Читать книгу Engaging Ideas - John C. Bean - Страница 32

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.