A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO TEACHERS' AND STUDENTS' EXPERIENCES AND PERCEPTIONS OF CRITICAL THINKING IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEGREE COURSE

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.