Summary
Contents
About the SeriesThe SAGE Key Concepts series provides students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding. Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension.Key Concepts in Education provides students with over 100 essential themes, topics and expressions that Education students are likely to encounter, both during their courses and beyond in professional practice. Co-authored to draw on experiences of working within academia, local authorities and the classroom, the entries provide:a definition of the concepta description of the historical and practical contextan explanation of how the concept is appliedan evaluation of the concepthelpful references and suggested further readingThis book will be essential reading for students of Education, and an invaluable reference tool for their professional careers. About the AuthorsFred Inglis is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sheffield. Lesley Aers is a senior member of a local authority school improvement service and an Ofsted inspector. Both authors are former schoolteachers.
Thinking
Thinking
This is another of those commonplace words which are as crucial to education as to life, but which are so various and so elusive it is hard to be sure what they mean. To begin with, one can say that thought and thinking cover everything which happens in the mind: reasoning, feeling, dreaming, analysing, meditating, doubting, cogitating … the list goes on for ever. Yet it can make perfectly good sense for someone to say to us, ‘When I did that, I wasn't really thinking’.
So ‘really thinking’ perhaps indicates a more conscious and applied activity of the mind than images and impressions just drifting through one's head. Thought of this kind has a subject, or perhaps preferably, it has an object. Now at once ...