The Knowledge Practices of Critical Thinking

Which knowledge practices demonstrate “critical thinking” in higher education? A rapidly growing literature is addressing what kinds of “thinking” may be considered “critical.” However, as yet, there is relatively little analysis of what could be called “actually existing ‘critical thinking’ in higher education,” or the knowledge practices actors consider to be educational evidence of this capacity. The nature of the knowledge in, for example, what students write for tasks aimed at eliciting critical thinking, and what teachers reward in those assessments as evidence of critical thinking, remain underexplored. This chapter briefly illustrates how these knowledge practices can be analyzed in empirical research, drawing on the sociological framework of Legitimation Code Theory (henceforth “LCT”).