The course is designed to foster critical thinking and expression skills needed by students to be able to function effectively (i.e., competently, reflectively, and creatively) in the university and the wider contexts.

It is content-specific and rhetorically intensive and adopts the integrated critical thinking approach to writing and communication instruction (Hatcher 2010). It is also inter- and multi-disciplinary in terms of content and its pedagogy is informed by theories on rhetoric and composition, critical thinking, and argumentation. These features of the course guarantee that by the end of the semester, students will have been better prepared to intelligently and effectively engage their readers and audiences not just in the university, but also in professional and social contexts. They ensure that students will be able to develop “sensitivities and dispositions of character that allow [them] to think clearly and express themselves cogently with an end to increased socio-adaptability, and personal reflection and development” (NUS GE Committee, 2020).

Specifically, the content focus of the course enables students to contextualize their writing while at the same time allowing them to broaden their intellectual and cultural horizons. This content focus introduces the students to new “conceptual and socio-cultural vistas” that they can mobilize or interrogate in their own writing.

By integrating writing and communication instruction with a content focus, students necessarily engage in cognitive processes of critical thinking and expression. The core strategies expressed in the learning objectives of the course are manifestations of these cognitive processes: students will interrogate sources of information and opinion in terms of relevance and reliability; critically examine how ideas in the core readings can be applied to a case, artefact or phenomenon; engage with various methods to understand multimodal cases, phenomenon or artefacts; express and organize ideas to present a line of argument in a way that is sensitive to the audience and the context; document and synthesize sources to establish a critical claim or proposition; and reconsider their ideas and their writing based on feedback.

The course ultimately builds up the capacity of students to write and communicate in a disciplined and context-sensitive manner—informed but judicious, assertive but responsible, critical but capable of cooperative thinking.

Hatcher, D. L. (2010). Stand-alone versus integrated critical thinking courses. The Journal of
General Education, 55 (3/4), 247-72.

NUS General Education Committee. (2020, November 30). GE reform—the NUS core curriculum.