Open AccessCritical Thinking: Two Theses from the Ground Up
Author(s) -
Ziqian Zhou
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
the journal of scholarship of teaching and learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1527-9316
DOI - 10.14434/josotl.v22i1.30983
Subject(s) - critical thinking , plea , scholarship , critical systems thinking , humility , sociology , epistemology , critical thought , set (abstract data type) , engineering ethics , pedagogy , computer science , political science , philosophy , programming language , law , engineering
This paper analyses a set of widely held beliefs concerning our understanding and teaching of critical thinking, a notion which is increasingly adopted by universities as their main educational goal. Existing scholarship on critical thinking throws up a vast heterogeneous collection of definitions of critical thinking. I propose a ‘meta-definition’ of critical thinking—or, what I call the cluster concept of critical thinking—to show that there is unity in an otherwise messy conceptual terrain. A second aim of this paper is to offer a plea for the intellectual virtues in general and that of humility in particular as a means of fostering critical thinking. This paper concludes by presenting a series of pedagogical implications for instructors in tertiary education in the business of designing modules that aim to promote critical thinking.