Abstract:

Criticality in higher education has always been a source of controversy and great debate. This is no exception when it comes to critical thinking and critical practice in academic writings. Many researchers have previously investigated the issue through a cognitive lens, therefore trying to justify either the existence or absence of critical thinking skills in students who come together from different cultural backgrounds. However, what seems to be the missing link is the role of culture and the students’ background, which can influence their critical academic writings, especially in the higher education context. Many lecturers and academic tutors simply ‘expect’ their students to write in a critical voice, regardless of their academic, social, cultural, political, and religious backgrounds. The present research has attempted to approach the issue of critical thinking through a socio-cultural lens, and therefore, investigate what social and cultural factors can influence the critical performance of students in their academic writing in the context of higher education. One major approach to understanding this issue, is the way higher education students perceive themselves as being critical and what underlying socio-cultural factors can create and define that self-perception. The second aim of this research is to uncover how this socially- and culturally created perception impacts on the students’ academic writing performances.
This research is the first phase of a three-phase PhD research which has been conducted with ten Iranian PhD students studying in the academic context of Australia. After conducting multiple interview sessions with the participants, a thematic analysis of the data using the NVivo software was carried out. The findings of the research are explained centring the idea that a certain vision of self by higher education students could be the key to understanding the nature of their critical being and critical writing performance.

Keywords:

Higher education, critical thinking, critical practice, academic writing