Christina Slade

This research project investigated manifestations of critical thinking in pupils 10 to 12 years of age during their group discussions held in the context of Philosophy for Children Adapted to Mathematics. The objective of the research project was to examine, through the pupils' discussions, the development of dialogical critical thinking processes. The research was conducted during an entire school year. The research method was based on the Grounded Theory approach; the material used consisted of transcripts of verbal exchanges among the pupils. Analysis of the transcripts revealed that: critical thinking appears to the extent that a 'dia-logue' is established among pupils; on the cognitive level, dialogical critical thinking is comprised of four thinking modes: logical, creative, responsible and meta-cognitive; and on the epistemological level, dialogical critical thinking is only manifested in a context where egocentricity of perspective and relativism of beliefs are transcended.

It is a commonplace of discussion about the impact of visual media, whether visual images in print, televisual images or the images of the internet, to claim that it functions irrationally. This paper argues against that claim. First, the assumptions about the connection between rationality and linear, written, unemotional prose are unjustified. Secondly, using analytic techniques analogous to those used in identifying argumentation in verbal text, is possible to discern arguments in visual text, in particular in image based advertisements

Television has been demonized as the cause of the moral decay of our society. Its content is derided as vapid. However, what we watch on television is often philosophically complex. This book examines news, cartoons such as South Park, advertisements, and soap operas and identifies complex moral dilemmas and arguments in them. It argues that we should apply analytical and philosophical skills directly to what we watch and shows how it can be done. In the final chapter, the way in which the news has been overtaken by the private lives of public figures is traced to a breakdown of the public-private divide.

The conception of reflective reasoning, like that of higher order thinking, has been informed by a Cartesian view of the self. Reflection is conceived of as a solipsistic process, in which persons consider their own thoughts in isolation. Higher order thinking has equally been represented as a single thinker considering thoughts at a meta-level. This paper proposes a different conception of reflection and higher order thinking, in which reflective dialogue is seen as the fundamental context in which reflection is possible and higher order thinking engendered. The very process of dialectic defines what it is to be reflective and to think critically. Learning to reflect alone is a consequence of internalising the discourse

Traditionally reasoning skills have been taught through written examples, often anachronistic or artificial. However, students use television as their major source of information about the world and as the source of basic understanding of the world. Yet we rarely provide students with the skills directly to criticize and analyze television's world view. This paper reports on a project designed to teach reasoning through the critical analysis of real television products. News presentation is shown to be influenced by the stereotypes and oversimplification of the genre of soap opera, to the detriment of balance.