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Abstract

Purpose

This article takes a postfoundational lens to reflect upon my ethnographic (re)searching experience in a Hong Kong high school biology classroom to expose ignorant theoretical–methodological assumptions of researchers and teachers on critical thinking for new realizations.

Design/Approach/Methods

Using an encountered embodied thinking moment as a trigger, this article examines the texts/discourses collected from teachers/teaching and students/learning to unpack underlying philosophical–theoretical–methodological traps and ignorance.

Findings

The analysis exposes three ignorant assumptions. First is a mind–body dualism that has historically disembodied thinking as an abstract and invisible mind/cognitive activity. Second is a knowledge–skill/thinking divide that upgrades critical thinking as a transferrable higher-order skill above and external to knowledge. Third is a naturalized assumption that didactic instructions in Asian classrooms are not as conducive to thinking cultivation as (Western) student-centered pedagogies.

Originality/Value

My postfoundational reflections interrogate and expand these philosophical–theoretical–methodological grounds to reconstruct effective thinking curricula and classrooms.

Keywords

Didactic instruction embodied thinking knowledge–thinking/skill divide mind–body dualism philosophical-theoretical-methodological traps and ignorance postfoundational lens

Introduction

Curriculum engages the key issues of (re)producing knowledge (Apple, 2000) and (re)making human subjects (Popkewitz, 2007) as an entangled effect of national, social, cultural, and political governance. For example, the ongoing competencies/skills-based curriculum reforms worldwide, initiated by and largely modeled upon the OECD's core competency definitions and the USA's twenty-first-century skills framework, intend to cultivate students as “critical thinkers” with higher-order thinking skills, positive dispositions, and agentive inclinations for ethical social actions. Hong Kong SAR's (Special Administrative Region) Education Bureau even provides a four-stage development scheme for critical thinking skills (see Appendix 1). Critical thinking has undoubtedly become one of the most desirable competencies for the twenty-first century.

However, as a popular discourse, “critical thinking” defies a neat definition. Broadly, it speaks to “an epistemological stance” (Sigurðsson, 2017) that subjects everything to rational scrutiny before acceptance. Generically, it correlates to “reflective thinking” that attends to the grounding and conclusions of the thinking (toward making possible ethical actions) (Dewey, 1933; Ennis, 1987), “the sense of reasoned justification of argument” (Kuhn, 1991, p. 13), or “thinking about thinking” (Flavell, 1976; Lau, 2015). While these generic connotations elevate critical thinking as a higher-order competency applicable to various subject domains, critical thinking is also subject-specific (McGuinness, 1999), expressed as, for example, logical–mathematical reasoning, evidence-based argumentation in science learning, or reflective inquiry in language studies. In this article, I foreground “critical thinking” as an integration of two equally important components—“thinking” and “critical consciousness”—an understanding gained through my reflexive ethnographical research on critical thinking in a Hong Kong biology classroom. While thinking is a basic condition, critical consciousness, as I will demonstrate below, is highly expected of researchers and teachers, exposing and imploding their otherwise naturalized and ignorant assumptions of modernity.

Curriculum-wise, Western student-centered pedagogies such as group work (Kutnick & Blatchford, 2013), collaborative dialogue/talk (Fung, 2014; Mercer, 2000), and evidence-based argumentation (Anderson et al., 2001; Kuhn, 1991) are often prioritized as being conducive to creating a thinking curriculum/classroom (McGuinness, 1999). In contrast, teacher-centered didactics and learning activities, featured in most Asian classrooms, are commonly deplored as not conducive (Hamamra et al., 2021). For example, Fung and Howe (2012) observe that Hong Kong classrooms packed with rows of seats “contrast sharply with Western beliefs in terms of promoting critical thinking and group work” (p. 102), and teacher-centered didactics often make students into “passive recipients of a collection of facts, concepts, and skills” (p. 246). Yue (2000) argues that ancient Chinese philosophy treats critical thinking as primarily a spirit of questioning not as conducive to students’ innovation and holistic development as Western critical thinking cultivation. Thus, critical thinking cultivation is (still) generally lacking in Asian didactic classrooms (Song, 2016; Yin, 2015;) despite Asian nation-states claiming to prioritize higher-order thinking skills over knowledge in making twenty-first-century citizens. For example, in Hong Kong SAR, schools are required to transform their curriculum teaching from “knowledge transmission to a cultivation of higher-order thinking and skills,” as officially stipulated/foregrounded in the Education Bureau's curriculum guides (Education Bureau, 2001, 2015b).

With a postfoundational lens, this article critically reflects upon my ethnographic (re)searching experiences on critical thinking in a Hong Kong biology classroom in fall 2018. In spelling out the encountered challenges, pitfalls, and realizations, it invites critical thinking researchers and teachers to critically problematize their otherwise naturalized and ignorant presuppositions on (a) the (un)teachability and (re)searchability of critical thinking, (b) the (in)compatibility between teacher-centered pedagogy and critical thinking development, and (c) the internal (dis)articulation between subject curriculum knowledge and subject-related critical thinking.

A postfoundational lens to expose-implode ignorant assumptions of modernity

Postfoundational means to critically discern, problematize, and overturn, for new openings, the ignorant philosophical–theoretical–methodological foundations that ground our teaching, learning, and research. As Jackson and Mazzei (2023) interpret and expand on Butler's (1992) thinking, a postfoundational inquiry is (1) emergent, (2) responsive to specific (temporary) conditions, and (3) attuned to what has been previously foreclosed to make room for experimentation and creation. Put differently, postfoundational inquiry does not nihilistically discard in totality the foundations (an impossible endeavor) but remains consciously aware of and contests them for new openings and generative force. Furthermore, it considers the inquirer as constituted by practices of inquiry, rather than as a presiding subject, identity, or agent prepared to pick up and apply theories and methods.

As argued elsewhere (Zhao, 2023), conducting a postfoundational inquiry entails three features. First, a postfoundational line of thinking is not neat theories/methods to apply but, rather, a philosophical/theoretical orientation to start with. Operationally, a postfoundational lens often discerns turning points in our unconsciously and ignorantly naturalized humanist research, which could possibly implode and displace foundational assumptions to begin anew and think otherwise. For example, scholars have proffered “study” as a postfoundational educational formation that challenges the instrumental and neoliberal ordering of learning toward realizing students’ full potential (see Lewis, 2013; Zhao, 2020). Posthumanistic and postqualitative new materialist thinking also bears a postfoundational feature to the extent that it exposes and overturns otherwise normative/ignorant presuppositions, such as humanistic anthropocentrism and objective data collection (see Murris, 2021, 2022).

Second, a postfoundational line of thinking needs to attend to the materiality, as it is the material that constitutes the entanglement of our teaching, learning, and researching. Cognitive and humanist inquiries usually do not problematize the entanglement of teaching and learning engagement within the spaces, places, contexts, and environments with which they occur, whereas a postfoundational inquiry takes account of “how objects, bodies and materialities impact upon learning, teaching and connection” (Gravett et al., 2021, p. 1). In this light, material objects are no longer merely objects of knowledge but become agentive materiality that demands researchers and teachers to follow and attune to it. Human–nonhuman assemblages choreograph what comes to matter as teaching and learning in classrooms. Last, conducting a postfoundational inquiry partly nurtures inquirers’ critical consciousness and competencies, which is crucial to critical thinking researchers and teachers if critical thinking is considered as a sustainably generative orientation for exposing ignorant foundations that otherwise normalize and rigidize our thinking capabilities.

For this article, I draw upon and theorize an encountered embodied “thinking” moment as a provocative trigger (May et al., 2021) that critically yet unexpectedly exposes and suspends some foundations that “normally” configure—yet delimit—my research positionality as a participant observer as well as the researched teachers’ curriculum development and critical thinking pedagogies and beliefs. These philosophical–theoretical–methodological presuppositions ground our research, teaching, and learning, and, I retrospectively realize, are ignorant, that is, naturalized yet limited, expressions of Western modernity. They include but are not confined to a take on critical thinking as a skillset or model, say, Kuhn's five-step argumentation, ready for teachers/researchers to pick up in cultivating students’ critical thinking (see Fung, 2014), or a take on the researcher as an expert outsider who applies a predesigned method to search/find data, that is, the presumed ongoing dynamics of critical thinking in class. It is in revealing these otherwise naturalized ignorant assumptions that I call the encountered embodied “thinking” moment a postfoundational trigger.

As a postfoundational trigger, this encountered embodied “thinking” episode turned us all into ignorant subjects at different times, ignorant in the sense of “not knowing” or ignoring something (or what to do). Specifically, I became bewildered and ignorant when I could not discern the happening of (critical) thinking in the classroom. Teacher A was ignorant, not aware that there was a gap between her intention and the students’ reception, as the latter turned out to be ignorant of her intentions. Teacher B, although hand drawing out her thinking process right in front of me in the classroom, was ignorant of the fact that she was materially embodying her thinking. Honestly, I did not plan to anticipate my realization of these “ignorant” moments. Rather, it is the countered embodied “thinking” moment that (re)draws me as the researcher, Teacher A, Teacher B—who was not included in my research plan—the students, and (critical) thinking into a newly generated and generative assemblage. Responding and attuning to, rather than discarding, these “ignorant” moments helped enact our (re)searching experiences of (critical) thinking along a postfoundational gesture.

In this sense, this article unfolds as a postfoundational reflection that hopes to (a) expose-transform some ignorant, that is, normalized and limited, assumptions of modernity that undergird foundational paradigms and (b) attend to and turn around some ignorant, that is, ignored and unknowing, moments for gesturing toward new generative horizons in critical thinking teaching and research. In doing so, it provides self-reflexive and critical implications for critical-thinking researchers and teachers as critical practitioners.

(Re)searching critical thinking in a Hong Kong SAR biology classroom

Project overview

Since the 1980s, Hong Kong SAR has been updating its curriculum reform(s) with reference to global trends in education, modeling upon OECD's core competencies definitions and USA's twenty-first-century skills map. Its signature curriculum framework, Learning to Learn, came out in 2001 and was renewed in 2017 as Learning to Learn 2.0. Like many other countries and nations, curriculum reforms in Hong Kong SAR have seen a salient shift of focus from knowledge acquisition to skills development, fostering nine generic skills to hopefully make educational subjects desirable to succeed in the twenty-first century.

This article draws upon an ethnographic study on critical thinking I did at a Hong Kong middle school with Teachers A and B in fall 2018. Hong Kong schools belong to three categories (Bands 1, 2, and 3), and this is a Band 2 school, where approximately 14% of seniors can test into one of the eight local universities and colleges. Teacher A, the vice principal in charge of the school's teaching reforms, has taught biology for over 20 years, and Teacher B, the panel head of the school's biology team, has taught for 7–8 years. Teacher A had taken a few graduate courses with me and reportedly dedicated her teaching to the cultivation of students’ thinking, whether critical or not. IRB approval was sought from my university at the time (EDU2018-032), written informed consent was obtained from the participants, and data were collected through classroom observations over seven sessions (50 min each) on an ecosystem unit taught by Teacher A to a Grade 11 class (about 20 students), videotaped teaching and learning, a brief questionnaire with students, interviews with Teachers A and B, and focus group interviews with students, all conducted in English.

With a presumably good (which I later realized to be ignorant) knowledge of what counts as critical thinking, I went to observe Teacher A's teaching, hoping, or, rather, prepared, to search for and see the ongoing occurrence of critical thinking in her classroom. The classroom was spacious, with students sitting around large square tables. I sat in the back with Teacher B around a table with a good view of the teaching and learning engagement. However, I soon found myself bewildered and helpless as a participant observer, as I could not see the occurrence of critical thinking, although the teaching and learning sessions struck me as student-centered, with Teacher A's didactic instruction via PowerPoint slides, students’ seemingly vibrant group activities (discussion and sharing), and active participation. Thinking, critical or not, was happening constantly, but as a novice researcher on critical thinking cultivation in classrooms, I did not see or capture its trace until one session when Teacher A asked the class to interpret the graph below of predator and prey population changes (see the left part of Figure 1). She asked the class to work on the graph handout and think by themselves before sharing ideas in pairs for 15 min.

Figure 1.

Original handout (left) and Teacher B's drawing/interpretation (right).

Without saying a single word, Teacher B, immediately next to me, started to interpret the graph by literally adding lines, signs, and words to the handout, concluding her thinking with three-starred knowledge points (see the right part of Figure 1). At that point, it struck me that Teacher B was materially embodying her otherwise invisible cognitive thinking-interpretation process. That was a big aha moment for me: To see the happening of critical thinking, we need to make thinking seeable in the first place. A note of clarification is needed here: I am not saying that Teacher B's thinking is embodied, and Teacher A's thinking is not. Saying so presumes a dichotomous ordering of embodied and cognitive thinking, that is, a mind–body dualism. Rather, I argue that all thinking is cognitive-bodily thinking, and it is just that I did not have a conscious awareness of, that is, was ignorant of, this embodied dimension (as an effect of the modernity episteme) until I saw Teacher B's silent hand-drawing thinking in front of me. In this sense, Teacher B's embodied drawing cracked open my presuppositions and bewilderment as a postfoundational trigger, enabling me to critically examine, expose, and overturn the otherwise naturalized foundations we hold in teaching and researching critical thinking.

Embodying biological graph interpretation as a postfoundational trigger

Intrigued, I asked Teacher B to rematerialize and videotape the entire embodied drawing–thinking/interpretation process. She sent me the first video clip (transcribed as in Table 1, left column), which I felt was more of a summative revisit of the three knowledge points, as reflected in her handout (Figure 1). I asked her if it was possible to detail her thinking/interpretation process to students with mediocre or poor biological knowledge like me. She sent me a second video clip (transcribed as in Table 1, right column). I then interviewed Teacher B on her viewpoints and pedagogical practices on critical thinking as well as her embodied drawing–thinking–videotaping experiences, followed up with Teacher A on her curriculum and pedagogical design, and shared with her Teacher B's embodied thinking. Later, I conducted a brief questionnaire survey with students regarding their familiarity with the topic (critical thinking) and feedback on Teacher A's worksheet design and pedagogical activities. I also asked students to think aloud about their graph interpretation process and record it with an iPad, and I tested Teacher B's two video clips with the students in small focus groups. Finally, I shared my reflexive findings and puzzles, especially the recognized foundations that we otherwise hold as researchers and teachers, with the two teachers and invited their self-reflections.

Table 1.

Comparison of Teacher B's two thinking excerpts.

… Let's look at the peak, the apex of population density of them. The population density of species 1, D1, is higher than that of species 2, D2. That's why we know that species 1 is prey, while species 2 its predator. This can be explained by the energy loss along the food chains. To summarize: the population density of prey is higher than that of predator. …(transcribed from the first video clip, and my underline)

… By looking at the graph, let's say look at time one, let's say the population size of the orange one, it's A, and the population of the blue one. You can see that B is higher than A. It means that the population size of the blue one is larger than the population size of the orange one. Then how do I know which curve represents the population size of predator and which curve represents the population size of the prey? We can look at the area under the curve. I use the blue pen to shade the area under the blue curve, and I used the orange one to shade the area under the orange curve. The area of the blue one means the area under the blue curve, it's larger than the area under the orange curve. Then I know, I know that the blue one represents the population size of prey and the orange one represents the population size of predator. Because the energy provided by the prey should be able to support the energy requirement by the predator. That's why the population size of prey need to be larger than the population size of the predator. … (transcribed from the second video clip, and my italics)

Retrospectively viewed, Teacher B's materialized embodiment of her graph thinking/interpretation, as an encountered moment, emergent in and responsive to the contextualized teaching and learning, functions as a postfoundational trigger for me as a researcher (nevertheless, Teacher B was not consciously aware that she was embodying her mind-thinking through her hand-drawing gestures; she told me that it was just a habit she picked up as a student and that she had been ignorant of the material/embodied and cognitive thinking aspects). Specifically, it enabled us all to critically reflect upon and attune to what has been previously normalized and ignorantly foreclosed in our (re)searching and teaching praxis on critical thinking for new openings/questions. First, instead of applying a ready-for-use critical thinking development model, we need to work out a way to make thinking, critical or otherwise, visible and accountable in our research and teaching. Second, both Teachers A and B failed to consciously treat graph interpretation as a form of critical biological reasoning and dismissed their didactic instruction as not conducive to cultivating students’ thinking, as opposed to Western-introduced student-centered activities such as group work. Why so? Third, while Teacher A intentionally designed her worksheet to cultivate students’ thinking, she nevertheless did not share with students what was meant by critical thinking, biological thinking, or her pedagogical intention. Her students were unaware of her intentions. That is, Teacher A and her students were ignorant of each other. In other words, there is a sharp gap between Teacher A's intended curriculum and her students’ experienced curriculum. How can such a teaching-learning gap or ignorance be abridged in terms of curriculum? The following sections aim to answer these questions.

Reflection 1: Embodied thinking to overturn an ignorant mind–body dualism

I argue that Teacher B's unintentional thinking embodiment exposes the foundational yet misguiding assumption that thinking and learning are abstract, disembodied cognitive activities. Such a disembodied conceptualization of thinking and learning, as Nathan (2021) rightly critiques, can find its epistemological grounding in die-hard ignorant mind–body dualism, largely traceable to René Descartes's thinking (ca. 1700s). This mind–body dualism treats the mind and body as fundamentally different and distinct, with the invisible former functioning as an entity for thinking and feeling and the latter as an inferior material corpse. This was further exacerbated by the Analytic Philosophy of Bertrand Russell and, later, by cognitive scientists, who postulate that a person constructs his beliefs and attitudes as “ideas” or mental representations, severed from a person's direct and grounded material experience in the world or with the body. For example, when we think about a horse, we refer to a symbolic/ideal horse image in our minds rather than a physical horse. These mental “ideas,” internal representations of the material world, are ultimately composed of propositions, a formal system constitutive of symbols, and logically consistent symbol manipulation operations. In this Western tradition, thought “was equated with mentally performed computational processes on these internal symbolic representations” (Nathan, 2021, p. 19). In other words, thinking happens in the mind through a series of internal representations of actions and concepts.

As an affirmative example, the Hong Kong SAR's Education Bureau offers an official “critical thinking skills” scaffolding chart (see Appendix 1). What stands out in this official conceptualization is the abovementioned foundational and ignorant assumption that thinking belongs solely to the mind or cognitive activity, separate from and irrelevant to the material body. Put differently, a mind–body division has epistemologically conditioned thinking as being disembodied and abstract, happening in the mind through a series of internal representations of actions and concepts like “make inductions/inferences, recognize, draw logical conclusion,” to give a few example verbs from the appendix chart.

Nathan (2021) further argues that such a mind–body division and its ordering of mind and thought underpin and envelop the development of Information Processing Theory (IPT), which has predominantly conditioned our theorization of learning in education for over half a century and has held back our educational thinking and praxis. IPT treats the “mind” as a general-purpose computer that manipulates mental symbols and symbol structures for a person to perform thinking and learning primarily through mentally presenting and reasoning about the world and ideas. To disrupt this epistemological trap and ignorance, Nathan proffers an evidence-based grounded framework that demonstrates naturally embodied ways of thinking, teaching, and learning. “Grounding maps novel ideas and symbols to modality-specific experiences that are personally meaningful” (Nathan, 2021, p. 25), building a connection between an idea/symbol and an object/movement/event in the world in service of meaning making. In this sense, Nathan's grounded thinking, teaching, and learning attend to the material and embodied aspects in an attempt to overcome the die-hard mind–body dichotomy and somewhat resonates with a postfoundational orientation.

I argue that Teacher B's unintentional drawing–thinking–explaining can be taken as a good example of Nathan's grounded teaching and thinking along a postfoundational materialist line, even though Teacher B enacted it as a learned habit. To me, her materialized drawing explanation produces a link between her mental thinking and the nonsymbolic physical-population-change graph handouts. More specifically, the hand gestures, say, pinpointing certain peak points, drawing parallel lines in shaded areas, and writing in certain symbols such as t1 and t2, make her invisible cognitive thinking/interpreting/teaching meaningful and grounded actions and experiences, with students’ learning and understanding as further intended reference and connection points. Furthermore, as was done by videotaping with students in mind, Teacher B's materialized thinking/thinking practice foregrounds the need to visually embody her interpretation of the graph to ensure that students can see the material changes to the graph in connection with her cognitive thinking, as expressed in her reflection excerpt below. In other words, Teacher B intentionally attends to the material that entangles and attunes her teaching and students’ follow-up learning, which, albeit unconsciously for her, succeeds in constraining mind–body dualism and foregrounds the natural, embodied-cognitive entanglement of thinking per se.

At the beginning, I want to show the pattern repeats, how to show … they have to see the pattern really repeats … if they see those shapes of pattern repeat again and again, then they know it is cycling. (Teacher B)

Reflection 2: Biology graph interpretation as biological thinking to overturn an ignorant knowledge–thinking/skill split

I argue above that Teacher B's materialized graph reading in class struck me as a postfoundational embodiment of her biological thinking processes. Specifically, it reveals and implodes my otherwise ignorant assumption before entering the classroom observation. As a researcher with a theoretical understanding of critical thinking, I entered the classroom presumably prepared to search for and easily observe the occurrence of critical thinking. Nevertheless, there was nowhere for me to catch the thinking dynamics until Teacher B's materialized and embodied thinking gestures unfolded right in front of me. Teacher B, however, did not have a conscious articulation between the two, that is, her graph drawing and her biological thinking, explaining that the former, as a habit, was probably picked up by her teachers. Teacher A, in her didactic instruction on graph interpretation, also briefly emphasized the three right/correct knowledge points for students to remember, failing to clarify how to interpret the graph itself, let alone organically articulate graph interpretation as an embodiment of biological thinking or reason.

Both teachers’ failures to recognize biology graph reading as a very formal process of biological thinking, whether critical or not, alerted me to an otherwise naturalized and ignorant knowledge–skill/thinking split that (dis)orders curriculum development rationale and instruction praxis worldwide. For example, the ongoing global competency-based curriculum reform initiated by the OECD and the USA foregrounds a shift in learning goals from knowledge acquisition to competencies and skills cultivation, intending to make educational subjects that can survive in the twenty-first century. Hong Kong SAR commonly categorizes learning goals along three dimensions of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. In the Learning to Learn 2+ (2015) curriculum guide, the Hong Kong SAR's Education Bureau defines nine generic skills, structured as basic skills, thinking skills, and personal and social skills, with “critical thinking skills, creativity, and problem-solving skills” categorized as thinking skills.¹ The 2015 updated Biology Curriculum Guide (Education Bureau, 2015a) targets its curriculum goals as “knowledge and understanding, skills and processes, and values and attitudes” (p. 8). The skills and processes are to develop students’ ability to “make scientific inquiries; think scientifically, critically and creatively” (p. 4), foregrounding, among others, use of “diagrams, graphs, flow charts and physical models as visual representations of phenomena and relationships arising from the data” (p. 12). Put differently, “analyse[ing] and interpret[ing] both numerical and nonnumerical data in forms such as continuous prose, diagrams, photographs, charts and graphs … and make[ing] logical deductions and inferences and draw[ing] appropriate conclusions” (p. 95) are stipulated as one of the assessment objectives in biology learning.

While graph interpreting is indirectly stipulated as a learning objective for assessment that counts as a form of biological critical thinking in Hong Kong SAR's biology curriculum, the above official statements affirm a commonly naturalized knowledge–skill/thinking split. This naturalized epistemological split upgrades critical thinking as a higher-order generic/transferrable skill applicable to varied subjects, supposedly weaving into subject curriculum teaching. Misguided schoolteachers tend to treat critical thinking as an external objective, disparate and beyond subject knowledge acquisition, and hence possibly fail to explicate a possible internal articulation between thinking cultivation, critical or not, and subject curriculum knowledge teaching and learning. As Teacher B confessed in the interviews, schoolteachers usually do not read the official curriculum guides of the Education Bureau, nor do they equate graph reading/interpretation to a form of biological thinking.

This knowledge–skill/thinking split also accounts for Teacher A's take on critical thinking cultivation as a hidden curriculum goal, not to be shared with her students, as knowledge instruction is her normalized pedagogical goal, and topics related to critical thinking “do not belong to the domain of biological knowledge” (Teacher A). Building upon Deanne Kuhn's (1991) five-step argumentation model, Teacher A intentionally designed the worksheet in Figure 2, putting a “critical question” on the left and asking students to answer with a “my opinion, reasons, and evidence” structure. Albeit intended to “exercise students’ comprehensive reasoning-thinking capability” (Teacher A), Teacher A did not explain this to the students, nor did she discuss with students any of the relevant concepts—thinking, higher-order thinking, biological reasoning-thinking capability, and her design intention—because she viewed all of them as irrelevant to her pedagogical goals (of teaching biology knowledge). In other words, this knowledge–skill/thinking divide prevented Teacher A from pondering the possible internal link between biology subject knowledge and biological thinking and that between teaching knowledge and teaching thinking.

Figure 2.

Worksheet used in Teacher A's class.

Furthermore, Teacher A defended her decisions, stating that she need not “share their pedagogical intention with students” because she assumed that her high school students “should figure out by themselves the internal relationship between the three-step argumentation structure and the exercise of thinking abilities” (Teacher A). However, as my follow-up brief questionnaire and student focus group interviews show, her 20 or so students had rarely heard of the terms “critical thinking” and “higher-order thinking,” nor did they predict Teacher A's good intentions or the link between the three-step structure and the cultivation of thinking. Only one student reported hearing the term from his primary school teacher in a general studies class. Put differently, students were ignorant of their teacher's intention to cultivate critical thinking through special worksheet designs and pedagogical devices such as group work. Teacher A was unaware of her students’ ignorance. In terms of curriculum, there is a big gap between Teacher A's intended curriculum and students’ learning experiences.

Students’ learning outcomes also mirrored Teacher A's naturalized ignorant knowledge–thinking divide, prioritizing knowledge points over the graph-interpretation process. When asked to reinterpret the graph using a “think-aloud” method and record their interpretation with an iPad, it turned out that most students simply recalled the three knowledge points foregrounded in class (and some even remembered them wrong). Instead of reasoning with the graph, they turned to commonsense knowledge as follows:

In this graph, we can see that Species 1 has a bigger change scope than Species 2, showing that Species 1 is prey and Species 2 is predator. When Species 1 has a large population, Species 2 has more food. Otherwise, Species 2 would not survive. If Species 2 exceeds these numbers, the population density becomes unbalanced. (Student 10)

With the ignorantly dominant yet misguiding knowledge–skill/thinking split, we can argue that reading a biographical graph is treated as a means toward reaching the three knowledge points to be tested in exams. In other words, the means give themselves over to the end and can be forgotten when the end is fulfilled. This knowledge–skill/thinking split glosses over the fact that critical thinking is subject-specific (McGuinness, 1999). That is, the biological graph reading itself expresses a mode of the biological thinking process, which, I argue, constitutes an inherent part of gaining biological knowledge.

Reflection 3: Can didactic teaching aid in thinking cultivation?

The epistemological split between knowledge and skills/thinking also creates a false, ignorant pedagogical separation between knowledge and teaching. Such pedagogical differentiation is also coupled with a naturalized assumption, as reviewed in the first section, that didactic instruction, especially in Asian classrooms, is not conducive to thinking cultivation, as opposed to student-centered activities such as group projects and pair work. Teacher A, for example, said that she attached great importance to the cultivation of students’ higher-order thinking by utilizing pedagogical means, such as classroom discussions, group work, and group presentations, excluding didactic teaching as a viable pedagogy.

Nevertheless, by comparing the transcription excerpts of Teacher B's two video clips in Table 1, I argue that Teacher B's didactic demonstration (embodiment) of her graph-interpretation process can pedagogically help students learn and grasp the biological mode of thinking and reasoning toward reaching certain biological knowledge. In other words, thinking is pedagogically teachable and learnable as part of the embodied instruction of knowledge, that is, it is made visible and accountable by evidence.

From the above table, we can see that Teacher B in her first video concisely and cognitively tells us her summative and leaping cognitive reasoning which makes sense grammatically (by using connectives like “that is why” and “this can be explained by”). However, the “why” doesn’t really explain “why,” and “explained” is not “explained clearly.” In comparison, Teacher B tries hard to “show her reason” and “how to show,” as she told me in my follow-up interview. For example, the added italicized question that might speak directly to the students and her subsequent showing/drawing/explaining materially embodies her answering-reasoning process. Next, the “because” and “that's why” structure also closes a reasoning/thinking loop with a detailed explanation. In other words, for the second video clip, Teacher B grounds her teaching/thinking in materialized-embodied drawing–thinking–explaining, which links her mental thinking, her physical hands, pens, the graph, and students’ learning. In abridging ignorant mind–body dualism, Teacher B unconsciously manages to demonstrate and embody her otherwise invisible cognitive thinking in didactic pedagogy (see Nathan, 2021).

I tested Teacher B's two video clips with the students; they could easily tell the difference between teaching knowledge and teaching thinking and felt that the latter was much clearer and more helpful. Teacher A said that high school students should figure out their unshared intentions when designing a three-step argumentation structure to cultivate thinking. This might be true, but considering the annual low percentage of seniors (about only 14%) who can test into one of the eight local universities and colleges, would Teacher B's embodied pedagogy achieve a better result in cultivating students’ biological thinking? Here, I want to emphasize the importance of cultivating thinking as a basic embodied-cognitive skill before we shift to critical thinking as a higher-order transferrable skill. With this clarification, I argue that we need to straighten out if not totally overturn, the abovementioned ignorant assumption that didactic teaching is not conducive to the teaching of thinking before constructing a healthier relationship between critical thinking cultivation and curriculum knowledge acquisition. Specifically, the ignorant knowledge–thinking/skill split can be merged, and teachers can organically link knowledge instruction and the teaching of thinking, as argued through Teacher B's case.

Based on this analysis, I argue that didactic instruction, often claimed to be typical in Asian classrooms, can also help enhance students’ (critical) thinking. While often critiqued as “hierarchical, rigid, and lacking creativity and imagination” (Di, 2016, p. 42), Asian pedagogies like didactic instruction and rote memorization are reportedly multilayered and multidimensional (see Nield, 2007) and can effectuate deep strategic, rather than surface, learning (Watkins & Biggs, 2001). “Choral or unison responses” in Chinese mathematics classrooms also display students’ active verbal participation (Clarke et al., 2013). The culturally responsive pedagogy of “Confucian do-after-me” can also be reconceptualized philosophically to (re)become pedagogically conducive to teachers’/students’ critical thinking training (Zhao, 2020). These research projects call on critical thinking scholars and teachers to loosen our otherwise naturalized ignorant philosophical–theoretical–pedagogical assumptions and stereotypes, critically attuning and responding to what is emergent in classroom teaching and learning for new openings and generative forces.

Reflection 4: Foregrounding critical thinking as a visible-accountable objective for curriculum and instruction development

Picking up an encountered embodied thinking moment, I have so far critically reflected upon my (re)searching experiences in a Hong Kong biology classroom. It is a postfoundational reflection in the sense it demonstrates the trajectory along which our modern assumptions about research methods and curriculum pedagogies are exposed and imploded for new openings. In so doing, I am not arguing to discard the foundations entirely (which is impossible) but to keep consciously aware of and contest them for new openings and generative forces. For example, it is not possible to discard the Tyler Rationale as a foundational framework for teachers to develop and implement teaching and learning. However, with my above case analysis, we can foreground “critical thinking” as an integration of the two equally important components—“thinking” and “a critical consciousness.” While thinking is a basic condition, critical consciousness is highly expected of researchers and teachers to maintain their researching/teaching attitudes toward sustainable and generative critical thinking in their curriculum and instruction development and implementation.

Curriculum and instruction, as Ralph Tyler (1949) depicts in his classic book Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, contain four core elements: learning goals, learning experience selection, learning experience organization, and evaluation. Often called the Tyler Rationale, this self-fulfilling logic, albeit reducing rich and dynamic education to a means-ends framework (see Kliebard, 1970), is managerially powerful and operationally effective in bridging the possible gaps that exist between teachers’ intended curriculum and students’ experienced curriculum, for example, teaching and learning. Its pedagogical efficacy rests on a holistic integration of the four common elements by a means-toward-end rationale, regardless of whether its end is knowledge or skills, such as critical thinking.

With this critical consciousness, we can better adopt the Tyler Rationale to correct the possible epistemological–pedagogical gaps, traps, and ignorance of teaching and learning critical thinking, as explained in the above analysis, by attending to the following points:

Make (critical) thinking an explicit learning goal to build common ground for teachers and students.

Specify subject curriculum expressions of (critical) thinking, that is, possible internal articulations between subject knowledge and thinking, before defining critical thinking as a higher-order transferrable skill, implying a knowledge–skill split.

Ponder the possible linkage between the didactic instruction of knowledge and thinking.

Make (critical) thinking materially embodied and grounded so that its cultivation implodes mind–body dualism and becomes evidence-based and measurable.

Check the integration of learning goals, learning experience selection, learning experience organization, and evaluation of possible gaps.

Maintain a critical consciousness of the above procedures to keep thinking sustainable and generative.

Postfoundational implications for critical thinking as “thinking and a critical consciousness”

Building on my ethnographic (re)search experiences in a Hong Kong biology classroom, this article showcases the complex interpellations between critical thinking (as a healthy integration of thinking and a critical consciousness), curriculum development, and instruction. Leveraging an encountered embodied thinking moment as a postfoundational trigger, this article explicates otherwise naturalized and ignorant epistemological traps and tropes for new openings that disorder curriculum teaching and learning on (critical) thinking. These ignorant traps include a mind–body dualism, a knowledge–skill/thinking split, and the presumption that didactic instruction, typical in Asian classrooms, is not compatible with thinking cultivation.

The recognition and possible implosion of these ignorant epistemological traps and tropes, I argue, provides researchers and teachers with, or rather expects of the latter, a critical consciousness that attends to a nuanced methodological–theoretical complexity on researching, teaching, and learning critical thinking. On one hand, we need to theoretically and epistemologically keep critical thinking as a fluid concept or stance that is not bogged down to a fixed contour. On the other hand, to enhance the teachability and learnability of critical thinking operationally, we need to resort to the Tyler Rationale as a usable model for curriculum and instruction development. This complexity reminds us of the implications of a postfoundational lens: It is not to entirely discard foundational epistemes and frameworks, which is simply impossible, but to keep the foundations open and contested for new possibilities. In this sense, a postfoundational lens is critical and maintains the sustainability and generativity of critical thinking. With this postfoundational lens, it is hoped that this article has critically interrogated and expanded the ignorant philosophical–theoretical–methodological grounds of integrating critical thinking with the curriculum as an agenda of (re)producing knowledge, (re)making educational subjects, and constructing a thinking curriculum and classroom (McGuinness, 1999).

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical statement

The project described in this article involves human participants, and IRB approval was sought from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (number EDU2018-032). The author was trained at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and fully understands and endorses research ethics protocols as a basic requirement of academic research. For this project, all the teacher participants signed written informed consent forms.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper was partly supported by the “critical thinking” teaching reform project granted by Hangzhou Normal University, grant number 1115B20500551.

ORCID iD

Weili Zhao

Notes

1

Nine generic skills include Basic Skills (communication skills, mathematical skills, and IT skills), Thinking Skills (critical thinking skills, creativity, and problem solving skills), and Personal and Social Skills (self-management skills, self-learning skills, collaboration). Available at

Appendix 1

Hong Kong EDB's official definition chart of critical thinking skills, taken from the Secondary Education Curriculum Guide (2017), Booklet 2: Learning Goals, School Curriculum Framework and Planning, page 56, and available at https://www.edb.gov.hk/en/curriculum-development/major-level-of-edu/secondary/CG_documents.html

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