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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume X, Number 2 |
November
2004 |
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume X, Number 2 |
November
2004 |
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S.J. Murabito, EnglishUniversity of Pittsburgh—GreensburgCritical thinking has to do with staking out connections, contexts, and possibilities. Ultimately, it has to do with generating one’s own individual point of view.
I am a teaching writer and a writing teacher, a person who infinitely tries to make connections, discover contexts, and entertain critical, cultural, and intellectual possibilities for meaning in what I read and in what I write. This process of seeing, understanding, and applying is the critical thinking that I try to teach to my students. For example, in a composition course, the class might examine different strategies that writers use for opening their essays. Subsequent to that, the students will either write responses to these different openings or compose critical commentaries on the openings of their own essays. In a fiction writing course, the class might study the effectiveness of the dialogues in selected short stories. Then the students will compose short stories, highlight important dialogues, and separately explain how those dialogues are functioning. In a literature course, the class might make note of the various punishments in Dante’s Inferno. Next, the students will create journals or longer essays that discuss these punishments, either in and of themselves or in broader contexts. Critical thinking, then, is born of close reading and careful discernment; it is the opposite of the easy-answer culture of the shoulder-shrugged, “Whatever.” Critical thinking has to do with staking out connections, contexts, and possibilities; it has to do with thinking, reading, and writing; and, ultimately, it has to do with generating one’s own individual point of view. In terms of a specific assignment that many of my colleagues could adapt to their own teaching, let me discuss teaching the concept of irony in George Orwell’s classic essay, “Shooting an Elephant.” I teach this masterpiece of personal and political writing toward the end of my basic composition course because it is very multi-layered and is best read after the students have gained the most confidence possible. In the essay, Orwell employs several levels of irony to convey his anti-imperialist theme. Having the class study these ironies and then either respond to them or to the ironies in their own essays helps the students improve as thinkers, readers, and writers—in this case, seers of irony, under standers of irony, and appliers of irony, which is, after all, a fundamental building block in all intellectual discourse. It is in this way that composition joins writing and literature courses in preparing students not only for further study in these specific areas but also for more confident study in other university courses as well. | |||||||||||||||||
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