Critical Thinking, Rationality, and the Vulcanization of Students

A Pedagogy of Force: Faculty Perspectives of Critical Thinking Capacity in Undergraduate Students

“…Countering this view, Walters (1990) notes that many conventional instruction techniques that presume to stimulate critical thinking often stimulate a mere "calculus of justification" (p. 451) that forces students to assure a rational and logical outcome. This "analytic reductionism" (Walters, 1990, p. 451) compels students to break down the parts of a problem as either deductive or inductive from the other parts.…”

Teaching Ethnographic Research Methods in Social Work

“…Researchers taking the first position have argued that attempts to establish standards for ethnographic research are incompatible with the philosophical assumptions o f a qu a litative tradition (Atkinson & H eath , 1987;Atkinson, Heath, & Chenail, 1991 ;Walters, 1990). That is, ethnographic a pproach es share the philosophical underpinnin gs of constructivism, which assum e th e coexistence of equally accurate ways to d escribe particular events in the social world (Atkinson eta!., 1991;Smith , 1990).…”

The Iraq war as curricular knowledge

“…This view of critical thinking is often considered synonymous to logical thinking since, according to its proponents, it is concerned with reason, intellectual honesty and open-mindedness, as opposed to emotionalism, intellectual laziness, and closed mindedness (Kurland 1995). At this point it is worth noting that Atkinson (1997), Martin (1992) and Walters (1994), among others, criticised this model of critical thinking for its exclusive and reductive nature, arguing that it is a highly normative and 'logistic' model which claims objectivity and rationality. The 'critical thinking' approach has also been criticised for its insistence upon the development of gereralised and transferable thinking skills which are assumed to be universal and thus can be used beyond their original domains of application, a point that Atkinson (1997) elaborately refutes showing that thinking skills do not appear to transfer effectively beyond their narrow contexts of instruction.…”