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This paper reappraises the view of John McPeck that critical thinking can only be taught within rather than across the disciplines. In particular the paper explores one aspect of McPeck's position: his resistance to teaching informal logic as a means of teaching critical thinking. The paper draws upon the author's experience of teaching critical thinking in the USA, Britain and Australia to outline some of the challenges and issues arising in devising and teaching courses in reasoning and informal logic and seeks to show that McPeck's misgivings are not entirely well-founded.

I report a study that investigated ideas about critical thinking across three disciplines: Philosophy, History and Literary Studies. The findings point to a diversity of understandings and practices, ones that suggest the limitations of a more generic approach. I argue that a more useful conception of critical thinking is as a form of 'metacritique' - where the essential quality to be encouraged in students is a flexibility of thought and the ability to negotiate a range of different critical modes.

Many critical pedagogy scholars claim that agency and dialogue in the classroom can only be achieved through students' engagement in verbal deliberation to "voice" against oppressive actions. As current discourses in the critical pedagogy literature tend to consider silence as a negative attribute in the classroom, I argue that they privilege a western construct and a very particular way of being and thinking. By using performative pedagogy as a theoretical framework, it is imperative to discuss the macro and micro implications of how discourses in the critical pedagogy literature affect how we understand silence theoretically and pedagogically.

In recent years public libraries have experimented with user-generated or community-contributed content through the interactive tools of Web 2.0. For some commentators this not just establishes a new relationship between libraries and their publics, but signals the end of information hegemony and an 'expert paradigm'. Such claims need to be treated with caution. This article argues that public library experiments with user-generated content can be more usefully analysed in the context of wider institutional mandates around literacy, civic engagement and access. This article critically examines some recent library developments in this field, with a particular focus on Australian libraries.

"In this article I reflect on introducing critical pedagogy into social justice teaching in an elite UK university as part of the Nottingham Critical Pedagogy Project. I de-essentialise Freire's conceptualisation of the human subject and her desire for transcendence with the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari's politics of desire. This enables an adaption of critical pedagogy from its original context of popular politics to the individualised elite setting of our project. Our pedagogical objectives become the opening of spaces of possibility which decentre the dominant regime of truth of the neoliberal university and enable imagining and becoming "other". This involves disrupting normal patterns of classroom performativity in terms of student as consumer and lecturer as producer of commodities, transgressing dualisms between mind/body, intellectual/emotional and teacher/student. Our pedagogical praxis is therefore inherently political as by radically disturbing commodified subjectivities we foster processes that lead to unanticipated, maybe even unspeakable, transgressions."

The author of the curriculum paper, literacy professor Peter Freebody, agreed the use of critical literacy in school English classes had gone too far in students asked to perform nonsensical exercises of conducting Marxist, feminist and racist readings of

Traditionally, educational researchers and practitioners have focused on the development of youths' critical understanding of new media as one key aspect of digital literacy ( Buckingham, 2003; Gilster, 1997). Today, youth not only consume media when browsing the Internet and sharing information on social networking sites, but they also produce content when contributing to blogs, designing animations, graphics, and video productions ( Ito et al., 2009).

This article examines a teacher educator's implementation of a pedagogy of multiliteracies in an adolescent literacy course. The purpose was to foster pre-service teachers' knowledge and dispositions to enact multiliteracies pedagogy. This article synthesizes the theories of multiliteracies pedagogy and Third Space to explore the opportunities and challenges presented by key learning experiences for pre-service teachers' development of knowledge about and dispositions towards multiliteracies pedagogy. This article argues that emphasizing the Situated Practice and Critical Framing components of multiliteracies pedagogy can promote pre-service teachers' productive negotiations of the conflicts they experience in developing dispositions towards multiliteracies pedagogy.

Critical thinking (CT) skills are generally considered to be vital to success at university, but Asian students are sometimes perceived as lacking these skills. This research explores the effect that thinking in a second language has on CT performance. To assess this, two groups of students were tested on a split-test version of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal ® Short Form A in both English and Chinese, one group taking the English half of the test first and the second group taking the Chinese half first. Three participants were also interviewed about the test-taking experience. The findings indicate CT performance is more difficult in an L2: participants who took the English test first performed significantly better when they took the Chinese test second, the group who took the Chinese test first performed significantly better than the group who took the English test first and interviewees reported experiencing the English test as more difficult.

Many UK universities offer degree programmes in English Language specifically for non-native speakers of English. Such programmes typically include not only language development but also development in various areas of content knowledge. A challenge that arises is to design courses in different areas that mutually support each other, thus providing students with a coherent degree programme. In this article, I will discuss a Bachelor of Arts programme involving Cultural Studies and Translation, as well as English Language and Linguistics. I will offer a rationale for a course in critical text analysis, which is offered in the final year of the programme. It is intended to promote language development and cultural awareness as well as skills of linguistic analysis and critical thinking.

Media literacy, critical thinking, and media production are powerful tools for youth to combat racism. Whether we have the chance to address it in the classroom, after school program or community, we have a responsibility as educators and citizens to work

The modern city is torn by conflicts and contradictions, marked by serious environmental problems (pollution, waste, traffic, etc.), and by large areas of human and urban blight, because its profound changes and the inhabitants of cities meet in a very fractured and parcelled out relationship; the contacts may take place face to face, but nevertheless are impersonal, superficial, and transitory. The critical approach to environmental education and sustainability is to target the inequalities, the wasting of resources, and the arrogance of human domination over nature, but its contribution to appropriate urban development is nevertheless still weak. It is therefore necessary to develop the research on the educational approach to the urban environment. Critical thinking, participation, the ability to imagine future scenarios, and a shared and free access to knowledge are essential elements of the necessary social change toward sustainability.

But, just as academics have, for years, sought to critically interrogate texts as part of the classroom, working with students to deconstruct and decode articles, poems, plays, novels, non-fiction books, films, games, and more, we would argue that technology also has become a text, one which plays a central role in our lives and that of our students. What is the relationship between a critically engaged activism, pedagogy, and technology? What does radical teaching with technology look like? How do we, as radical teachers, ensure that we and our students are shaping the content and meaning of technology rather than just being shaped by it? Teaching today, from K-12 through graduate school, is ubiquitously tied to digital technology, and the call to make it more so grows. Institutional resources are increasingly directed toward classroom digital initiatives. The "digital divide" discourse, abandoned for a while

The popularity of visual literacy may have resulted, in part, from some school authorities rushing the process of determining school curriculum. This article argues that the haste is reflective of pressure placed on educational discourse to conform to neo-liberal reforms of the sector, and is not the result of a careful and complex debate within the education community. In Australia, such reform has contributed to the erosion of visual art as a discrete subject in the general curriculum. The article accounts for the fact that the lack of careful debate may be due to art educators rehearsing tired arguments for retaining the place occupied by visual art, which smack of sentimentality. The author examines the conceptualisation of visual art at a cultural and theoretical level, and argues that by considering the function art has traditionally played in relation to conceptions of human subjectivity, we may disclose the marginalisation of visual art as a signal of much larger threats to political and economic structures in democratic society. The article considers whether the absorption of 'art' within a broader preference for visual communication, graphic design, or design and technology, is symptomatic of a long-term cultural stagnation.

This reflection, using auto-ethnography as method, explores the value of attunement to feedback in the teaching of a professional postgraduate course for allied mental health professionals. This is, therefore, a story of two halves: a narrative of my learning based on my reflections of my own teaching, and a story of how I have integrated feedback from students and their clinical supervisors to refine my teaching and course development in the programme. The resulting model of teaching and learning I have developed involves a process of 'creative attunement'. 'Attunement' is a psychodynamic concept involving 'contact' or a quality of relationship based on availability, presence, empathy, respect and selective disclosure. The learning activities of the programme aim to develop an awareness of the students' own 'craft knowledge' as graduate social workers and occupational therapists during their intern year in the health services. Through a process of growing the students' awareness of self in the clinician's role by attuning to students' feedback, learning from undergraduate education becomes more available to be applied in a new field of practice. Designing learning activities that incorporate stories of practice and align with clinical supervisors and service user narratives provides access to a variety of learning experiences. I explore the implications for developing critical-reflective practice within a 'community of learners' model.

This article aims to examine the discursive structure of 'soft power' in China, its cultural, historical and political backgrounds and the role the mass media play in mediating its meanings. Conceptualised within critical discourse analysis, this study assesses soft power discourse as a form of articulating traditional values on the part of China's political and intellectual elites, as well as views about China's future directions. Specifically, it focuses on three levels of analysis: 1) a description of the language of 'soft power'; 2) an interpretation of soft power as an institutional practice; and 3) an explanation of the broad socio-political dynamics that shape the discourse of soft power. The article concludes with an initial evaluation of the significance and implications of the soft power discourse.

"The paper positions education and learning in the context of Gilles Deleuze's ethico-political philosophy oriented to becoming-other amidst experiences and events. Deleuze's unorthodox affective epistemology is inseparable from ethics in terms of real-life consequences at the level of practice. The paper presents the critical and clinical analysis of experiential events as texts comprising a mode of the informal pedagogy in terms of creating new concepts, meanings, and values for experience. The logic of sense foregrounds ethical evaluations of experience with regard to multiple directions we might take in novel situations, which disrupt common sense with problems that do not yet yield answers as univocal and unidirectional solutions. The paper conceptualizes a model of the new ethics of integration as a follow-up to the ethics of care in education informed by the relational self-other dynamics and moral interdependence."

"In assessing the various forms of welfare capitalism, normative political philosophy typically draws on two major philosophical traditions - republicanism and liberalism, invoking either equality and the public good or, alternatively, individual autonomy as normative criteria for evaluation. Drawing, instead, on Critical Theory as a tradition of social philosophy, I advance a proposal for assessment of the types of welfare capitalism conducted as 'immanent critique' of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Normative criteria thus emerge within a diachronic dimension of social transformation, which in turn grounds the comparison among synchronic types of capitalism. This ultimately enables a research agenda for the operationalisation of a normative analysis of capitalism within which social justice is gauged by the degree of voluntary employment flexibility - a key factor in the distribution of life-chances in the early twenty-first century."

After critically reviewing the apparent 'turn' from welfare states to pedagogic states, I focus on forms of pedagogy evident in notions of citizen empowerment. Issues raised through documentary analysis of key UK policy texts are examined through frameworks offered by Aradhana Sharma's work on women's empowerment in India in order to widen the analytical lens, opening up issues and questions that might be helpful in analysing new configurations of governance in the UK. These include the problem of multiplicity in the identification of strategies and technologies; the idea of pedagogy as a gendered domain, both in terms of the subjects targeted and in those involved in pedagogical work; and the problem of conceptualising 'the state' in formulations such as the 'pedagogical state'. Although questioning the idea of a 'pedgagogic turn', I conclude by addressing the forms of politics and political subjects called forth by pedagogic projects. The paper was written before the 2010 election but the analysis has much to offer to the politics of Cameron's Big Society.

This sequential QUAL → qual study examines: Phase 1 how reflective practice was implemented in a diversity course in a teacher education program by one teacher educator, and Phase 2 how two of the teacher candidates implemented reflective practice in their diverse student teaching contexts. Data included observations of the course and the student teaching of two teacher candidates (TCs), interviews of the course instructor, three TCs, and two high school students, as well as analyses of key course assignments. This study concludes: (1) cultivation of a reflective practice in TCs is critical to the teacher preparation process; (2) support for TCs in this process is strengthened when led by an instructor who also engages in reflective practice; and (3) teacher reflection on diversity, assumptions and inequity, with opportunities to transfer these course reflections to their teaching practices is central to preparing teachers to teach diverse student populations.