Critical thinking is embedded in national university graduate outcomes and included in international bodies' statements on higher education. At the same time, there are tensions surrounding critical thinking in higher education, such as its commodification, Eurocentrism, and relationship to rapidly digitalising cultures. Drawing from the…

Through the experience both in the classroom and travels, the author comes to define the key aspects of critical thinking (CT) as "individual skills that facilitate logical and informed decisions." Beyond personal anecdotes, scientifically, the import of CT has been shown in many walks of life (see, e.g., Bauwens and Gerhard [1987]).…

Today's students are motivated to understand the world around them, and in so doing, they question things that their professors take for granted. Students are naturally drawn to question the world around them, and as they do so, they are developing frameworks to better organize their questions and the answers. The author understands that students…

Involving students in policy debate is one of the most impactful academic interventions for secondary school students, according to a study, which between 2007 and 2017 followed about 3,500 students who were part of the Boston Debate League (BDL). The nonprofit supports debate teams in Boston Public Schools, which have a large concentration of…

Political Science is a relatively new subject in the Mauritian academic context. As a small island developing state located in the Indian Ocean, it has many interesting features from which to draw to teach the discipline. These features include the ethnic and cultural diversity of its population; the island's political stability in a geographical…

To best prepare students for the real-world research environment, key skills, including experimental design, data analysis, communication of results, and critical thinking, should be key components of undergraduate science courses. Furthermore, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on in-person teaching has resulted in a need to develop courses that…

Working with students in ways that emphasize creativity and improvisation presupposes a posture of openness and self-regard for all stakeholders. The teacher in such a setting can neither impose an ideology nor fix expectations for growth. The students, composing and improvising collectively, will encounter opportunities to test beliefs and…

This article presents two in-class exercises designed to develop specific skill sets needed to think critically and make decisions in today's business environment. The first exercise, "Flossing your Teeth" is designed to build information literacy skills needed in the evidence-gathering phase of critical thinking. The second exercise,…

Use the techniques presented here to enhance students' capacity to produce outcomes that enable future growth and to develop the critical foresight that permits learners to adapt to societal disruptions resiliently and empathetically.

This essay explores the nuanced impact of generative AI technologies on management and business education, framed through three paradoxes: the "Expertise Paradox" suggests that AI's adequate performance at lower-level tasks may weaken students' development of higher-level thinking; the "Innovation Paradox" states that AI's…

The Thinking Folk project introduced Socratic dialogues as a pedagogical construct to develop critical thinking skills by drawing on the lived experiences of learners in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes. The resulting conversations were soon described as "real" talk by learners, which, in a process that not only…

Social and emotional (SE) skills are interpersonal, self-regulatory, and task-related behaviors that are important for adaptation to and successful performance in educational and workplace settings. These skills are related to important outcomes such as academic achievement and job satisfaction. A recent report suggests the term "durable…

Developmental courses in community colleges often leave students unprepared, demeaned, and uninspired. These gatekeeper courses need reform, especially in terms of curriculum and instruction. One framework -- Dr. Gholdy Muhammed's Historically Responsive Literacy (HRL) -- could be useful for developmental courses and students. HRL is a teaching…

The last day of a course is often viewed as awkward, abrupt, and even antithetical to a course's aims. More often than not, prime opportunities for reflection, reinforcement, reconciliation, and closure are typically subsumed to administrative tasks and end-of-course exhaustion. This paper summarizes the scant end-of-course literature, reviews the…

This article offers a semester-long approach to using generative AI in the public-speaking course. Using critical communication pedagogy, the authors provide practices to navigate the turbulence that has followed the emergence of publicly available generative AI tools. These tools have received negative attention because of their potential to…