Chapter 3: Critical Thinking and Community Engagement
Critical thinking is an important practice when conducting community-engaged work. This entails both critical analysis and critical reflection and draws on a student’s skills in observation, analysis, logical inference as well as problem-solving and communication. We briefly touch upon critical analysis and critical reflection below.
Critical Analysis
Critical analysis is a process of engaging with new information that includes:
- Understanding a situation from multiple perspectives and viewpoints, and staying open and curious about multiple meanings and ways of knowing about this situation
- Understanding the context of the situation. Who is articulating this perspective? What is their position in relation to this issue? What is the history of this issue?
- Identifying the strengths of a perspective/argument but also seeing the gaps in knowledge or analysis
- Continually asking questions about the content. Why is it positioned this way? What are the implications of this positioning? What are other ways of thinking about this? How do I relate to this information? Why do I relate that way?
Critical Self-Reflection
Critical self-reflection takes the analysis described above and turns it inward. Self-reflection is a practice that asks us to understand ourselves in relation to a given issue or a community topic. It is about knowing how our identities, histories and sets of experiences influence our connection to the issue and identifying the gaps in our knowledge and understanding.
There are a number of tools for engaging in self-reflection, including:
- Journaling: Capturing your reactions and your analysis of those reactions through writing or audio/video recording yourself;
- Mind-mapping: Identifying a central question or concern and identifying all of the considerations, thoughts and feeling associated with it;
- Debriefing: Discussing your reactions and analysis of those reactions in a pair or small group of people;
- Creative engagement: Using an artform to explore your reactions and analysis of your reactions, things like visual or performing arts; and,
- Reflections: Structured or unstructured writing on your experiences.
Module 1 Exercise 4: Reflecting on Your Feelings About Community-Engaged Learning
Using the text fields below, please type in your responses to the following questions:
- What excites you most about the prospect of community-engaged learning?
- What reservations do you have about working with community partners?
When you are finished, click on the icon in the top left corner of this activity (i.e., the icon with three horizontal lines) and select “Download My Answers” to submit and download a copy of your responses.
