Reflecting back to an early teacher-training experience back in 1989, I recall being excited at first encountering this new word, and being encouraged to explore the concept of metacognition, with the emerging understanding that cognition is automatic and unconscious, whereas metacognition is conscious and deliberate. The concept of metacognition helped us as neophyte teachers to understand the importance of being explicit about our intentions, and working in the field of academic literacies development, to draw our students’ attention to the actual processes of reading and writing.

Another exciting concept for me was ‘critical thinking’; this involves both a questioning mindset, and a celebration of creative ways of seeing familiar ideas. Reflecting on my own experiences as a student, I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in an educational environment that was not characterized by routines of rote memorization and full class recitation. Instead, many of my teachers had embraced teaching approaches that aimed to develop our critical thinking faculties. The very best of my teachers encouraged us to broaden our horizons, and to consider situations from multiple perspectives. But not one of my own secondary teachers ever used the terms ‘critical thinking’ or ‘metacognition’. In contrast, I consciously use both of these terms with students in an effort to emphasise how important it is to be critically aware of one’s thought processes. As Blanken-Webb (2017) observes in the introduction to her chapter, “[t]he process of metacognition adds to the effect, efficiency, and even the meaning of what we do in education” (p. 163). Throughout my teaching career, I have experienced moments of excitement at encountering many new concepts – including the notion of epistemology, or theory of knowledge. I believe there is a very close relationship between epistemology and metacognition, and Mary Kalantzis in her video for this section alludes to the multifarious possibilities for learning, and the importance of each learner’s awareness of their own paradigmatic positioning in terms of their understanding of what reality is, and the various ways of coming to understand and accept this reality – and awareness of other realities. Given the affordances of the technology-rich learning environments that we inhabit together with our students, it behoves us to draw attention to these possibilities, and to emphasise that many perspectives are possible, each yielding a different, and valid truth.

There is not time or space here to talk about Meyer’s (2016) notion of ‘threshold concepts’, but I would encourage readers for whom this is new to explore these troublesome, yet transformative concepts. In my case, I found that it helped to start with foundational concepts. When working with students who are beginning to work in a new discipline, or who are preparing to engage in postgraduate study within a familiar discipline, I encourage them to take stock, and to systematically explore both the topic and their discipline, guided initially by Hart (2018):

• Identify the key theories, concepts and ideas
• Examine the theoretical grounds for the discipline (including ontological and epistemological orientations of key researchers)
• Identify recurring questions and associated problems
• Identify any major issues, debates, and controversies relating to this topic
• Attempt to map diagrammatically how knowledge on the topic is structured and organised
• Use a time-line to map out the origins of the topic
• Anticipate subsequent directions, especially given the affordances of information technology
• Consider the political and ideological standpoints of theoreticians and practitioners working in this field
• Identify key sources, especially seminal books and articles

In contrast to a didactic pedagogy in which a transmission approach is used, effective teaching in an e-learning environment should aim to involve students in an active way both with the content of their learning, and the various forms of representation. This suggest a need for metalanguage, the use of critiquing tools and explicit criteria against which judgements can be made.

References

Blanken-Webb, J. (2017). Metacognition: Cognitive dimensions of e-Learning. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), E-learning ecologies: Principles for new learning and assessment (pp. 163-182). London, England: Routledge.

Hart, C. (1998). Doing a literature review: Releasing the social science research imagination. London, UK: Sage.

Hart, C. (2018). Doing a literature review: Releasing the research imagination (2nd edition. ed.): Sage Publications.

Meyer, J. (2016). Threshold concepts and pedagogic representation. Education + Training, 58(5), 463-475. https://doi.org/10.1108/ET-04-2016-0066