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Academia Inc.

Academia Inc.

How Corporatization Is Transforming Canadian Universities
by Jamie Brownlee
edition:eBook
tagged : higher, aims & objectives
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Critical Condition

Critical Condition

Replacing Critical Thinking with Creativity
by Patrick Finn
edition:eBook
also available: Audiobook Paperback
tagged : experimental methods, aims & objectives
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Excerpt

Excerpt from Critical Condition: Replacing Critical Thinking with Creativity by Patrick Finn

From the Preface

An Invitation

This short book is an invitation to participate in a thought experiment. I ask you to join me in considering what would happen if we replaced critical thinking with creative practice at the heart of learning. In pursuing this experiment, we will examine some of the history of critical thinking and look at examples of how critical and creative work might operate in the university.

Given that universities are where we train teachers, doctors, lawyers, dancers, politicians, and so many others who influence the way our world works, it seems to me that how we do our work matters a great deal. For generations, our accepted practice has been to have every course in the university operate in a mode that foregrounds critical thinking. What would happen if we changed that?

We promise students who arrive on campus that we will turn them into critical thinkers and then go to great lengths to explain that this is a good thing. But is it? Is it good for us? Is it good for everyone? Perhaps it is, but it has been a long time since anyone asked whether critical thinking is helping us. (Actually, it may be that no one has ever asked. ) What if it is not? What if it is time we put another way of working at the heart of what we do? And what if that mode is more creative than critical? Why don't we think about this for the next few pages and then have a discussion?

From Chapter 4: We Can't Go On Together (with Suspicious Minds)

Diamonds are funny things. Everyone agrees that they are beautiful to look at. They even have some industrial uses in drill bits and saw blades. But they are not actually very valuable, because they just are not that rare. Those in charge of the world's production, refining, and sale of diamonds have found ways to artificially inflate their value—ways that have succeeded so well that the imposed value of diamonds is high enough that every year, many people lose their lives mining and selling them.

Critical thinking is a bit like the diamond trade. No one doubts that it is brilliant on the surface and that it is very good at cutting into things, but we have falsely inflated its value in order to maintain cultural capital in our educational institutions. In a similar fashion, when you question either the diamond trade or the retail market for critical thinkers you are in for some heated discussions. The problem with cleaning up the diamond trade is that we are deeply attached to the illusion. We have marked those stones as somehow related to our highest expressions of love and have spent billions on them, so no one wants to admit they are only worth a fraction of what we say they are. Perhaps it is the same with critical thinking. It seems to be getting tougher to sell university education these days, and we think that if we give up the notion that we are in possession of advanced mental tactics that can be taught for a price, then maybe we will lose value in the marketplace of ideas.

The emotions that drive the diamond market are not necessarily bad, and the public seems comfortable with the ongoing narrative about the diamond trade, but we should have alli the information before we make up our minds. In the area of critical thinking, people have more options. The growing interest in creative thinking can be seen in every corner of the academy. This interest extends across geographic boundaries and is now as hot a topic in India and China as it is in Canada and the United States.

The market for critical thinking is collapsing, with departments that traditionally linked themselves to its instruction losing numbers while other parts of the university grow. The fastest-growing areas all have programs that connect to words like innovation, entrepreneurship, invention, and creativity. This is quite exciting for those of us who are interested in the world of creative thought; however, it is important that those in the disciplines whose focus is linked directly to creative work be part of the discussion.

Around the world, people continue to ask for diamonds. More and more of them are being mined, and every major city has dozens of retailers offering them. The same cannot be said for critical thinking: no one is asking for more of it. No business is saying, “What we need is more criticism—let's look at this issue critically. ” No government office is saying, “What we need is a more critical approach—who do we have that is a critical thinker?” We do not look to our politicians, our educators, or any of the industries that serve us and ask for more critical people. In fact, it turns out that we would like significantly less of it.

When we look behind the scenes, we find that today the world of critical thinking is a bursting bubble. There will always be value in it, but it currently holds an artificially high value that needs to be adjusted down. Meanwhile, creative thinking is enjoying increasing demand and is poised to replace its more linear cousin as the mode of thought of greatest benefit to most of us. To engage most fully with our talents as individuals and as citizens of a global community, we need to engage with open, contributory modes of thinking and working. I call this loving thinking, and it involves working from a position that begins in hope rather than in suspicion.

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Critical Perspectives in Canadian Music Education

Critical Perspectives in Canadian Music Education

edited by Carol A. Beynon & Kari K. Veblen
edition:eBook
also available: Paperback
tagged : aims & objectives, arts & humanities
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Excerpt

Excerpt from Critical Perspectives in Canadian Music Education edited by Carol A. Beynon and Kari K. Veblen

From the Foreword: Questioning Traditional Teaching and Learning in Canadian Music by R. Murray Schafer

I have no idea how the world should be educated. Each culture has its own targets for citizenship and develops a curriculum to meet those objectives. Those who disagree with the objectives will have a rough time in school. I spent years in school trying to get out. It seemed to me that so much of education was devoted to answering questions that no one had asked while the real questions slid by unanswered. Plato taught that there was an answer to every question. Socrates taught that there was a question to every answer, but that was something my teachers didn't seem to want to deal with. For that reason I never completed my education, but instead set out to travel the world and educate myself. Unfortunately, as Ivan Illich pointed out, the effect of universal education is to make the autodidact unemployable.

It was only after many years of travelling—first as a sailor, then as a journalist, a broadcaster, and a composer—that I began to question seriously why my life at school had been so futile. The failure of the music program concerned me in particular because I had musical talent—I played the piano and sang in a choir—and had eventually adopted music as my vocation.

When the Canadian Music Centre initiated the John Adaskin Music Program, in which composers were invited to visit schools to work with children and young people, I was one of the first to apply. After visiting several schools, I could see clearly what was missing: creativity. In art classes original paintings were produced and in literature original stories and poems were written; but the music scene was dominated by the concert band or the jazz band playing classical arrangements of music that wasn't even written in Canada, let alone within the school itself.

During this period (the 1960s), a wave of international activity was aimed at encouraging creativity in music education. The Manhattanville Music Project was active in the United States, and in England composers like John Paynter, George Self, and Peter Maxwell Davies had penetrated classrooms and were writing music both for and with young musicians. I shared their ideas and wrote a series of little books about my own experiences. The books were descriptive, not prescriptive. You can't tell people how to become creative, but you can reveal the excitement of creative activity and hope that it may encourage them to try something on their own. Allowing children to become creative does not require genius: it requires humility.

Above my desk I wrote some maxims to heel myself in line:

1. The first practical step in any educational reform is to take it.

2. In education, failures are more important than successes. There is nothing so dismal as a success story.

3. Teach on the verge of peril.

4. There are no more teachers. There is just a community of learners.

5. Do not design a philosophy of education for others. Design one for yourself. A few others may wish to share it with

you.

6. For the five-year-old, art is life and life is art. For the six-year-old, life is life and art is art. This first year in school is

a watershed in the child's history: a trauma.

7. The old approach: Teacher has information; student has empty head. Teacher's objective: To push information into

student’s empty head. Observations: At outset teacher is a fathead; at conclusion student is a fathead.

8. A class should be an hour of a thousand discoveries. For this to happen, the teacher and the student should first

discover one another.

9. Why is it that the only people who never matriculate from their own courses are teachers?

10. Always teach provisionally: Only God knows for sure.

When I began to think about these matters in the 1970s, it seemed that a revolution was just around the corner; however, it didn't happen. Instead music education programs in Canada and the United States pioneered backward. My own work in music education moved into other countries and cultures, namely South America and Japan. In South America there was no money for music so teachers had to use their imaginations. “Tomorrow, I want each of you to bring an interesting sound to class, ” I would say, and the next day a whole flood of sound and noise-makers would fill the room. This became our orchestra, and we produced free improvisations, rondos, and fugues with what we had just as easily as with violins and clarinets—better, probably, because we were unconcerned about the safety of expensive instruments.

In Japan the word for music is ongaku, and it means simply “beautiful sounds. ” Everything—from the singing of birds, the splashing of water, the chirping of crickets, and conventional music—can be ongaku, and this opens the soundscape and gives our ears a completely new field to investigate.

Sometimes I think that music programs in Canada are crippled by affluence. How many times have I entered a classroom to have the proud teacher point out all the rooms' possessions: the instruments lined up against the wall, the loudspeakers, the amplifiers, and the CD players. But the problem with flutes, trumpets, and violins is that all you can do is to learn to play them, and that takes years. As a result, a very expensive music education program has been erected in the form of a triangle: the children are enrolled in the program at the base and the apex is the professional performer (or the teacher) or, in a very few cases, the genius who will make the school famous.

“Show Uncle Murray your flute, ” my brother's wife said to her daughter, just entering high school. She brought it out and took it out of the box.

“Can you play it?” I asked.

“Not yet. ” And she left the music program a year later.

Too many parents and students have been fooled into believing that if it looks expensive, the music program must be good. And those who don't learn to master those expensive tools will slip down to the category of consumers who simply help the recording industries get richer. That, I think, is the problem music education faces in Canada today.

Can we learn to do more with less? I think so, and there are many people in various countries who are demonstrating how this might be accomplished. The examinations of new approaches to music education in this very book illustrate this potential for change.

In one of my pieces for young players (Minimusic), I included the line: “MUSIC IS NOT TO BE LISTENED TO. MUSIC IS LISTENING TO US. ” That is, the perfect world is listening to the imperfect world and is inviting us to go further, delve deeper, and reach higher in creating the music of the future.

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Humanities in the Present Day

Humanities in the Present Day

edited by John Woods & Harold Coward
edition:eBook
also available: Paperback
tagged : philosophy & social aspects, aims & objectives, arts & humanities
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