We spent our last class reviewing the way the course had been structured and how we felt we had developed over the semester. Our professor first asked us to define critical thinking. After four months trying to channel critical thought… we should at least be able to articulate what it actually is.
As a class we settled on the following definition:
“Critical thinking = the ability to understand something for what it is and what it is not”
As a critical thinker, instead of instantly accepting (or rejecting) information you are given you should analyse its strengths and weaknesses, its objectivity and subjectivity, its sources and its biases. From this you should draw your own conclusions and generate your own individual opinion on the topic. Much of the information we are given as students comes from professional academics or official published articles. We are therefore susceptible to taking what we hear or read to be somewhat gospel because it is knowledge generated by those with higher academic authority to ourselves.
However, when ‘specialists’ in a field talk to people unfamiliar with their subject… lots of bullshit can go on. I know this because I have done it. As my peers and I all specialize into different topic areas, I have found that if I say something specific to my course in a fancy way and with enough confidence, people tend not to question it.
In this module, however, we have learnt to question each other and critique our classmates’ claims and assumptions. We each designed a 3 component ‘integrated plant-animal’ farm system. Much of our class time was then spent presenting information about this system and justifying why it should be implemented on the UBC farm. In addition to general class discussion, we each did 3 powerpoint presentations, a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style presentation and a number of written proposals, All of these were assessed and marked by both our professor and our peers. For the written proposals, we were each given someone else’s proposal to mark and we were assessed on how well we did this.
If I compare this course to those I have taken at UCL … I have read very few academic articles, have spent minimal hours alone in the library, have not sat a single exam or felt particularly stressed, have had no real syllabus and have at no point felt stupid, confused or useless. Instead, I have grown in confidence. My abilities to present, to summarise, to question, to argue and to THINK have improved hugely. I have also developed a close relationship with all my classmates and my professor, which I never felt I had at UCL. We all hang out after class and will often go for a beer and chat about relevant topics that have interested us or further discuss our projects. We are all genuinely interested and invested in what we are learning about and regularly go to events around campus that relate to this.
In January 2016 the World Economic Forum released a report called ‘The Future of Jobs’. They describe how our society is entering the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’: an era of advanced robots, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and biotechnology. They predict that by 2020 the skills that are considered the most important in today’s workforce will have changed. Critical thinking will increase in importance to become the second top skill workers will need. Robots may help us get to where we want to be faster, but they can’t be as critical or as creative as humans (yet).
References:
World Economic Forum, 2016. The Future of Jobs: Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,