ASSIGNMENT 4

Submission Date: 27th January 2023 (to be submitted by 11:59pm via Turnitin)

Title: Reflect upon the uses of critical thinking within teaching and learning.

Word Count: 1,000 words (+/- 10%)

Weighting: 20% of final grade

Guidance

This last assessment is a combination of what you have learned about critical thinking and how this might then be applied to education. Like all of the assignments on this module, it is very open as you will all have learned different things about critical thinking and critical theory. Depending on your discipline, some things may have impacted on you more than others and you may wish to focus on that.

An example might be if you feel you have developed your critical understanding of how talk (Socratic thinking/talk) supports learning in an arts-based classroom, you could take forward your discussion on how the theory has supported this understanding and how you may use it in future.

An alternative approach might be to look at how critical thinking has transformed your understanding of how arguments are constructed through critical approaches, and how education/teachers may make more informed choices if they had more awareness of critical approaches. For example, the papers we looked at about maths and how they draw on Foucault and issues of power could be related to how education might benefit from this consideration. The work of Giroux or Freire is relevant here.

The assignment should be a mix of your reflections and theoretical positions that have informed the thinking. It should also say something about the benefits of critical thinking/theory to education.

There is no set structure to this assignment. You can use headings to separate out your discussion, or write as a continuous reflective piece. As long as you lead the reader through your discussion, providing support from theory and literature, that will be suitable for the expectations associated with this assignment.