Symposium on
Critical Thinking and General Education
July 28-29, 2023
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
The ability to engage in critical thinking has been widely accepted as an essential attribute of a university graduate. The term ‘critical thinking’ appears invariably as an educational objective of almost every university major program, whatever the discipline. In the area of General Education, which aims to broaden the intellectual horizons of students and encourage them to reflect on perennial issues that concern humanity, the cultivation of the capacity for critical thinking has been given special prominence.
But what exactly do we mean by ‘critical thinking’? The term seems to be interpreted differently and at different levels. For some, critical thinking refers to cognitive dispositions such as intellectual curiosity, open-mindedness, and willingness to consider alternative systems of belief. For others, critical thinking also includes cognitive skills such as the definition of concepts, illustrating and paraphrasing ideas, understanding the structure of argumentation, and assessing the validity of logical inferences. It goes without saying that many of these cognitive abilities are predicated on linguistic competence, as the articulation of complex ideas crucially depends on one’s command of language and text. The complexity of the concept of ‘critical thinking’ does not seem to find full expression in its standard Chinese rendition as 批判性思考, 審辯性思維, or 明辨性思考.
The issue of critical thinking has been a key concern of the General Education Foundation programme at CUHK since its inception a decade ago. A hallmark of the two Foundation courses offered by the programme, namely, “In Dialogue with Humanity’ and ‘In Dialogue with Nature’, lies in their adoption of the small group seminar format in encouraging students to reflect on perennial issues that concern humanity and relating those issues to their own lives.
This symposium aims to provide a forum for scholars and teachers of General Education to reflect on the concept of critical thinking and to share pedagogical experiences in enabling students to acquire a critical thinking capacity.
The symposium will address the following issues:
- 1. What are the essential attributes of critical thinking that are most relevant to higher education today? Do these attributes vary across disciplines, or are they common to all academic disciplines?
- 2. What is the value of critical thinking as an objective of university education in the context of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as compared to other educational objectives, such as diversity and inclusion, the awareness of sustainable development goals, and the cultivation of core values of the community?
- 3. To what extent has the university been successful in helping students develop a capacity for critical thinking? What kinds of cognitive growth in terms of thinking habits can be witnessed in students during their university years?
- 4. How should we measure critical thinking competence? To what extent are the existing instruments of measuring critical thinking valid or adequate? In what ways are these instruments culture-dependent?
- 5. What is the relationship between critical thinking and linguistic competence, in particular writing competence? To what extent is the development of critical thinking dependent on language and culture? What kinds of narrative and rhetorical skills benefit the development of critical thinking?
- 6. Technology has always had an immense impact on human thought behavior. Just as the invention of writing and printing technology has had a tremendous impact on thought, how might big data and Generative Artificial Intelligence impact critical thinking and the cultivation of it in the university?
