Foundations for Critical Thinking
by Norman Harris
I have found an extraordinarily useful definition of Critical Thinking on the website of the Beth-El College of 
Nursing & Health Sciences, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. It defines Critical Thinking as “A cognitive process based on reflective thought and a tolerance for ambiguity which has the following attributes: 1) disciplined and self directed; 2) Oriented toward inquiry, analysis and critique; and 3) Multidimensional and multilogical problem-solving rather than unidimensional, monological, or linear…”
I find this a useful definition because it is consistent with the way many adult learners acquire information, both in terms of their day-to-day lives and in terms of the acquisition of new information, particularly in the scholarly arena. It is a definition that acknowledges the routine multi-tasking activities that all responsible adults routinely undertake. And when one adds matriculation in a graduate degree program, the necessity to be “disciplined and self directed” is paramount. The aspects of critical thinking that require an understanding and an application of “reflective thought and a tolerance for ambiguity” are often challenging for adult learners.
Such challenges obtain for a variety of reasons—not the least of which are instructive models that guide faculty to assume congruence between their own often unarticulated expectations and the wherewithal that adult learners should have as a matter of course. There are other explanations for adult learner inability to consistently demonstrate “reflective thought and a tolerance for ambiguity,” but my focus here is not to settle on a hard and fast set of explanations; rather, I am interested to explore how “reflective thought and a tolerance for ambiguity” play out in adult learner academic writing.
As illustrated in the writing produced by some students in the College of Educational Leadership and Change at Fielding Graduate University, there is an assumption that earning an advanced degrees requires a kind of articulate amnesia wherein hard won methodological approaches to life—which are often verified by success in the adult learners’ profession—must be cloaked, eschewed, and banished. One result of this assumption is that students’ critical thinking as displayed in what they write is put in a straightjacket—the diction becomes so formal as to be archaic, and the logic so embedded with qualifications that an entropic equivocation is what passes as analysis.
On the other end of the spectrum, some adult learners take their real life experience as sufficient to whatever research task at hand. When this occurs, the writing becomes anecdotal and big ideas (significant research questions, various subtleties, and ambiguities) are reduced to an assumed least common denominator. While this kind of writing has a colloquial charm, it seldom takes advantage of students’ life experiences as one method of defining, exploring, and in some cases solving problems. More directly, the often sophisticated and reflective strategies that adult learners have used to make their professional way are jettisoned as so much dead weight that prevents flight in the new academic arena.
A bridge between current competencies and those required in the academy has to be constructed. And that bridge must be built from matter discovered when one drills down to the core of what makes for effective communication in any arena—the soft-sale of a clever concept on the job, the ever evolving psychology of love that frames relationships with those we care about, and so on. The bridge is built from the same set of assumptions that motivates the construction of the medicine wheel, the tree of life, and the paradigm.
So what are the factors that go into building a bridge from current competencies? And how do those factors impact on critical thinking and critical reading? First I want to lay out my assumptions—those ideas to be used to be build the medicine wheels, trees of life, and paradigms referenced above.