Showcase of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors (SOURCE)

Critical Thinking Instruction for the Desegregated Classroom

Despite the progress initiated by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and subsequent desegregation of schools over the following two decades, trends in the US have reversed course and recent data indicates that school systems are moving towards resegregation. In this essay, I propose a pedagogical approach, implementable at the classroom level, to symbiotically promote and maintain desegregation. This approach is a combination of the recently popularized Culturally-Responsive Education (a pedagogy that sees students’ at-home cultures as an avenue, instead of a barrier, to their learning) and the long tradition of Critical Thinking in Education (a pedagogy that emphasizes reason, metacognition, and intellectual humility). The purpose is providing an argument for and guide to “Critical Thinking Instruction for the Desegregated Classroom”. This approach also avoids some of the strident political controversy that inhibits students from fully experiencing the value of the desegregated classroom by offering an objective and self-aware framework for students to interact with the diverse perspectives around them. In addition, Critical Thinking Instruction promotes the maintenance of desegregation at the district level by developing future parents, school board members, and community leaders who will one day value the benefits of a desegregated classroom for their own children. In summary, by focusing on implementable classroom practices that explicitly instruct students how to think and not what to think, educators can reinforce traits of intellectual humility and metacognition, ultimately providing students the tools to break cycles of inequity and demographic isolation in our communities.