Journey to information/data collection from Critical Thinking perspective
Aug 24th, 2011 | By veronica | Category: News and Events
Dear CT Practitioners! Warm hello to you all!
I hope that all is well on your end, and that you are enjoying your activities!
There is a week left by the end of the month, but we have already 848 visitors who have accessed our CT Blog – which is indeed great, given that August is a vacation month in several countries!
Comments from you to different posts are highly appreciated: many thanks to Igor from Ukraine, Mr. Joshi from Nepal – comments can be followed via the posts under the News and Events section.
The work on Guidebook on Personal Development from Critical Thinking perspective is actively moving ahead and many thanks to all those who are already submitting their sessions for review.
In this very post, I want to get back to Curriculum Development from Critical Thinking perspective, and mainly to take you to a new chapter of the Guide, related to Information and Data collection from Critical Thinking perspective, which we have identified as first learning situation. In the previous post I shared with you the part of Motivation for Critical Thinking which is an important pre-condition for any learning situation from CT perspective.
There are 5 other learning situations that we have worked on, for which we have developed specific tasks, etc. and we’ll share them with you very soon.
You may be asking yourselves how can data collection become critical?! Do we really need to have a critical thinking approach when it comes to data collection or information gathering?! What difference does it make if compared with a standard data collection situation?
Or
How much from what I see and hear in the news I can/should believe in? How can I trust the promises or declarations of politicians in my country? To what extent people in my country are able to distinguish between facts and assumptions?
From our perspective “The first pre-condition for an independent decision making process is access to diverse sources of information. In order to be able to make a decision, a critical thinker needs information from diverse sources, often from contradictory sources of information. This is an important aspect, given that any text or source of information does already propose/give „a ready interpretation of the facts”, thus, influencing, from the very beginning, the decision making process. This causes difficulties in generating alternative solutions or makes it almost impossible, even if we put in practice high level cognitive processes.”
While I would like to let you read the entire part related to Information and/or Data collection from Critical Thinking perspective http://www.criticalthinkingblog.org/our-projects/curriculum-development-from-critical-thinking-perspective/learning-situation-informationdata-collection-from-critical-thinking-perspective
I still want to ask you the following:
- How often do we, in our daily work, consult at least 2 contradictory sources of information for a certain subject/matter?
- As a critical thinking practitioner, what would you do/change/improve in your activity in order to promote “critical” information/data collection at the classroom level, through textbooks and through curriculum in general?!
Your valuable comments are awaited in the Leave a Comment Section below!
With best wishes,
as ever,
Veronica
1) How often do we, in our daily work, consult at least 2 contradictory sources of information for a certain subject/matter?
Most of we decision-makers classically prefer conveniently-available sources of information. We play safe with ‘zero risk’. At times, we play ‘populist’ card at the cost of reasoning. We mistake, misunderstand, and misinterpret it as ‘all-friendly’ proposition. And those others of us, pursuing critical line, do ’selectively’ consult contradictory sources, but then mostly with very little impact thereof upon what we finally decide. The rapidly emerging ‘fast-track’ prototype, lately, has been impeding the process of decision-making based on two or more paradoxical sources of information.
2) As a critical thinking practitioner, what would you do/change/improve in your activity in order to promote “critical” information/data collection at the classroom level, through textbooks and through curriculum in general?
At classroom level, we can attempt to harness ‘critical’ culture by encouraging and allowing the reading of even alternate books (different from the prescribed ones) by both – the teachers and the taught. Further, the floor-discussions ought to enable and facilitate diverse points of reflection on a subject from the representative classroom audience.
Dr. Devkant Joshi,
NEPAL