In this talk, we will be led through a reflective journey. Among the many facets of GE, which is (are) the essential one(s)? When we say GE is for the well-being of students, what do we mean by well-being?
In this talk, we will argue that critical reading is the basis for critical thinking, critical writing, and scientific reasoning. By critical reading we mean a slow, careful, and analytical approach to texts. We always want our students to think about what a text is trying to achieve and how it goes about doing so. Skill centered education requires that we not only focus on the skills themselves but also on their transfer and applications – while skills transfer, we must not assume that they transfer easily from poetry to journalism, for example. In sum, we propose a return to the roots of education and a radical re-appropriation of critical reading as the foundational skill.
