Critical Practice in Higher Education

What is critical practice; what is critique? And what do these ideas have to do with higher education? This book argues that engaging in critical practice is fundamental to meaningful teaching, learning and research. Critical practice is key to understanding societies, technologies, and the power relations that pervade our practice. Critical approaches are vital for responding meaningfully to some of the knotty questions that we face in higher education. And yet, there is a need to re-examine critical theorising in contemporary times, to address the limitations of current conceptions of criticality, where critique is at risk of becoming stale, redundant, even harmful.
International in scope, this book engages theory and empirical data from recent research to offer new ways of thinking and doing critical practice. Case studies are drawn from teachers and academics working in the UK, Australia, and America, across a breadth of disciplines and learning environments. Specifically, the book proposes a move towards a relational critical practice. After many years of attention that has been paid to cognitive notions of critical thinking, skills and dispositions –assumed to take place within the boundaries of rational, individual, minds – this book takes us beyond thinking about criticality as an individualised activity. Elaborating a critical practice that considers the affective, embodied and relational nature of criticality, this text will explore how we might look more closely at the entanglement of ideas and practice, of mind and body, of thinking, feeling and doing. In doing so, this book argues for a celebration of critique, and for the value of a relational critical practice in higher education.