The power of critical thinking in learning and teaching. An interview with Professor Stephen D. Brookfield
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss continuities and watersheds of Professor Stephen Brookfield’s world-renowned and massive contributions to Higher Education and Adult Education. While Brookfield’s work demonstrates a remarkable continuity in terms of multi-angled perspectives on critical thinking and democratisation, there are also some notable changes through the years, such as a turn to self-directed learning (in the 1980s), a focus on power dynamics (in the 1990s), a theoretical turn (heavily influenced by Critical Theory, at the turn of the century) and a turn towards the importance of race relations (in the noughties). The extensive interview includes discussions of Brookfield’s four lenses (students’ eyes, colleagues’ perceptions, theory and personal experience); the power of failure; credibility and authenticity as key criteria of being a good teacher; the inevitable omnipresence of power and an open, pragmatic approach to learning and teaching methods; the importance of feedback and assessment’s key role as learning; use and abuse of technology in the classroom; MOOCs not being a disruptive innovation; Higher Education’s potential as an agent of liberation and prevailing counter-forces; how educational institutions can encourage skillful and critically-reflected teaching; and the connection between art and pedagogy. Since beginning his teaching career in 1970, Stephen Brookfield has worked in England, Canada, Australia, and the U.S., teaching in a variety of adult, community, organisational and higher education settings (the latter include Harvard University and Columbia University). In his endeavour to help adults learn to think critically about the dominant ideologies they have internalised, Professor Brookfield has written, co-written or edited 19 books on adult learning, teaching, critical thinking, discussion methods, critical theory and teaching race.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it