In my previous post, I said I had intended to write about an epiphany I had after teaching my first session of English 101, English Composition, at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), but instead I got bogged down in recounting how I had ended up back in front of a classroom after six years away from teaching. Here, then, is the promised blog post about the concepts of academic writing, argumentative writing, and critical writing.
The official BMCC English department course description for English 101 says that the course “introduces students to academic writing.” That’s fine; but in fact, the textbook I am required to use as a new faculty member—They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing with Readings (Fourth Edition), by Cathy Birkenstein, Russel Durst, and Gerald Graff—includes some academic writing among its readings, but also many opinion pieces originally published in newspapers, as well as occasional pieces such as Barack Obama’s commencement address at Howard University in 2016. Given that wide range of content, I told my students on day one that what we were studying and learning was more accurately referred to as argumentative writing than academic writing per se. And they seemed comfortable with this idea. After all (as many of them already seemed to know from their high school education), the idea of this kind of writing was to state a thesis and prove it via an argument consisting of claims supported by evidence.
I also said, however, that we were going to approach this course as addressing critical thinking as much as argumentative writing. You’d think critical thinking would be mentioned in the official, departmentally drafted and sanctioned course description; but it is not. The word “critical” only appears in the list of learning outcomes, which says that, as an outcome of the course, “Students will write, read, listen, and speak critically and effectively.” The only mention of critical thinking per se is in the description of services offered by the BMCC writing center, which, my syllabus is required to state, “teaches registered students to think critically, write actively, revise mindfully and proofread carefully.”
That sounds nice. So nice, in fact, that I don’t want to leave that up to the writing center; I want to teach it in my own classroom. So I told my students this class would focus on critical thinking and argumentative writing. And when it came to defining critical thinking, I listed on the white board my own terminology for six types of knowledge that I adapted from Benjamin Bloom’s famous taxonomy (as discussed on the Critical Thinking page of this website):
- Factual knowledge (identifying facts—the rote memorization part of learning)
- Conceptual knowledge (understanding concepts)
- Procedural knowledge (understanding processes, like combustion or how a bill becomes a law)
- Analytic knowledge (breaking complex ideas down into more basic components)
- Synthetic knowledge (putting facts, concepts, or ideas together to formulate something more complex)
- Evaluative knowledge (making judgments of quality, efficacy, suitability, etc.)
As far as I could tell, my students seemed to get it, and buy it. And then class ended for the day. And I headed out onto Greenwich Street, making my way to the Park Place entrance of the Chambers Street subway station (the IND subway station at Church Street, as opposed to the IRT station on West Broadway, for those ancient New Yorkers, like me, to whom such distinctions still have meaning).
And as I walked, I started thinking about the things I told my students about argumentative writing and critical thinking. And I realized that perhaps instead of using the term “argumentative writing,” I should have used the term “critical writing”—because what we were aiming for was the written incarnation of critical thinking.
But as soon as I thought it—the term “critical writing” for what we were going to learn about in my class—I thought about the problematic nature of that term. Problematic in the sense that, to my way of thinking, critical writing would involve an element of critique, in the sense of critical theory. And my class, whether I liked this fact or not, was certainly not a class in critical theory.
So, for the moment, I decided that “argumentative writing” was probably the best term for what we were going to study in my English 101 class this semester. But at the same time, i started planting the seeds, in my own mind, at least, for how I wanted to teach the class in future semesters. In future semesters—when I am not obligated to teach the class using They Say, I Say as our textbook—I would love to start the class by reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and introducing the notion of critical pedagogy, and linking critical pedagogy with critical thinking and critical writing. Yes, we will get around to the classic five-paragraph essay, in which you state a thesis, argue your thesis, build your argument on a series of claims, support your claims with evidence from properly cited sources, and come to a conclusion that restates your thesis, summarizes your argument, and adds something new to the discussion (this is where the notions of the “who cares?” factor and the “so what?” factor discussed by Birkenstein, Durst, and Graff come in especially handy). But I would like to do at least a little something more than that. I would like to leave my students with the idea that this is not simply an “academic exercise,” in the most banal sense of that term; but rather that critical writing is an essential part of critical thinking, and that critical thinking is not simply a set of handy tools for academic and professional success, but rather the foundation for making a difference, making the world a better place—for helping the long arc of history bend, as Dr. King said it must, towards justice.