Abstract:

Critical thinking as a way of thinking and as a skills set encompasses analysing, generating and organising pre-existing and new ideas to make comparisons, evaluate, argue and solve theoretical and practical issues. Universities across the globe have shifted to enhancing and emphasising critical thinking as a focus of tertiary teaching and learning technique due to the 21st century push for new world and higher order thinking. Such can be seen in the high use of Blooms Taxonomy for teaching and curriculum design. While this focus on critical thinking is necessary in the contemporary age, evaluation of tertiary education’s colonised state has also been a large focus in postcolonial spaces. Despite moving past colonisation, postcolonial countries, such as South Africa, continue to experience the aftermath of colonisation, particularly in its tertiary education system which still operates according to Euro-American standards, disciplines and theory. There have been movements to decolonise this institution in South Africa, however, most of these movements have resulted in the inclusion of postcolonial thoughts and practices in curriculum, with true decolonial thought only being showcased at a postgraduate level. While this is a major step towards decolonising the curriculum and furthers critical thinking, the Humanities discipline in particular still shows heavy Euro-American theoretical focus. This brings into question what further decolonial steps are needed in the South African higher education curriculum and how decolonial thought and practice can be integrated into the curriculum further at an earlier, undergraduate level of study? With a focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences, this paper aims to investigate and answer these questions by analysing and reviewing what previous literature has provided as answers to these questions and by providing further recommended steps forward. Through the use of a literature review on the topic, findings showed that the steps that have been taken include ensuring students reflect more on Western theory to deconstruct and question theories not from the global South; ensuring scholars and students acknowledge their race, gender, class and geographical identity when questioning colonial theories; redeveloping curricula to move away from Western-centric methods and towards the allowance of transdisciplinarity and plurality; and pushing postcolonial thought. However, it was still found that two vital steps have not been fully taken. Thus, it is recommended that decolonial curricula content be introduced as a focus at undergraduate level so that such skills are scaffolded prior to postgraduate studies. Furthermore, it is imperative that decolonial thought be integrated into the training and development of student critical thinking skills, constructing a new focus on decolonial critical thinking, which can be scaffolded with the aid of Blooms Taxonomy.

Keywords:

Decolonisation, Tertiary Education, Humanities, Curriculum, Critical Thinking.