Key points from this session for our research project:

• This research focusses on Criticality and approaches to Critical Thinking and Critical Literacy that are consistent with the defining characteristics of criticality - i.e. the ‘thinking’ includes the dimensions of being critical and acting critically.

• Criticality is always about more than philosophical debate - it has to lead to action. Although the action can be as small as contributing your opinion to a classroom discussion or on a forum or in the comments section of a video, action is essential.

• Critical Questions are questions that allow students to express all three dimensions: thinking, being and acting

Defining Criticality

• Criticality encompasses skills, dispositions and ethical actions. It goes well beyond a cognitive exercise determining if an argument is true and accurate. From a situated perspective, very few arguments are true or accurate in all situations. Critical thinkers like Brookfield (2011) prefer to determine whether an argument is “contextually appropriate” (p. 21). Once the thinker has weighed the contextual factors of a situation or argument, they have an ethical responsibility to act. This action can take many forms. In a teaching and learning context it could include, expressing a view in class, posting a comment, writing a blog or selecting one teaching resource over another. It is this preoccupation with ethical citizenship that echoes through time and links criticality to the tradition of Socratic questioning, which has much in common with Critical Questioning (CQ).

• Critical thinking has been, and often still is defined in terms of ‘objective logic’. In using this term, there is a danger that much of the ‘being’ and ‘acting’ – the situated and embodied thinking, that are intrinsic to criticality, can be lost or ignored. Criticality is the term that Davies and Barnett (2015) use deliberately to distinguish it from the traditional expression CT, to better convey “the educational potential that lies to hand” and widen CT “to incorporate not only argument and judgment and reflection but also the individual’s wider identity and participation in the world” (p. 15). Stephen Brookfield (2011) by his own admission uses terminology interchangeably, depending on the audience. For him “everything focuses on unearthing and scrutinizing the assumptions that frame our actions and decisions”, and relates to power and hegemony. The point of theorizing is to inform action (S. Brookfield, personal communication April 28, 2020).

• Criticality is defined as a dispositional, critical orientation of the thinker towards the world, encompassing critical ways of thinking, being and acting (Burbules & Berk, 1999; Davies & Barnett, 2015). “Criticality embodies a critical mode of being-in-the-world” (Dunne, 2015, p. 93). Brookfield’s definition of CT is well matched to this definition of criticality. Using his definition allows for the reconciliation of generalist, specifist and thick approaches to CT and to unpack criticality for use in this study.

How do we develop students Criticality?

Developing students’ criticality means, creating learning tasks in which they:

• Investigate the assumptions held by scholars in a field of study regarding the way legitimate knowledge is created and advanced in that field – i.e. they are not taught the ‘facts’ but investigate the thinking that allow for these ‘facts’ to be accepted as legitimate.

• Reflect on their own assumptions and the way these frame their own thinking and actions. Investigating their own assumptions, happens within, across and beyond the bounds of domain specific contexts.

• Check the assumptions that they, and others, hold, by assessing the accuracy and validity of the evidence for these assumptions and by looking at ideas and actions from multiple perspectives.

Take informed actions that are well grounded in evidence and that are more likely to achieve the results intended. (Brookfield, 2011, p. 157)