“It is your responsibility to change the society [& your classroom practice in that vision] if you think yourself as an educated person.”
― James Baldwin, with inserted phrase by Thomas M. Philip
“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”
ABOUT THIS COURSE
The quality of thinking affects every aspect of our life, such as how we absorb information, how we make decisions, and whether we can effectively engage one another in a civil society. To think well in our times, we need theoretical and practical tools by which to separate thinking from mere feelings, differentiate between good and bad ways of thinking, form and successfully communicate rigorous arguments, uncover the logic and hidden assumptions in other people’s claims, monitor and manage our sources of information, and so on and so forth. This course provides an essential set of such tools and creates a collaborative environment within which the students can learn and master them.
This course is part of Georgetown’s 2018-19 Technology-Enhanced-Learning (TEL) project Blended Learning. By our working definition, blended learning is the learner experience that is fostered by the use of digital technologies applied with an intentional mixed-mode strategy. More specifically,
i) the students’ learner experience includes their ability to achieve the stated course objectives (see Syllabus), the richness and value of the course content and activities, and their sense of agency and growth in confronting whatever learning challenges may come up;
ii) the digital technologies adopted in this course are meant solely to facilitate and enrich the students’ learning experience. The face-to-face and digital components of this class are intentionally integrated, so that they work together to achieve larger course objectives.
WHY THIS WEBSITE
- The critical-thinking dimension: being asked to contribute content to this website, the students have to think critically about what it takes to share information in a way that is responsible.
- The public-service aspect: in the spirit of Georgetown Values, the students as well as the instructor of this class want to share resources — in terms of both content and pedagogy — that may be useful to (a) other young people who wish to cultivate/further their Critical Thinking skills and (b) other instructors who wish to teach Critical Thinking in a way that speaks to challenges of our society and our times.
- As part of the continuous self-teaching that our rapidly changing times demand: as Georgetown’s provost Robert Groves puts it on his blog, “research in all areas of study depends on critical thinking” and only by continuing to encourage “innovation in teaching methods” and “developments in experiential learning,” among other things, can we ensure that our graduates are “well grounded in diverse self-teaching skills.” Resources included in this website are meant to facilitate the ongoing cultivation of such skills.
Disclaimers: While the contributors to this site try their very best to ensure accuracy of the materials shared here, they do not thereby promise that everything included is absolutely true. The readers are urged to exercise discretion if they wish to use and/or share the materials. All the cases mentioned on this site are strictly for instructional purposes.
Copy Right Claims: Unless otherwise noted, the instructor (Professor Huaping Lu-Adler) together with her contributing students and colleagues have exclusive rights to the materials posted on this site.