Critical thinking and Empathy in the Helping Professions
Abstract
As espoused by most institutions of post-secondary education, critical thinking is considered one of the most important outcomes of that education. Despite this, the literature does not provide a coherent or concise meaning for this term. In previous research, examining students’ understandings and discursive uses of critical thinking, empathy was occasionally implicated in a relationship with critical thinking. This research project attempted to further examine students’ understandings of critical thinking and its implicated relationship with empathy through focus groups of graduate students and students pursuing a professional degree in a subset of the helping professions. Using a form of discursive psychology for analysis, three major findings were presented. First, students’ discussions produced a wide array of meanings for critical thinking, but an interpretative repertoire for critical thinking was not made evident. Secondly, students’ talk also demonstrated the rhetorical use of critical thinking to account for what should be occurring in practices of students’ profession or academic disciplines. Finally, students’ discussion of empathy did not evidence an interpretative repertoire for a relationship between critical thinking and empathy. Rather students’ accounts demonstrated considerable discursive flexibility in their talk of critical thinking, which appeared to account for the relationship between critical thinking and empathy found in previous research.
Description
Keywords
Psychology--Social
Citation
Lewis, B. (2017). Critical thinking and Empathy in the Helping Professions (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25490