Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines

Starting from a Vygotskian analysis of imagination as “image formation,” this paper explores some emergent qualities of the phenomenon of imagination in the play activities of young children. In the context of the early grades of Dutch primary schools (4-7-year old children) different activities of children were studied while they were making symbolic representations of real or imaginary situations. Observations in two activity settings show that the children got engaged in two types of imagination: an ‘etc-act of imagination’ and a ‘production of alternatives.’ It wIll be argued that these types of imagination are basic modes of thinking that relate to respectively abstract thinking and to creative thinking.

The construction of creative identity from a Vygotskian perspective is explored in this paper. A theoretical link is made between Vygotsky’s (Smolucha, 1992) claims about the development of creativity and Penuet and Wertsch’s (1995) use of Vygotskian theory to address identity formation. Narrative is suggested as the link between culturally organized activities, mediated mental functioning, and the storied self. Data from semi-structured interviews about creativity conducted with a second grade child and his parents illustrate how discourses from home and school come together during the development of imagination and are used to construct identity.

Vygotsky (1997) coined the term speech-drawing to describe what he saw as the most significant moment in intellectual development, the moment when two psychological tools intersect each other. This paper resurrects the utilization of speech-drawing as a methodological tool to investigate children’s thinking. Specifically, this paper will examine children’s drawings of make-believe houses and the private speech, or spontaneous self-directed speech, children produccd while drawing. These instances of speech-drawing will be utilized to illuminate critical and creative thinking from a Vygotskian perspective. The future use of speech-drawing, as a promising methodological tool to study children’s thought processes, will also be presented and discussed.

In this paper I argue that creative and critical thinking operate in tandem in the mind as a purposeful dialectic of generative and evaluative dimensions of sense-making. The complementariness of these two forms of thought are dramatized through a case study in an innovative literature-history class, by tracing thc development of critical and creative thinking in one students process of authoring. In the class the teachers mediated students’ thinking by engaging them in open-forum conversation about varied cultural-historical perspectives and then providing strategies for both generating interpretations and questioning/critiquing them. As multiple conflicting perspectives from literature and history interplayed in the class, the student was prompted to construct a point of view by considering opposing lines of thought in a dialogue of creative and critical thinking. He appropriated these new tools, internalizing strategies for and a disposition toward creative and critical thinking to make sense of complex texts and social issues. Vygotsky’s notions of problem-solving, play, mediation, ZPD, and internalization are used to explain how student thinking developed in this context.