Meskerem Woldegerima
Assignment 1: Personal Response to Reading
Verlinden, J 2005, Critical Thinking and Everyday Argument, Wadsworth/Thompson Learning, Southbank, Victoria, pp. 16-27.
Description:
In this article Verlinden explains what critical thinking is and considers the skills involved with critical thinking. The word critical thinking is usually misunderstood by people for finding fault in people’s ideas. However critical thinking involves skills that allow the thinker to make judgments on whether to agree or disagree on an idea by taking time to reflect on thoughts and reasoning to arrive to the truth rather than accept the first answer or conclusion that comes to mind. Critical thinking deals with ideas, including beliefs, observation, communication, information and arguments. Critical thinking involves skills such as argument analysis, verbal reasoning, and problem solving and the abilities can be used to improve critical thinking. Despite the fact that there are a number of perspectives to critical thinking skills that exist there are similarities in the views of argumentation scholars because they both involve in reasoning and analysis and they are both also used in problem solving. Learning argumentation helps into becoming a better critical thinker. VerLinden 2005 argues that critical thinking can be developed by studying a particular subject or the general ideologies of critical thinking.
Comment:
I found the article clear as it explained critical thinking and the skills involved with it and how we can become a strong critics learning specific skills. There were a few discipline such as “local and general critical thinking” the article provided a meaning for this terms though which was quite helpful. The article was not biased as the author has logical facts from scholars on critical thinking to support his opinion. It provided a good definition of what critical thinking is and presented examples of how to be a strong critics such as questioning positions and arguments with a few of exposing their assumption. I found this as a great example as it argues that critical thinking can be developed by a specific subject.
Critical thinking is a vital aspect of developing critical literacy as the aim is not to accept everything from the media or text as truth instead analyze the whole information critically to determine the purpose of the of the text.
Verlinden has made me think that I can become a strong critic by developing general skills of critical literacy. Developing critical skills is important because developing the skills will help me make the most of my reading time. Instead of reading and understand the words I will have to understand the purpose of the article.
McLaughlin, M., & DeVoogd, G. 2014, “Critical literacy as comprehension: Expanding reader response”, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, vol. 48, no. 1, 52-62.
Description:
McLaughlin and DeVoogd explores ideas for students to be critically aware and prov...
