The Influence of Life Stories and Literature on Critical Thinking

Introduction

One of the main assumptions of the life history approach to social research and theory, as described in the Encyclopedia of Sociology, is that the actions of individuals and groups are simultaneously emergent and structured and that individual and group perspectives must be included in the data used for analysis. This approach incorporates several methodological techniques and data typology. These include case studies, interviews, letters, diaries, archival records, oral histories, and diverse types of narratives. Autoethnography and life history research approaches identify significant field variation and precise conceptual distinctions in terms such as life story, biography, discourse, history, oral history, personal experience narratives, or collective narratives (Bochner & Ellis, 2016; Adams, Holman, & Ellis, 2015; Denzin, 1989). Life stories contain accounts of past actions, plans and expectations regarding future activities.

Within this background, the main objective of this chapter is to explore the influence of literary narratives and life stories on English learners’ critical thinking development by examining students’ goal orientation, attitudes, and motivation based on their responses to rhetoric passages with a high sociolinguistic content component. More specifically, as part of a larger project, this study applies a sociocultural pedagogical model to raise L2 learners’ awareness of the relevance of developing critical thinking competence in current societies. This model aims to enable students to analyze reality and gain confidence in expressing their voices. As a dystopian life story, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four novel is used as critical thinking triggering strategy for first-year bilingual education baccalaureate students at a state high school to achieve this goal. Orwell’s literary narrative, published in 1949, is set in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda. The novel thematic perspective is more relevant than ever. For Chase (2015, p. 59), narrative research is a specific type of qualitative research that involves “interdisciplinary analytical approaches, diverse disciplinary perspectives and methods, which are both traditional and innovative and revolving around biographic details exactly as they are told by those who experienced them”. In this sense, part of the present study involved students in a reflective learning process in fostering critical thinking by enquiring to which extent we live in an Orwellian world. As described by the author, a world filled with official deception, secret surveillance, brazenly misleading terminology, and manipulation of recorded history by a totalitarian or authoritarian state. The study’s methodological instruments included a three-dimensional analysis model, pre-and post- questionnaires, specific tasks on judgment and inference, guided interviews, rubrics, and field observations. This chapter reports on the study’s qualitative findings and demonstrates the effect of literature and stories on students’ engagement and awareness of their critical thinking skills.