Abegglen, Sandra, Tom Burns, and Sandra Sinfield. “Utilizing Critical Writing Exercises to Foster Critical Thinking in Diverse First-Year Undergraduate Students and Prepare Them for Life Outside University.” Double Helix 4:1 (2016): 1-11. Web.  

Summary: 

This article begins with a background from the authors stating that this essay was written from London Metropolitan University, where the student body is largely made up of non-traditional students, first-generation students, and ethnic minorities. Thus, this essay is targeted to teach University professors how to adapt their teaching styles to improve diverse students’ critical thinking and writing skills.  

Abegglen and others begin to explain that social constructionism concludes that no true perception of reality exists, and that people construct their knowledge of the world through varied experiences. In educational studies, students are often expected to provide constructive criticism on an issue, topic, or text, but many diverse populations of students struggle with this because they do not see their own diverse/cultural experiences welcomed or respected in the typical classroom. The authors claim that collegiate writing is too focused on background, information, and explanation, and not enough time is devoted to critical content, and detailed analysis, and evaluation of texts.  

Paulo Freire is then introduced, a Brazilian educator and advocate of critical pedagogy, who claims that populations need to be provided with education that is “new, modern, and anti-colonial” (3). Freire attacks the banking concept of teaching, where students act as empty vessels to be filled with information, rather, he insists that we consider how to work alongside our students. We must incorporate pedagogy that treats students with respect and intelligence and considers their different upbringings and cultures.  

When it comes to critical writing exercises, the goals of these activities are to engage students with one another; we must encourage dialogic learning alongside multi-modal activities. Students should realize that engaging in conversation is learning, and the classroom should be a place where these conversations are sparked and flowing. One critical writing exercise is, of course, the freewrite, because it allows students to write without censorship, and as Freire says, this exercise “frees the colonized” because students are writing freely while paying no attention to grammar, punctuation, etc. Another exercise is to have students write about why they don’t write: overwhelmingly students respond that they don’t write because of low-confidence levels and fears of being wrong. It’s important to nail down the notion that writing is not necessarily right or wrong, but a process, and a dialogical, social process at that.  

Other critical writing exercises include peer review sessions and zig-zag exercises where students read each other’s papers and then are given 10 minutes to respond to what they’ve read. All of these critical writing exercises rely on students engaging with one another, communicating about and for their writing, and responding to each other.  

Lastly, it’s important to reiterate that students are not empty learning vessels, and that the teacher-student relationship is colonizing by itself; lecturers automatically assume a superior position, which causes insecure writers to think and behave in class differently. Creating a social classroom that relies on dialogical learning and critical writing activities allows diverse students to blossom in the classroom and engage in critical thinking. We must think of students and teachers as equal halves of a dynamic system. Social constructionism cautions us to be suspicious of our assumptions about how we perceive the world, and we as educators must alter our pedagogy to emphasize critical thinking, dialogical teaching, and multi-modality lessons to establish a more diverse understanding of our students’ learning.  

Quotations: 

1. “Ironically, whilst students are very aware that they live in and need to respect their diverse communities and globalized world, they do tend to feel that their own diversity and difference is not welcome or respected in the typical Honors classroom” (2)  

1. (Freire) argued for pedagogy that instead treats the learner as a creator of knowledge- a more mutual approach to education that considers all people incomplete and allows them to strive to become more fully human” (3) 

1. “The fear of not getting it right makes students write and correct at the same time- an act of censorship that makes writing very difficult” (5) 

1. “There needs to be an open and honest dialogue about all aspects of the learning and teaching process so that students have a real say about the tasks and criteria in question. Only this allows students to become critical learners and writers” (8) 

Analytical Reflection:  

I really enjoyed reading this essay, but I think it was more philosophical than anything else. From the title of the piece I expected numerous critical writing exercises to be explained and even carried out to show how they work and why, but in actuality, only a small portion of this essay focused on that while a larger part of the piece focused on emphasizing pedagogy that advocates for minorities. This is important and necessary of course, but a bit off-topic from what the title assumes the article to entail.  

Moreover, the actual critical thinking writing exercises that are listed are helpful but could be explained more thoroughly. I think we all know why freewrites and peer reviews are useful, so I was hoping to learn more about the less popular or obvious writing exercises. However, I did really enjoy reading about how dialogical learning is an important factor in the classroom. This allows students to engage with each other, converse with each other, and argue with each other, and incidentally pushes the instructor to the side of the room, freeing the colonized, as Freire might say.  

The overview of Freire and his advocation for learning which allows students to interrogate material pedagogy and critical thinking was fascinating and informative. I always recognized that teaching and learning was a political process, and Freire sums this idea up quite nicely: “Higher education is not just tutors facilitating critical thinking in students, who often experience it as indoctrination to preferred white, male, middle-class views and stances- education is a political act that cannot be divorced from pedagogy” (3). I agree that learning from communication with other students should be valued over the standard teacher-student lecture, as this learning method only instills the idea of the banking concept of learning.  

I really enjoyed this article and found my own teaching pedagogy rooted in much of the claims stated by Abegglen and others. I specifically resonated with the idea of dialogical learning and encouraging the instructor to relinquish authority at times to allow students to focus on engaging purely with each other.  In my own English 101 class I hold true to these ideas, and for the group teaching performance in this course I believe our group will implement some dialogical and “fun” learning game which relinquishes some of the teacher authority in favor of more relaxed and social learning. Our group has only briefly discussed what we will be doing for this project, but we did state that we want this exercise to be twofold- part lecture and part game; we want learning to be functional and standard, but also relaxed and fun.

Lastly, for my own pedagogical research design study, I am considering looking at the differences in information intake from two distinct forms of learning: lecture and social interaction. I could potentially create two lesson plans that overview the same information pertaining to Genre and Medium, and present this information first by lecture, and then through some sort of interactive activity or game and see which method my students hold on to- ie. which method my students learn more from. My argument for this lies in the concept of criticality: I’m currently questioning if lectures allow for critical thinking, or if more social learning allows for this… This is all just brainstorming for the time being, but Freire’s dismissal of the banking concept of teaching only affirmed my beliefs in dialogical, multi-modal teaching.