What I expect in terms of a rigorous and critical engagement with a text or topic in a lower division or gen ed class is very different from what I expect of 300-level classes, much less capstone courses populated by majors. Isn't developmental steeping reinforced by practice, practice, practice how we're supposed to promote rigor and critical thinking?
Hell, if I can teach my students in Intro nothing more than to think about their own lives, or bits and peices of their engagement with media and politics, with a modicum of sociological imagination, I have transformed their reflexive, critical potential and capacity for rigorous "readings" of text, interactions, representations, etc... all the while knowing that that all I have really succeeded in doing in that class is scratching the surface of rigor, critique, social self-reflexivity and comparative historical situated knowledges.
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 5:41 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> The discussion however, was about the first two years in college.
>
> I remember those two years. Students have to take a lot of survey classes
> then. I remember a survey of all English lit in one year. I remember taking
> a philosophy of history class in which we read one book a week. I remember
> at the same time doing a comp class, which was basically a five page paper
> every ten days. And on it went.
>
> I was fairly well read at that time, but I didn't have much "rigor" because
> I still needed to steep in the stuff -- having it become second nature. The
> rigor started more with the upper division classes, once that broad
> foundation had been set.
>
> Joanna
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alan Rudy" <alan.rudy at gmail.com>
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2011 1:51:03 PM
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?
>
> On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 11:24 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Isn't there something of a contradiction between developing ability to
> > think rigorously (vigorously ?) and developing critical thinking
> > skills ? Rigor requires strict adherence to complex thoughts of
> > others, and it is difficult simultaneously be critical of what one
> > develops the ability to strictly adhere to. The enthusiasm for ideas
> > necessary to discipline oneself to handle them rigorously is
> > undermined by thinking about the same ideas critically.
> >
> > It is difficult to read more than forty pages of something in a state
> > of mind that is highly critical of what one is reading.
> >
> > Charles
> >
> >
> Nope, no contradiction. Critical thinking - individual or collective,
> instructional or political - absolutely necessitates analytic rigor. So
> many students of read without rigor and, at best, generate utterly
> exogenous
> critiques... critiques inconceivable to anyone who read closely, rigorously
> and fairly. I am not saying that exogenous critiques are unfair or
> useless. I am saying that it takes rigorous thinking and fairness to
> generate good and fair endogenous critique.
> Good criticism is rooted in rigorous efforts to fairly understand a text,
> its context, its production, etc. You don't have to be civil, as Doug
> argued, but to be critical you do need to be rigorous.
> As a teacher, it IS a struggle to teach both close reading, analytic
> distance and critical engagement. But a good part of this difficulty lies
> in the fact that my students often do no reading, usually do cursory
> readings, sometimes do a single good reading and just about never do
> repeated readings.
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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319