who counts as a citizen? what are the obligations of citizens? what are the obligations of the state toward those who are considered citizens and those who may not be defined by that state as citizens but who nonetheless take on the obligations of citizenship? In short, we will begin to tease apart our assumptions about what citizenship means--is it an ethical relationship? is it conferred by institutions? what happens when ethical relationships and obligations exceed the reach of particular nations? Combining theoretical texts on theories of citizenship with practical discussions of teaching critical citizenship in public schools, we will explore what citizenship means in a transnational context and how to teach
about its complexities.
C&I 590: Critical Thinking and the Curriculum
From the beginning, public education in the United States has served two purposes, to educate citizens so that they could intelligently participate in a democracy and to socialize diverse citizens into a common body of knowledge, understandings and ways of acting. Both of these involve aspects of critical thinking as well as enculturation. These goals have always existed in tension in American education.
In this class we will explore the roots and history of these two goals from a political and philosophical perspective but we will ground this study, always, in what actually happens in schools, classrooms and curriculum. How do goals of socialization or democratic citizenry play out in what teachers and students do? What do they mean for teaching and curriculum?
EPS 590: Critically Reading the Media and Popular Culture
