Critical thinking, social education and the curriculum: foregrounding a social and relational epistemology

Abstract

In this article, I examine the extent to which, given how critical thinking has been most commonly conceptualised and taught in schools, the subject indeed develops modes of thinking, relating and reasoning that allow individuals to collectively work towards the appreciation and solution of social problems. In the first section, I outline a number of perspectives among social studies researchers and educators that demonstrate the importance of developing critical thinking capacities in students. This is followed by, in the next section, a close examination of two widely popular approaches through which critical thinking is taught – one in the general school curriculum and the other within social studies lessons. I argue that in their current forms and for a number of reasons these understandings of critical thinking fall short of developing the social and relational dimensions of thinking that are more than a little necessary in fulfilling the raison d’être of the subject. Towards this end, the final section presents a social epistemological framework for the teaching of critical thinking in the school curriculum, highlights a number of principles of its application and provides some examples of its use in classrooms.

Keywords:

• critical thinking
• social education
• curriculum
• epistemology
• deliberation
• thinking skills

Notes

1 See, for example, Anderson (2008), Clegg (2008), and Davenport (2005). For a critical account of this, see Lim (2014a).

2 One of the deepest sources of disagreements stems from the debate on whether critical thinking standards are domain-specific or generalizable across a range of social and scientific inquiries. See the discussions in Davies (2013), McPeck (1990, 1992a, 1992b) and Moore (2004, 2011).

3 http://www.cie.org.uk/aboutcie, accessed 1 August, 2014.

4 A more comprehensive explication of the forms of thinking delivered through other thinking curricula lies beyond the scope of this article. However, as amply demonstrated in the literature, the majority of these remain steeped in similar forms of logical thinking. See, for example, Fisher (2004), Paul (1992, 1993), Paul and Elder (2005), Swartz and Costa (2010) and Swartz and Parks (1994).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonel Lim

Leonel Lim is an assistant professor of curriculum, teaching and learning at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. His research focuses on curriculum theory and the politics of education, with specific interests in the relations between ideology and curriculum, the socio-political assumptions of critical thinking and rationality, elite schooling and the sociology of curriculum. His research has been published in Journal of Curriculum Studies, Cambridge Journal of Education, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and Asia-Pacific Journal of Education. Among his forthcoming books are Power, Knowledge and Symbolic Control: The Pedagogic Recontextualization of Critical Thinking in Singapore (Routledge) and The Strong State and Curriculum Reform: Assessing the Politics and Possibilities of Educational Change in Asia (with Michael W. Apple) (Routledge).