Engaging Ideas. John C. Bean
student is guided toward a focus on a significant question that grows out of the writer's interests and that demands critical thinking, undergraduate research writing can spring to life. Flower (1993, 299) describes a successful undergraduate research project on Darwin written at Carnegie Mellon University for a course in cognitive psychology. Flower's student Kate, a sophomore, posed the following problem about Darwin at the end of her introduction:
In this paper I will look at the creativity of Charles Darwin by asking two questions. Does Darwin's work support or contradict current psychological definitions of creativity? And secondly, what is the best way to account for Darwin's own kind of creativity? Which of the major theories best fits the facts of Darwin's life and work?
Within her paper, Kate presented different theories of creativity and examined Darwin's work in the light of each theory. She proposed that Darwin was indeed creative and that his creativity could best be accounted for by the “problem‐solving theory” of creativity, as opposed to the “romantic imagination theory,” the “Freudian sexual energy theory,” or “Wallis's four‐stage theory.”
Kate's essay reveals how successful undergraduate writing can be when students are actively engaged in posing and exploring questions. Emphasizing inquiry and question asking is thus a promising antidote to “all about” writing.
Data Dump Writing, or Random Organization
Both “and then” writing and “all about” writing have discernible organizational plans—chronological in the former case and encyclopedic in the latter. Data dump writing, by contrast, often has no discernible structure. It reveals a student overwhelmed with information and uncertain what to do with it. Commonly encountered in research papers, data dump writing patches together quotes, statistics, and other raw information without an apparent purpose or a coherent organizational plan. It takes all the data the writer gathered about topic X and dumps it, as it were, on the reader's desk. Data dump writing is particularly facilitated by the internet because it is so easy to cut and paste material from websites; students often lift material word for word without assimilating it into their own language. Data dump papers can create nightmares for teachers with their exasperating mix of incomprehensible structure and possible plagiarism. Because data dump writing is familiar to all teachers, it needs no specific illustration here.
What Causes These Organizational Problems?
The “and then” paper, the “all about” paper, and the data dump paper all reveal a retreat, in some manner, from the reasoned analysis and argumentation that we value in academic writing. Why do these problems occur? A number of explanations have been posed. For example, writing theorists influenced by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget have hypothesized that the immature organizational patterns just described are symptomatic of concrete operational reasoners, who tend to focus on data, objects, or things as opposed to propositions or forms (Bradford, 1983; Lunsford, 1979). In writing, concrete operational reasoners can string details together chronologically (“and then” writing) or arrange them in simple informational categories (“all about” writing). But creating the kinds of nested hierarchical structures required in propositional writing requires the abstract thinking that characterizes formal operations.
Other explanations focus on theories of intellectual development cited previously in this chapter, such as Perry's (1970) and Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule's (1986) schemas of cognitive growth. In both schemas, students come to college imagining knowledge as the acquisition of correct information rather than the ability, say, to argue a position or connect to a conversation. Eventually, students develop a complex view of knowledge, where individuals have to take stands in the light of their own values and the best available reasons and evidence and understand and empathize with multiple perspectives on complex issues. Composition scholars using these theories have hypothesized that students will produce cognitively immature prose as long as their attitude toward knowledge remains in the early stages of intellectual growth (Hays, 1983; Lunsford, 1985). The best teaching strategies for accelerating students' growth are tasks that ask students to consider multiple points of view; to confront clashing values; and to imagine, analyze, and evaluate alternative solutions to problems. Many of the assignments used as illustrations throughout this book have these aims.
Still other explanations focus on the different cognitive processes of novices versus experts (Alexander, 2003; Beaufort, 2007; Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, 2000; Flower and Hayes, 1977; Graff, 2004; Kurfiss, 1988; Sommers, 1980; Voss, 1989). Novice/expert theory provides perhaps the most hopeful of all explanations because it implies fairly quick improvements in student writing derived from improved teaching practices. In this view, students simply have not been taught the kind of writing admired in the academy. “And then” structures, “all about” structures, and data dumping are the result of poorly designed writing assignments and uncoordinated teaching.
For example, many teachers report improvement in their students' writing when they explain how expert academic writers construct an introduction (Booth, Colomb, and Williams, 2008): early in the introduction the writer must identify a problem, show why the problem is problematic, and motivate readers to see the problem's importance. Other teachers report the benefits of teaching students what Graff and Birkenstein (2009) call “the moves that matter in academic prose.” Building on Graff's (2004) earlier analysis of students as outsiders to academic prose, Graff and Birkenstein set out to demystify academic prose by showing students how to insert their own voices into academic conversations. (Later in this chapter we summarize some of the “moves” taught by Graff and Birkenstein, 2009.)
Pedagogical Strategies for Promoting Critical Thinking
This overview of writing and critical thinking points toward a consistent set of teaching practices aimed at engaging students with subject matter problems. If we are to create a pedagogy truly aimed at the development of thinking skills, we should consider adopting the following strategies.
Create Cognitive Dissonance for Students
According to Meyers (1986), “Students cannot learn to think critically until they can, at least momentarily, set aside their own visions of the truth and reflect on alternatives” (27). A good way to promote this process is to create what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, which undermines students' confidence in their own settled beliefs or assumptions. Research in neuroscience, as summarized by Zull (2002), offers a material explanation for how cognitive dissonance helps restructure neuronal networks in the brain. Zull explains how knowledge exists as elaborate networks of neurons and synapses. Because learners build new knowledge on existing neuronal networks, these existing networks must be partially dismantled if the learner is to create new networks that embrace fuller, more detailed knowledge. To encourage new networks, Zull recommends assignments that help students dismantle an older mistaken or inadequate view. Thus in a first‐year seminar in cultural studies, students might be asked to write a thinking piece on alternative views of hip‐hop as revealed in Imbram X. Kendi's (2019) How to Be an Antiracist:
Thinking Piece Task: When Kendi was a teenager, his parents and grandparents warned him of the dangers of hip‐hop, expressing a view similar to that of linguist John McWhorter: “By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly ‘authentic’ response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success” (87). How does this view differ from Kendi's own experience with the hip‐hop scene on the Ave in Jamaica Queens? To what extent does Kendi's distinction between assimilationists (who discourage hip‐hop) and antiracists cause you to rethink any of your ideas about structural racism?
Another strategy is to create “decentering” tasks that encourage students to see a phenomenon from an unfamiliar perspective. Here is an example of a possible thinking piece assignment from nursing:
Most public discussion of the coronavirus has focused on the medical model of infectious diseases concerned with the pathology of COVID‐19, methods of transmission, advances of treatments, and