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This study will be potentially beneficial to teachers as it guides them on how they can work with important but often neglected aspects of the curricula by using the book Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. My thesis statement is that goals from the core contents of English 7 and Social science 3 syllabuses are intertwined and have a connection to democratic values and, as I demonstrate in the analysis that follows, can be taught in connection by using Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as a method and Frankenstein as the content from which this collaboration can be created. CLIL will be used to show teachers how they can work in connection to create joint lessons that address both syllabi's goals when teaching content from Frankenstein and how it can be connected to democratic values. Liberatory teaching is one of the methods which match well with teaching content from Frankenstein and democratic values, as it gives the students the autonomy they need to develop their absorptive habits and critical thinking skills. The key concepts that will be used to analyze the chosen content in Frankenstein are alienation, mechanisms of inclusion, and exclusion. The key concepts are transparent in the content taken from Frankenstein, as the book is very well suited for such research. The analysis is split into two parts that show how the key terms affect Victor and the monster. Content for the analysis is taken in chronological order and is comprised of several different scenes and passages from Frankenstein where the key terms are most transparent. The pedagogical discussion will show how a teacher can use the content showcased in the analysis to connect to different goals in the respective syllabi and how teaching can be connected to teaching democratic values from the upper secondary school curricula. Further, it will recommend how teachers can create teaching content and activities suited for the content in Frankenstein, depending on the lesson's goals. Teachers will also be recommended different approaches and methods when teaching content from Frankenstein and what they need to avoid and think about to make liberatory teaching effective in the classroom.

Critical thinking is an educational ideal with an accumulating canon of scholarship, but conceptualizing it has nevertheless remained contentious. One important issue concerns how critical thinking involves an interplay between cognitive abilities and associated character traits, dispositions, and motivations. I call these and other aspects of the critical thinker “critical thinking virtues”, taking them to be intellectual excellences of character, cultivated by people who tend to aim towards making reasoned judgments about what to do or believe. The central virtue that motivates any critical thinker to engage her skills in critical thinking I call “willingness to inquire”, connecting the character of the person to the skills she must use consistently to be a critical thinker. Willingness to inquire is the virtue that ranges over the application of all critical thinking skills, a basic motivational drive guiding a person towards the educational ideal. Other critical thinking virtues, such as open-mindedness, fairness, and respect for dialectical partners, also facilitate the appropriate application of critical thinking skills in a process of inquiry. Pedagogues should therefore seek not only to instruct for skills, but also to explicitly mention and instruct for the virtues as well. I conclude by offering curricular recommendations in this regard. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Accreditors and administrators have begun to focus on general education with an eye to improvement. One of the most valued, but difficult to assess, learning outcomes in general education is critical thinking. Critical thinking is thought to play a role in student engagement and positive student learning outcomes. This study examined students' acquisition of critical thinking skills in a required general education great books course at a large, mid-Atlantic, Research I university with a high transfer-in population. Student interviews, class observations and document analysis were employed in the study. Specific attention was paid to dialogic learning, as Vygotsky's theory of social learning and the theory of student engagement underpinned the study. This study found that critical thinking learning goals were not communicated to the students explicitly through the syllabus. Only 20 percent of the students in the class reported acquiring critical thinking skills. All of those students were female transfer students. Many students described the class as outside their primary educational interests. Those who acquired critical thinking skills were more likely to be active participants in the class, value professor-student conferences and have a strong academic support network. Social interaction contributed to students' acquisition of critical thinking skills in this class. Future assessment of critical thinking will depend on a clearer definition of the concept. General education programs and courses that link social interaction and the acquisition of critical thinking skills are worthy of further study. / Educational Leadership

Dystopian literature has been gaining popularity during the last decade in accordance with thesocial and political changes around the world. On the same parallel there has also been anincrease in games with dystopian worlds and themes. Dystopias have been serving as tools forsocial criticism since their conception; and with their introduction to games, the question of ifgames serve as a medium for criticism rises. This paper looks at how dystopian games elicitcritical thinking through design and narrative by studying the game BioShock (2007)’s influenceon players by using it as a case study with a qualitative interview method. The discussionscrutinizes the game’s emotional and intellectual impact on players under the umbrella ofnarrative and game design.

There has been little research which shows that students use critical thinking skills when they write. The use of journal writing has been studied for a variety of purposes, but little evidence exists that journal writing can enhance critical thinking skills. The writing assignments presented in this study were designed to enhance the critical thinking skills of college students enrolled in a reading methods course at a small college in southern West Virginia. Case studies were used to describe the critical thinking skills used by the four participating students. Each of the six writing assignments was developed to elicit as many critical thinking responses as the student could write during the time allotted in class. All of the writing assignments were completed within the framework of the reading class, and two of them were completed as collaborative group work. Twenty critical thinking skills were used as the criteria for examining the responses that students used in their writing. The twenty skills were placed in these four categories: Analyzing Arguments/Issues which included five critical thinking skills; Clarifying Information which included four critical thinking skills Inferring which included six critical thinking skills; and Evaluating Arguments/Issues which included five critical thinking skills. These twenty critical thinking skills were coded so that they could be easily recorded on tables. Findings indicated that the four participating students used more Inferring and Analyzing skills than they did the Clarifying and Evaluating skills. All of the skills were used at least one time in the six assignments. Students praised the journal for giving them an opportunity to "freely express ourselves,·' / Ed. D.