Scholars in the field of conflict resolution in schools theoretically argued that minor distractions and disturbances are conflicts. In the present study, we refer to them as emerging conflicts. The study has been carried out within the phenomenographic research tradition and used semi-structured interviews. We addressed the professionalsthe teacherswho deal with emerging conflicts every day, investigating their different ways of understanding an emerging conflict. The 9 different ways we found make the collective and shared understandings of emerging conflicts visible and form a professional language with which to discuss these kinds of conflicts. These nine could be divided into three groups, the social practice of the classroom, something that stems from outside the classroom, and something that characterises all human interaction. The awareness of the existing understandings could further be discussed in relation to what is actually taught in teacher education in Sweden.
To develop students' critical thinking is one of the primary goals of a modern democratic school system. However, what is to be developed has been the matter of long-standing debate. One particular area of conflict has been what role is played by the knowledge concerning the object to be critically thought about.The 'specifists' have asserted that knowledge about the object is the core. The 'generalists' have claimed that there is no need for any actual profound knowledge. Typically, this debate has been held at a theoretical and philosophical level. In this paper, I will make an empirically based contribution to the debate. In a unique approach, I will use a number of student essay responses to argue in favour of a specifist view, and at the same time to question some of the generalists' basic assumptions. The paper ends with an appeal to the generalists to provide us with proper clarification regarding the questions I raise. This is important as they hold the dominant position in the field. If they are to continue to do so, we need to be clear about the accuracy of their basic assumptions. This becomes even more essential as the generalist research has been severely criticised for producing inconclusive results, as well as the fact that the generalist This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Educationalists have had serious problems in proposing well-grounded ways of teaching critical thinking. Reviews of the field have called for research to develop theory concerning the learning experience associated with critical thinking enhancement, as well as to explore more tailored teaching and evaluation methods. This article suggests an approach to teaching critical thinking with potential to handle these concerns. Based on an analysis of students' essay responses, the article carries out a thought experiment to elaborate an example of design and enactment of lessons using the variation theory of teaching and learning. In this way, the article offers the research community a thorough description of a theory-driven and tailored tool for teaching and evaluating critical thinking, which deserves further exploration.
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