John Dewey, the twentieth-century educator and philosopher who pioneered the pedagogy of reflective learning, defined the objective of such practice as follows:

Reflection involves not simply a sequence of ideas, but a con-sequence—a consecutive ordering in such a way that…“thinking,” in its best sense, is that which considers the bases and consequences of belief. (Dewey, 1910:2–4)

Similarly, one of the goals of a module I teach in USP—UWC2101R “Writing and Critical Thinking: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on ‘Mind’”—is to encourage students to adopt a stance of “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends”—an orientation to the processes of knowledge and its creation that Dewey claims “constitutes reflective thought” (Dewey, 1910:6).

To demonstrate the value of such reflective analysis both as a method for thinking critically about the course’s content and as an approach to the process of academic writing, I not only teach the skills part of the module using a reflective learning model of writing as iterative revision, but I also present the content portion of the module on a reflective learning model of thinking as iterative ‘re-vision’ as well. The overall goal of the course is for students to realise that these two process models—one for creation of academic writing and one for creation of new ideas—describe, in fact, one and the same method of reflective thought.

How does such a double-loop process model look in action?

To give my students hands-on practice in the process of reflective analysis, I ask them to spend a whole semester considering the question: What is the nature of the human mind? The history of this question and its proposed answers constitute a case study in the principles of reflective thought. And by examining some of the answers to this question proposed by researchers in the fields of philosophy, neurobiology, anthropology, sociology, psychology and dynamics systems research, students come to realise that both the advancement of the sciences as well as the ongoing dialogue of humanities rest upon an iterative process of provisional assertion, questioning and revision.

Virtuous circle 1: process as the product of thinking

The students’ first ‘jump’ into experiencing, rather than just reading about, reflective analysis comes when they realise that they, too, must engage in the practice of questioning their previous understandings which they are satisfied with. I have set up the readings in this module in a such way that students will first encounter manifestly reasonable arguments that they find convincing initially, only to discover in the next class session, equally reasonable arguments which contradict, problematise and complexify the understandings that students have gained from their previous reading. In this way, students—like the scientists and humanists whose works they are reading in the course—come to see that their current understandings, while hard-earned, are yet provisional and are subject to ongoing questioning and revision in light of later knowledge and understanding.

Within the first few weeks, my students begin critically analysing the texts and sharpening their own skills in mounting reasonable arguments and counter-arguments by themselves. As they attempt to articulate and to defend their newfound insights during in-class discussion with their peers, they too experience the recursive process of assertion, questioning and revision. Suddenly the problem of the scientist and the humanist is now their problem as well.

Faced now with the twin problems of formulating and communicating their ideas clearly about a question whose answer they will not find in their college textbooks, my students are thus forced to ask themselves: How do I establish a reasonable argument? What conclusions can and cannot be drawn from this evidence? What are the entailments of my asserting x? How do I know when I have considered enough variables? What are possible alternative ways of framing this same question? What assumptions underlie this claim and what are my justifications for making these assumptions? What are the bases and consequences of considering this belief?

Now that Dewey’s ‘theoretical questions’ have become the students’ own experiential problems to struggle through, these issues take on a practical urgency for my students as they face the task of expressing their own thought and defending it against the reasonable objections of others. As they are no longer passive spectators of the on-going intellectual debate, students find that they must now learn to become players in the game. It is at this point that ‘learning about’ becomes ‘learning to’ as iterative practices of reflective thought cease to be intellectual abstractions for my students and become instead, everyday tools on which they need to build their understandings and to communicate clearly what they have understood to others.

Virtuous circle 2: thinking as the product of process

The design of the course’s writing component also emphasises process and reflection as integral constituents of articulate thought. Accordingly, my students’ second cognitive ‘re-organisation’ comes when they realise that their new-found understanding about the nature of their own thinking (and the iterative creation of knowledge) also applies to their own writing (and the iterative creation of argumentative texts). Here, students’ own engagement with the writing process gives them hands-on practice with the tools of reflective questioning and revised analysis. Now they must iteratively re-fashion multiple drafts of their essays over the course of many weeks as they continue to discuss with one another their ever-developing understandings and confusions in class. Each student gives and receives individual feedback during peer review meetings and teacher-student conferences, and at the culmination of these processes-within-the-process, recursively incorporate the resulting feedback and reflection into their ever-developing writing assignments.

Having experienced the processes of reflective thought first-hand, my students gain the critical experiential knowledge that no good piece of writing spontaneously ‘pops into the world full-blown’ from the writer’s pen but that it is through what Dewey calls “active, persistent, and careful” (Dewey, 1910:6) participation in the iterative process of reading-thinking-writing-questioning that students, like all writers, accomplish and discover what they think.

Reference

Dewey, J. (1910). How We Think. Lexington, Mass: DC Heath.