Integrating Writing, Thinking, and Learning: A New Edition of a Faculty Development Treasure

A few years ago a colleague of mine mentioned the help that John Bean’s first edition of Engaging Ideas(1996) had been in her development of writing assignments and in her design of an entire course in which the students seemed particularly active and engaged. The next time I heard of Bean, the director of our writing program was planning a faculty development session to prepare professors from a wide range of disciplines to use writing assignments as an integral part of their teaching repertoire. She had learned of Bean’s book from the first colleague. In our department it was impossible to find a copy of Bean clean enough to reproduce an important chart: even the best was filled with marginal notes, highlighted passages, dog-eared pages, and coffee stains. Fortunately, the library had a clean copy.

This year, we can begin the process of marking a useful book again: the second edition has recently been published, and our faculty will soon use it in a series of five workshops we’ll call “Critical Thinking and Student Learning.” And there’s no need for reproducing pages for discussion; we’ll each have a clean copy of the book. Engaging Ideasdistills the best in pedagogy research, presents it in useful segments, and emphasizes practical improvements to teaching. Bean powerfully challenges the traditional view of writing as primarily a communication skill rather than “a process and product of critical thought” (4). In doing so, he draws examples from many disciplines, giving this book broad appeal in the academy.

Bean has revised his earlier edition carefully. In his preface to the second edition, he explains how the last fifteen years have brought new perspectives and paradigms to the fore, and how this new edition has employed them: an expansion from the process writing movement of the 1980s and 1990s into the more recent rhetorical modes based on novice/expert theory, and expanding from an individual model to embrace an understanding of discourse communities. The development of a more defined culture of assessment in most institutions in the last decade or so has also influenced Bean’s more explicit discussion of measurable student development. Classroom technology has changed as well, and this edition reflects these new realities including online and blended learning. Wisely, Bean has incorporated these ideas in an organic way in the book, instead of devoting a discrete chapter to each. His rigorous revision is evident from a glance at the list of references in this edition: 90 of the 254 items were published since the first edition. So the second edition is not just a repackaged version of the old one—it reflects substantial rethinking by an active educator.

Engaging Ideasis well designed. The first chapter, touted as “a busy professor’s guide to the whole book,” is just that. It overviews all of the sections and frequently mentions certain chapters that a reader could turn to for specific information. Bean explains some of the links between writing, learning, and critical thinking and emphasizes the ways that critical thinking is rooted in solving problems. Consequently, he explains, “presenting students with problems, then, taps into something natural and self-fulfilling in our beings” (3). He also points out the importance of introducing students to the disciplinary context of problems (4). Bean urges us to design a course around critical thinking objectives, where, as Joanne Kurfiss (1988) explains, “students are active, involved, consulting and arguing with each other, and responsible for their own learning” (quoted in Bean, 5). Bean emphasizes writing assignments because “they are the most intensive and flexible way to integrate critical thinking tasks into a course, and because the writing process itself entails complex critical thinking” (5).

Bean suggests that teachers need to design critical thinking tasks for students, to develop a variety of ways to integrate them into a class (as formal writing assignments, as small group tasks, as...