The Future of Thinking : Rhetoric and Liberal Arts Teaching

Adapts rhetorical exercises such as paraphrase and precis to give students a range of strategies for making sense of texts, and encourages the development of practical, critical skills in a wide range of humanities students.

Learning to think is a complex process made up of reading, writing listening, speaking and remembering textual materials. The aim of this topical book is to encourage practical educational reform in the Humanities by taking the emphasis away from the reception of texts to their production. Adapting rhetorical teaching methods, the authors encourage students to participate in the activities of thinking giving them short written and verbal exercises to develop conceptual competences and linguistics skills. It is argued that these methods can be implemented successfully across a wide number of humanities subjects and that they encourage the development of practical transferable skills, both cognitive and linguistic.
The authors have used these methods successfully in class, and the book includes sample exercises, the initial results, and feedback from their students.