article · Teaching in Higher Education
The concept of criticality is pervasive across higher education discourse, yet its meanings often remain vague and implicit. This lack of clarity allows terms such as critical thinking, critique, and critical perspectives to operate inadvertently as mechanisms of exclusion and domination, particularly during student assessment and the peer review of academic work. In response, there is an urgent need to interrogate and redescribe these notions within contemporary educational environments marked by existential, institutional, technological, and planetary shifts. Clarifying criticality offers the potential to transform teaching theory and practice while diversifying academic publishing. Re-evaluating these underlying assumptions can help academic institutions rethink how knowledge is produced, evaluated, and shared, ultimately encouraging more equitable educational practices and broader participation across shifting disciplinary contexts.
When core academic standards like critical thinking are left undefined, evaluation risks becoming arbitrary and exclusionary for students and researchers alike. Unpacking these concepts ensures that educational assessment and research evaluation become more transparent, inclusive, and responsive to rapid technological, cultural, and environmental transformations affecting modern universities.
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This Point of Departure ‘kicks off’ a process that we hope will elicit submissions for a Special Issue to mark the 30th anniversary of Teaching in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives. The theme of the issue will be to debate the meanings of the concept ‘critical’ or ‘criticality’ or ‘critique’ and its associated uses such as ‘critical perspectives’, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘critical literacy’ in higher education and the implications of these debates for teaching. We will invite contributors to interrogate the definitions, uses and import of these terms, particularly in the context of conducting and writing about research on teaching theory and practice in higher education for this journal. Despite its pervasiveness in higher education discourse, the meanings of the concept remain vague and implicit, such that they can function as mechanisms of exclusion and domination, for example when assessing students (Stables Citation2003; Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild Citation2024; Taylor et al. Citation2023) or reviewing submissions for publication (Bozalek and Romano Citation2023; Taylor et al. Citation2023). More specifically, we hope to clarify for ourselves and for potential authors how we might meaningfully rethink and redescribe the concept in contemporary higher education contexts that are shifting and unstable – at many levels – existential, institutional, disciplinary, epistemological, technological, cultural and planetary. As editors and reviewers of the journal, we also hope that contributions to the Special Issue will challenge not only how we teach, but also how we frame and manage the journal and thus open up, enrich, and diversify our coverage of research on teaching that adopts a critical perspective.<br/><br/>
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DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2024.2335223
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