Kritisk tenkning i arbeid med bærekraftstemaer på barnetrinnet

Teoretiske og empiriske forståelser gjennom et designbasert forskningsprosjekt

Abstract

Critical thinking has a rich history and occupies a central position in debates concerning education. In 2020, critical thinking gained a central position in the Norwegian curriculum (LK20) and it lies as a fundament for teaching and assessment across all subjects and grade levels. Concurrently, sustainable development also gained a central position in LK20, as one of three cross curricular topics. The curriculum revision, coupled with limited research on critical thinking in primary education, prompted the research project called Critical thinking in primary school (KriT) in 2020. KriT is a design-based research project (DBR), that followed 16 teachers and their students at two urban primary schools for one and a half year. Throughout three iterative cycles, teachers and researchers collaborated to develop lessons aimed at enhancing students’ critical thinking. In this qualitative dissertation, I use a selection of the KriT project’s data corpus to address the following research questions: 1. How do primary school teachers develop understandings of critical thinking through participation in a DBR-project? 2. How can critical thinking about sustainability issues be enhanced in primary education? 3. How can various theoretical positions provide insights into teachers’ possibilities to facilitate critical thinking in environmental and sustainability education (ESE)? I answer the questions through the extended abstract and four articles: teacher interviews about critical thinking (article 1 and 3), teachers’ facilitation of critical thinking in whole-class conversations about sustainability issues (article 2) and a theoretical discussion about critical thinking in ESE (article 4). Collectively, the articles provide insights into teachers’ understanding of critical thinking across three phases: teacher interviews at the initiation of the project, their classroom practices across three iterative cycles, and teacher interviews at the conclusion of the project. The theoretical contribution of the dissertation is primarily four conceptualisations of ‘critical thinking’ and their relation to selected positions in ESE. These four conceptualisations are derived from research literature on the subject and are in the dissertation given the following terms: the logic-analytical line, critical pedagogy, criticality, and critical openness. In article 4 and the extended abstract, I further develop and adapt these conceptualisations within the context of ESE at the primary school level. Based on these conceptualisations, I advocate for a model of critical thinking in ESE that examines the conceptualisations in relation to each other and to four positions within critical ESE. The positions included are the pluralistic approach, wild pedagogies, dark pedagogy, and pyropedagogies, because they are pertinent in Nordic educational discussions on ESE. The model also represents a methodological contribution of the dissertation, as it provides a foundation for analysing the results of the empirical articles. The analysis of the empirical articles shows that the understanding of critical thinking among the teachers in the KriT project is predominantly aligned with criticality and the logic-analytical line. That implies that the conceptualisations of critical thinking that are promoted as beneficial within critical ESE do not have a strong anchoring in the teachers’ understanding, which can impact teachers’ and students’ work with critical perspectives regarding sustainability issues. Article 1, an interview study from the beginning of the project, points out that teachers comprehend critical thinking as cognitive skills with an emphasis on dialogic perspectives. The article also indicates that, collectively, teachers understand critical thinking in various ways, although individually, each teacher has a limited comprehension. In the concluding interviews, which form the data corpus in article 3, the teachers claim that they have gained a deeper understanding of how to facilitate critical thinking in the classroom. The analysis demonstrates that the teachers’ understanding became more nuanced towards the end of the project compared to the beginning. In article 2 I investigate teachers’ practice by exploring how various epistemological levels in wholeclass dialogues about sustainability issues support students’ emerging critical thinking. The article provides more examples of students’ emergent critical thinking in the last cycle as opposed to the first two, indicating development. Furthermore, the article underscores that to enhance critical thinking in whole-class conversations, the teacher must employ specific ‘teacher moves’, including the teacher supporting and challenging students by asking them to elaborate and justify their thoughts, combining objective and subjective knowledge in dialogues, creating space for alternative solutions, and developing an exploratory classroom discourse where students’ statements are utilised to examine sustainability issues. Overall, the dissertation underscores the need for teachers to acquire knowledge about various conceptualisations of critical thinking and how these conceptualisations can be used when working with sustainability issues in primary education. At the same time, the dissertation reveals that teachers develop their understandings through the KriT project, which suggests that participation in research projects can enhance teachers’ comprehension and development regarding critical thinking in ESE.