This is something I put together recently.
I believe the best teachers empower their students to think critically within the framework of an interpretive and practicing tradition. By “think critically” I mean the capacity to understand and evaluate arguments and to formulate one’s own views about an issue. By “an interpretive and practicing tradition” I mean to suggest that any kind of meaningful discourse is embedded in a human context that arises from particular historical circumstances and that may apply in various concrete ways to contemporary circumstances.
As a law professor and professor of theological ethics, it is not enough for me to teach “black letter” rules. Students need to understand the reasons for a black letter rule so they can evaluate whether the arguments for or against the rule are sound. But it is not enough for students merely to know how to be “critical.” Even the notion of the “soundness” of an argument suggests that the argument refers to some source beyond its bare internal logic.
Any argument about law or policy is relatively “sound” or “unsound” only in relation to some ideal of human society and flourishing. This is why critical thinking must occur in relation to an “interpretive and practicing tradition.” Students need to learn to think critically about ethics, law and policy so that they are prepared to extend, refine and improve the tradition, in particular as they apply those rules within the concrete circumstances of their “practice.”
This emphasis on application “in practice” means that I try to demonstrate how high-level theories lead to concrete principles and rules that get worked out in individual cases. In this regard it is useful to employ case law, case studies, historical examples, hypothetical scenarios, and “flipped classroom” exercises that help students experience what happens to theories, rules and principles “on the ground.” A classroom is a “community of practice” in which learners are always being formed as whole people.
At the same time, the possibility that the “tradition” as a whole can be improved suggests some external ideals to which even the tradition itself is subject. While all human circumstances are historically contingent and therefore in some sense unique, I believe there is an objective reality that gives authentic shape to our contingent concepts of ethics and the “good.” Therefore, I believe the best teachers ultimately point their students towards reflection on what is universally good, true, just, and right, even if such ideals can be hard for any human being or human community to understand or apply. Perhaps the best and most lasting lesson any teacher leaves his or her students, to paraphrase Aquinas and Aristotle, is a sense of commitment to the pursuit of a good that is beyond one’s self.