As teachers and academics, we often spend a lot of time cultivating our worldviews. We refine a distinct and justifiable sense of how the world works, be that politically, historically, experientially, or physically. This level of complex perception, refined over time, motivates our thinking and our actions. When we teach students, we use the term “critical thinking” to indicate a method for cultivating and examining a worldview, often a worldview that is otherwise normalized into our students’ background consciousness. Critical thinking leads somewhere, we maybe think, but where it goes is largely beyond our knowledge and outside the breadth of our own personal realities.

For this post, please consider to what extent your students seem aware of the world around them. Do they hold coherent worldviews? What are the scopes of those worldviews? How do you find evidence of thee, or their absence, in their writing?