1. Critical Thinking and Rubrics

As a student in a Core Discovery class, you are required to exercise your critical thinking skills on a regular basis. These are among the basic intellectual skills that you use on a daily basis in life, along with speaking and writing skills. Thinking critically means thinking systematically while evaluating options. You do this sort of thinking when you are required to make a decision, whether to believe something or to do something. People make claims on your beliefs and your actions all the time, from your teachers to your roommates to your parents. When they make claims like this, they create a context in which you think critically. "Do I believe them?" "Should I do what they suggest?" These questions spur episodes of critical thinking—"Is it better to believe them? What can be said for their claims? Are the other options better supported by reasons? Etc." How these episodes go depend on how well you can exercise the relevant thinking skills. Critical thinking is like writing—you can improve by learning about the process and practicing it over and over again. Good critical thinkers are people who can think for themselves and exert control over their beliefs and actions. Among other things, this class will give you a chance to practice and improve your critical thinking skills.

Monsters are our concern in here, and so you will work on critical thinking skills by evaluating claims made about them. One way that we will do this is by applying a rubric to the texts we read and films we watch. Rubrics are authoritative rules that guide conduct; for us, it will be a small set of monster-related rules that will serve as lenses through which we can evaluate texts and films. These rules will focus your attention on central aspects of what you are reading or watching and help you understand it and its relation to the broader monster theme. Think of the rubric as a generic study guide that can be applied to most everything we evaluate throughout the course.

In a class where critical thinking is a point of emphasis, a rubric can help you critically engage topics and texts.  A well-designed rubric will help initiate the process of critical thinking.  In the first place, it will focus your attention on what really matters for the purpose of the course, and that will help you home in on what is most fundamental.  Second, it will help you figure out what the author or movie maker is trying to get you to believe and why.  Finally, it will structure your evaluation of the text relative to the course goals.  Of course, the rubric won't do your work for you—you must know when and how to apply it, and you must use it effectively.  Much of what we do from here on out will be devoted to making the rubric and its application clear.

Our class is a year-long exploration of both monsters and the themes surrounding the concept of monstrosity.  We will look at the creation, development, and multiple reiterations of the monstrous, through both classic and contemporary works in literature, film, and art. Application of this information will help the student identify the societal, political, and cultural mechanisms used to influence and shape contemporary conceptions of the monster in the real world.  In other words, the course will focus on the dynamic of demonization—how it works and how we work it. To aid us in achieving these goals and in enhancing critical thinking skills, we have designed a thematic rubric that will structure our initial engagement with each text we study. 

There are two ways to characterize this rubric.  First, one can think of it dimensionally.  The dominant dimensions are those of essence and process.  In the material we will study, there are two roles whose essence concern us, viz., the monster and the person(s) who make the monster (i.e., the maker).  Who fills these roles in the text and why/how do they fill them?  At any given point in the text, one can inquire as to who fills these roles.  However, since these texts tend to have narratives that unfold in time, we have our second dimension, process, which can be seen as orthogonal to the essence dimension.  The role of monster may be filled at one time by one character and by another character at a different time.  Likewise for the maker.  The process dimension focuses attention on the changes in the way these roles are filled in the text, and why those changes come to pass. 

Second, the rubric can be cast as a set of questions.  The first form supports a somewhat visual understanding of the rubric, but this form is more portable and easier to apply to texts.  The questions are as follows:

1. Who is the monster?
2. Why are they a monster?
3. Who makes the monster?
4. Why do they make the monster?
5. How do the answers to these questions change through the text?

When you think about a text or a movie, think about it with these questions in mind. When you write about them in your journals, you might try to answer these questions or use them to set up your entries. By the end of the class, you should be able to weave the answers you have to these questions together into a coherent and general understanding of the concept of monstrosity as it occurs in the many parts of your life.