This article is contributed by Dr Desmond Allison from the Department of English Language and Literature in response to a seminar/dialogue session on "Strategies for Teaching Critical Thinking".

A common rhetorical scenario that I think we should review very critically casts assessment as the chief villain of education, restricting teaching and learning activities to the purveying and regurgitation of unquestioned knowledge frameworks that are embodied in textbooks and on lecture notes. Such assessment-driven teaching (presented as bad, but common) is then contrasted with those (desirable, but rare) critical and creative modes of thinking in which knowledge frameworks are questioned and challenged. This sort of rhetoric unfortunately encourages an impoverished analysis of educational practices and condemns most learners and teachers to failure before we have begun.

The notion that creativity necessarily requires a refusal of conventions in a search for new forms, as more than one workshop discussant seemed to assert, rather amusingly reflects a particular set of educational and cultural conventions rather than a universal truth. A struggle to reconcile the expression of fresh meanings and insights with existing formal constraints is an alternative, widely attested and potentially relevant depiction of creativity.

When considering critical thinking, most workshop discussants focused on critical appraisal of dominant theories and on the search for new and better theories, rather than on raising and investigating questions that arise within theoretical frameworks. This may partly reflect the fact that more specific questions usually arise in particular subject disciplines: an exception is that questions about frameworks themselves are part of the normal (second) order of the day for the academic study of philosophy. A focus on shifts in knowledge paradigms makes sense in a course on epistemology.

To retain such a focus, however, when reviewing the place of critical and creative thinking throughout academic curricula will prove restrictive and educationally self-defeating. How many (or how few) people discover or create new paradigms; how many even believe that they have done so? How many more people work and think within existing paradigms? If there were no place for critical or creative thinking within existing knowledge frameworks, there would be little hope for most of us or for most education. In such a starkly uncompromising account, even new paradigms would only form additional barriers to others, rather than offering wider opportunities for revitalised thinking.

The point of this note is to suggest that asking questions and seeking alternative explanations are activities to be encouraged at the heart of existing frameworks of knowledge and education, and not only in opposition to them. How far enquiry does or does not take place in recommended texts and on lecture courses is open to investigation and change.

Whether we are concerned with propositional or procedural knowledge, or with combinations of these modes as in data analysis and interpretation, there should be scope for encouraging students to address and ask genuine questions as they work within provisional assumptions at various levels of application. Such questioning points the way beyond simple reproduction of prior "knowledge" to its exploration and testing in contexts of use, and that process can lead at times to more fundamental reappraisals. What kinds of learning activities and assessment cedures do people suggest will serve such educational ends.