Last semester, one of my classes liked to do a daily debrief about the recent elections in the United States of America (US)– there were an inordinate number of US citizens in the class, and they were very invested in the outcome as they were expecting to move to the US in a year. As we watched two very different candidates face off one another, it was interesting to note how the debates ran in class. Sometimes the opinions that students offered, or rather hotly held on to, were regurgitated baseless clickbait that clearly fed a certain demographic. It prompted me to question how media literate they were. While they worried about their predicted grades, I worried about their critical thinking skills. Those mental frameworks that we hope to eventually develop in our students through careful instructional design.
The need for critical thinking has never been more… critical! Our students these days are inundated with a surfeit of information, primarily through the constant exposure they have to digital devices and subsequently, media. The seeds of critical thinking should, ideally, be sown at home, as parents try and inculcate some sense of evaluation and judgement in children. Educators are called upon to nurture this bedrock and develop critical thinking skills through sound instructional design and pedagogical choices that intentionally contribute to capabilities of children so that they access information with more critical lenses, evaluate credibility, approach problem solving in creative ways and make decisions with confidence. Since we are subject to our conditioning from several spheres as well as the wider community, our thinking is, quite naturally biased and our job is to help students work through that and develop prisms of diverse and more judicious thought. This requires work – going beyond content delivery to actually focus on fostering attitudes and dispositions that make for a critical thinker. This means a reduced chance of believing spurious claims and a greater emphasis on credibility, truth, and good judgement while navigating the media swamp we often find ourselves in. Which means we would need more concrete ways to foster a penchant for more thoughtful approaches within our students.
I once was teaching poetry in a Language and Culture unit and would have ordinarily taught a selection of poetry from diverse authors and approached it from a purely literary angle. In an effort to be more inclusive of a diverse group of students, I tried something different and designed a Bilingual Poetry Unit that featured poems that incorporated the native tongues of poets within their English poems – to highlight how intrinsic language was to identity and how hard it is to dissociate from the cultures one came from. We preceded this with students bringing in poems from languages that they spoke at home and even had parents send in contributions. The whole unit was infused with a sense of respect and empathy and understanding as well as a deeper engagement with the texts that invariably led to more probing excavations into literary aspects that, in turn, manifested in better academic responses. This was done in a structured inquiry-based model where students were provided with open-ended questions and tools to conduct a literary excavation of sorts. Using a students’ agency and own experiences and fitting it into a wider context provides the required relevance and interest that makes learning meaningful. The results were beautiful. Besides the honing of skills related to the critical analysis of literature, students built on the questions provided with their own points of enquiry, they delved deep into the idea of language and identity formation, the inevitable marginalization of those who struggle with English, the encroachment of the lingua franca on regional vernaculars, the implicit colonization that persists through language and their own place in these complex contexts.
Over the years, I have become more aware of the importance of intentionality behind all decisions in instructional design. I believe, this begins with first determining and having clarity on what students should learn and then designing instructional events accordingly. The emphasis has to be on the impact all our choices have on the learning experience of the student. The key is to update, innovate, and revise curricula. If connections that can be made from the learning material to the students’ lives are tenuous at best, changes will necessarily have to be made. We are a society that is overwhelmed by, and constantly battling, “brain rot” – the word that Oxford University Press has recently chosen as word of the year (2024); a word that indicates the mental fatigue experienced by mindless scrolling on social media. No one is more susceptible than the average high school student. This is the climate that is least conducive to the fostering of critical thinking, while also being the time that it is most required! While we may not be able to do the trending TikTok dance to hold our students’ attention, we can definitely curate material and activities that have interest, value and can transcend temporal, spatial and cultural distances to inspire thought and provoke a spirit of enquiry. The goal is to foster autonomy and help students develop those individual prisms of diverse and more judicious thought – the absence of which will always make the proverbial bandwagon look attractive!
Bridget Raju is a high school English teacher at The International School, Bangalore.