Honoring Controversy: Using Real-World Problems to Teach Critical Thinking in Honors Courses.

Many studies have found that a university education does not guarantee the ability to think critically (Arum and Roska; Bok) despite the fact that the community of honors colleges and programs constantly emphasizes that we teach critical thinking. My 300-level honors students, though, do not demonstrate critical thinking when they are easily swayed by the messages contained in one-sided movies about how our food is produced or how hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is an evil perpetrated only to line the pockets of greedy corporations. The simple exercise of showing students one-sided films such as Food Inc and Gasland and then discussing them has repeatedly proven that many honors students are either not noticing the biased nature of the reporting or are not influenced by it when forming their opinion about genetically modified foods or fracking. Some students are already convinced that genetically modified foods (GMOs) and fracking are bad for humanity because of previous media exposure, but many students have said they had no strong opinion about the topics until they watched the two-hour films but could now see nothing possibly beneficial in these technologies. Suffering from the "availability bias," i.e., relying only on what one has been told in forming an opinion, they are not yet open to the possibility of valid counterarguments. If my students might be representative of honors students elsewhere, then anecdotal evidence suggests that honors programs might not be succeeding at teaching critical thinking any better than many other departments and that we are contributing to the national problem of producing unskilled graduates. Since 2000, fewer than a dozen articles have focused specifically on critical thinking in Honors in Practice, the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council, and the NCHC monographs. In 2000, Laird Edman wrote an excellent general piece titled "Teaching Critical Thinking in the Honors Classroom," reminding us that not even senior faculty achieve the ability to think critically once and for all; no one "gets there," he writes (48). Faculty need to practice critical thinking throughout their careers, and students cannot learn it in a single class. Also in 2000, William Taylor offered techniques for improving discussion in order to teach critical thinking. In 2001, Julie Fisher Robertson and Rane-Szostak shared a study they did on teaching a course dedicated to critical thinking, lamenting the "paucity of literature on critical thinking within honors programs" (41). Subsequent discussions of critical thinking in NCHC publications include several chapters in the 2012 monograph The Other Culture: Science and Mathematics Education in Honors: "Information Literacy as a Co-Requisite to Critical Thinking: A Librarian and Educator Partnership," "Confronting Pseudoscience: An Honors Course in Critical Thinking," and "Recovering Controversy: Teaching Controversy in the Honors Science Classroom" (Buckner & Garbutt). What follows here might be seen as a continuation from this last piece, in which Richard England touts the virtues of controversy as "central to a liberal education" (75). Although his focus is on discussing scientific controversies and intelligent design in particular, I generalize the argument by asserting that controversy can and should be taught in most courses All fields have controversies, and getting our students used to analyzing them consistently will contribute to their developing a disposition toward critical thinking. REASONS FOR TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING THROUGH CONTROVERSY IN HONORS COURSES Many seasoned colleagues think that honors already successfully promotes critical thinking. As Greg Lanier reported, the phrase "critical thinking" is among the most used in honors mission statements. But what if, as Dail W. Mullins, Jr., implies in his 2005 JNCHC article, our mission statements could "well have been produced by an 'Honors Program Description Generator'" (19). …