Building Cultural Awareness and Critical Thinking Skills through Project-Based Task: A Workshop for Indonesian Context

Abstract

<p>Facing the Third Millennium, any countries should prepare young generation with cultural awareness and critical thinking skills so as to survive in the global era. According to Scriven and Paul (2001), critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. Whereas, cultural awareness refers to the foundation of communication involving the ability of standing back from ourselves and getting aware of our cultural values, beliefs and perceptions (Cunningham, 2013). These two conceptual insights can be appropriately practiced by pedagogically and professionally competent teachers through the language classroom activities, one of which is ‘project-based task’ which requires learners to think critically to complete cultural-based tasks, and at the same time appreciate the cultural norms. Therefore, the <strong>workshop</strong> is intended to equip participants with the practical knowledge and skills of building cultural awareness and critical thinking skills through the project-based task.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Cultural Awareness<strong>, </strong>Critical Thinking Skills<strong>, </strong>Project-Based Task<strong></strong></p>