Abstract:
Recognized as a skill of enduring importance, critical thinking has witnessed
increased attention in recent years, but questions still remain regarding its nature, and
what constitutes this intellectual value. As a matter-of-fact, the notion of criticality and its
place in higher education has been mostly framed within a Western cognitive approach
which tends to favour the centrality of skills of reasoning and falls short of extending it
beyond the realms of argumentation and logic. Many scholars allude to some abstract
universality in thinking while neglecting its relation to cultural context. This study draws
on a postmodernist approach, and is framed within an interpretive phenomenological
methodology informed by the ideas of phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Merleau Ponty and Van Manen. The aim is to deconstruct existing conceptualizations of critical
thinking prominent in Western academic discourse and suggest a reconstruction of the
concept by situating it within a non-Western contextual perspective. This study also seeks
to investigate the lived experiences and perceptions of university teachers and students of
English in the context of Algerian higher education. Qualitative data were collected from
12 teachers and 20 students of English in the Department of Foreign Languages at the
University of Medea, using semi-structured teacher and student interviews, participant
observation and reflective journal documentation. The diversity of these methods allows
triangulation of the results, providing insights on contextuality, relationality and
embodiment as significantly shaping the meaning and development of critical thinking in
the Algerian university context. Other issues emerged such as authority and the
reproduction of inequality, power relations, symbolic violence in the classroom,
embodiment of certain forms of habitus and capital, fragmentation of efforts and
experiences, religion, culture, politics, the educational LMD system and the EFL
curriculum which have a bearing on the development of critical thinking. Therefore,
critical thinking is not an abstract subject or a universal ideal mode of thinking that can
be nurtured in all students, but its meaning and development are related to relational and
contextual realities and to socially and culturally embodied practices which are
structured, maintained and reproduced in the classroom and the wider field of EFL higher
education.
