Bringing Creative, Critical and Compassionate Thinking into ELT

Uwe Pohl and Margit Szesztay, Hungary

Margit Szesztay is a Hungarian teacher and teacher trainer. At present she is the coordinator of IATEFL's Global Issues SIG. http://gisig.iatefl.org. Her main areas of professional interest include the teacher as facilitator and the creative potential of groups. E-mail: margit.szesztay@gmail.com

Uwe Pohl is German-born teacher educator based at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Currently, he is particularly interested in mentoring, trainer training and intercultural learning. E-mail: uwe.pohl@gmail.com

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A personal introduction
Why compassion?
Critical and creative modes of thinking from the viewpoint of compassion
Seeing the wood and the trees
Putting the three Cs into practice
The moment is now: new challenges and opportunities
References

A personal introduction

We have both felt for a long time that ELT is not just about teaching the language well and that there is scope for wider, educational aims. In fact, looking back on our personal histories we can trace how the values underlying our professional practice evolved, and understand why it is that the educational dimension in our work as teachers and trainers has become so important to us.

As a Hungarian child growing up in the US initially with no English, Margit often found herself taking up the role of the observer. The experience of feeling like an outsider with limited language, has given her a heightened sense of empathy with those in similar situations; e.g. her future students. Years later, she wrote her MEd dissertation on empathy and is still intrigued by the way empathetic listening can deepen conversations in and outside of the classroom. One of her aims as a teacher and trainer has been to help create a culture of empathetic listening in the groups she is working with.

Uwe is a German national who has been living in Hungary teaching English for many years. This ‘in-between cultures’ experience and his practical work in the field of cross-cultural communication has led him to believe that empathetic understanding holds the key to dealing positively with the many challenges of intercultural encounters. It is when we make a conscious effort to transcend our culture-bound perceptions and interpretations and reach out to the human being in cultural others that prejudices, misunderstandings or conflicts can dissolve.

Why compassion?

Recently there has been a shift in our thinking about empathy. We now feel that compassion is a better term, it captures in a more accurate way the quality we would like to bring more fully into our personal lives, and into our work as teachers and trainers. As the quote below illustrates, compassion builds on empathy, but is a wider, more action-oriented concept:

“Compassion starts with empathy — imagining putting ourselves in the mind of another person, and imagining what they’re going through. We are probably wrong about what they’re going through, because we can’t know, but without this imaginative process we can’t have compassion. Once we’ve empathized, and feel their suffering, the second half of compassion is wanting to end that suffering, and taking action to ease that suffering in some way.” (Babauta 2013)

We believe that the compassionate thinking needed today is closely linked to recognizing the interconnected nature of our lives. As often noted these days, through globalization our world has become a village – our decisions and actions have an impact on the lives of others thousands of miles away from us. In this sense, each one of us is connected to the rest of humanity, and also connected to the natural world around us. So “to mobilize the emotions and the caring instincts of people” (Beeley-Colwell-Stevens 2006, p. 23) means encouraging them to act in socially responsible ways. Realizing that what I eat, what I wear, where I shop has a systemic effect, and with our everyday decisions we can make a difference and help build a better world. We think that education has a role to play in awakening our common sense of humanity, and in making us see that we can all be active agents of change.

Critical and creative modes of thinking from the viewpoint of compassion

Critical and creative thinking are often associated with our uniqueness as individuals. Compassionate thinking, on the other hand, highlights our communal side. In order to become educators in the sense outlined above, we believe that compassionate thinking needs to complement critical and creative mental modes and, from a compassionate standpoint, both critical and creative thinking look a little different.

Being critical

Critical thinking is often seen as an antidote to being misled, misinformed and manipulated. Its essence has to do with having a questioning attitude, not taking anything for granted (Brookfield 2011). For example, not accepting claims made by an article without sufficient evidence, being able to differentiate between fact and opinion, and being alert to typical mind-traps such as over-generalization or jumping to conclusions (Roy van den Brink-Budgen 2000).

In our view, though, critical thinking also means stepping back from the daily routines of our lives and asking some ‘big’ questions. As Einstein reminds us: “Common sense is a collection of prejudices acquired by age 18”. We would add it takes conscious effort on our part to become aware of our own, in-built prejudices. What we take to be normal is not necessarily fair or good, it is just what we have come to take for granted. So we feel that we need to be critical not just with what we read, hear, and see around us, but also with our internalized ways of thinking, communicating, and behaving. We need to re-examine our values in the light of our everyday lives. And if there is a mismatch, do something about it.

To us critical thinking also means that thinking is critical in the sense of important. Quoting Einstein once again, “Today’s problems cannot be solved with the mindset that created them”. We need a change of mindsets, a change in the ways we think because thinking matters. We need to become less ego-centric and engage with what’s happening in the world around us. Through empathetic listening we can begin to understand the world from multiple perspectives, and, in turn, begin to act on this understanding.

Being creative

The articles in this special edition of HLT highlight various aspects of creativity and argue for bringing it more fully into ELT. We also see encouraging creativity as an essential part of our work as educators. We consider it especially important to explore group creativity: For us as language teachers this means exploring ways in which groups of people can think and talk together and arrive at new insight. As Ken Robinson points out in his popular TED talk “Schools Kill Creativity”, what often stands in the way of creative modes of thinking is the fear of making mistakes. An education system that focuses on memorizing facts-and-figures and only rewards coming up with the correct answers, does not encourage creativity.

We feel, therefore, that we need to create space and provide opportunities for the free movement of ideas in our classrooms and training rooms. To liberate our students from being constantly checked and corrected, to encourage them to find the courage to express their ideas, and to set a model for listening empathically to every view and opinion expressed in the group. In contrast to individual creativity, group creativity lies in coming up with original ideas together, ideas which reflect multiple perspectives and draw on the multiple talents of the group. Woodward's (2011:113-115) notion of 'exploratory talk' is a good example of how students can be encouraged to be creative together by sharing, respecting and questioning everybody's ideas in the language classroom.

Seeing the wood and the trees

For clarity’s sake, it makes sense to consider critical, creative and compassionate thinking separately. Here is a summary of what we see as key features of the three types of thinking:

As this breakdown shows, there is some overlap among the three categories and some of the items relate to feelings, rather than thinking. In fact, compassionate thinking itself is borne out of emotions, and could also be considered as a basic value, attitude, or awareness. In any case, our aim is not to create ‘water-tight’ terms but to arrive at a categorization that guides us in our pedagogical practice because it makes us see different aspects of our experiencing more clearly. It is also worth remembering that, in reality, people ‘perfink’, i.e. perceive, feel and think at once (Bruner 1968:69) and that, ideally, we would like students to combine different types of thinking as they engage with the world around them.

With this in mind, we suggest using this breakdown as a checklist to aid reflection on the educational aspect of our work in ELT. We also find the following questions helpful in relating the three thinking modes to our classrooms:

• Do the materials and activities I’m currently using lead to compassionate, creative, and critical thinking?
• Does my teaching style and the way I relate to my students encourage the 3 Cs?
• What resources are available for bringing the 3 Cs more fully into my teaching?

Putting the three Cs into practice

We would now like to illustrate how video materials can be used to bring compassionate, creative and critical thinking into the ELT classroom. Of course, any kind of written, visual or listening material whose content or format serves to trigger critical, creative and or compassionate thinking can be of value. But, in our experience, video clips are a particularly promising resource for engaging today’s students and one that is still under-exploited in this regard.

E-lesson Inspirations http://gisig.iatefl.org/elesson-inspirations is a set of video-based resources for teachers who want to strengthen the educational dimension of their teaching. Each unit consists of a link to a short video clip in English which raises a real-world issue and some ideas for what to do before and after watching the clip. The activity suggestions serve as building blocks around which teachers can plan lessons suitable for their own contexts and particular group of learners. The clips were chosen and the classroom activities compiled with the 3 Cs in mind. In this way, all the units have potential for fostering thinking skills. ‘Mystery (wo)man, for example, is the title of a unit for upper-intermediate to advanced learners. Narrator and

protagonist Kyle Thiermann is a surfer who cares about social and environmental issues and finds a way to do something about them. His story of encouraging his fellow surfers to move their money from Bank of America into local banks stands as an example of the way our individual everyday actions can make a difference to what goes on in the world. Before you read on, take a look at the clip and the activities designed around it by following the link to the website of IATEFL’s Global Issues Special Interest Group:
http://gisig.iatefl.org/elessons/mystery-woman

The content as well as the person behind the message prepare the ground for compassionate thinking. When working with teenagers and young adults, the power of the clip lies in the fact that Kyle is someone most of them can relate to: a young guy who likes adventure and having fun. In addition, several of the pre- and post-viewing activities encourage creative and critical thinking. For example, the opening task ‘Who is s/he?’ asks learners to read a short blog post and to imagine who this person might be before they watch. Another pre-viewing task, ‘Reflect & Share’, encourages learners to examine their own assumptions about being an ‘activist’ and then listen to different viewpoints in the group.

The moment is now: new challenges and opportunities

We live in challenging times. As Alan Maley notes, “the combined pressures of Consumerism, Globalization, Media saturation, Trivialization and Speed put us at great risk. Our lives are lived at an increasingly accelerated pace, leaving less and less time for mature reflection and the exercise of independent choice” (Maley 2005). At the same time, the problems facing us on a global scale – population growth, diminishing resources, environmental degradation, climate change – would require the kind of mature, holistic reflection we seem to have less and less time for.

So let’s take some time in our classrooms to foster thinking skills of the kind we are suggesting. With English being the lingua franca, there are now around a billion speakers of English worldwide, and an estimated 750 million of them speak it as a foreign language. (https://exploredia.com/how-many-people-in-the-world-speak-english-2013/) The demand for teachers of English is high, and our numbers are growing. In the video, Kyle says surfing has become a multi-billion industry, and there are now so many surfers that they can have a big impact on the world around them. Well, what about the ELT profession? We believe that our numbers are big enough that we, too, - teachers and students - can have a big impact on the world around us. The time is now to become critical, creative as well as compassionate in our thinking, to be what Krznaric (2012:4) called outrospective, "discovering who you are and what to do with your life by stepping outside yourself".

References

Babauta, L. (2013). Developing Selfless Compassion. Retrieved December, 2014, from http://zenhabits.net/selfless/

Beeley, F. M. Colwell and J. Stevens (2006). Planet Earth: the future. Woodlands Books Limited.

Brookfield, S. (2011). Teaching for Critical Thinking: Helping Students Question Their Assumptions. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

Dass, R. and M. Bush (1992). Compassion in action: setting out on the path of service. New York: Crown.

De Bono, E. (1992). Serious creativity: using the power of lateral thinking to create new ideas. HarperBusiness.

Krznaric, R. (2012). The Power of Outrospection. Transcript of talk at RSA Animate. London, 3 December. www.wearecognitive.com/videos/the-power-of-outrospection

Maley, A. (2005). MacDonald Duck Revisited: Implications for Culture, Society and Education. IATEFL Global Issues SIG Newsletter No. 17.

Van den Brink-Budgen, R. (2000). Critical Thinking for Students. Oxford: How To Books.

Woodward, T. (2011). Thinking in the EFL class. Activities for blending language learning and thinking. Helbling Languages.

Please check the How the Motivate your Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.