Discourse as critical thinking: A focus on disposition

• Critical thinking definitions have largely shifted from normative to operational • Critical thinking as discourse is an instructive example of this shift • A disposition to inquiry and argument underpins critical thinking performance • Quality Talk promotes viewpoint diversity and collective meaning making • Elaborated explanations reveal individual critical and creative thinking The normative orientation of many established definitions of critical thinking has given way to an inevitable shift towards conceptions seeking to incorporate and highlight the construct’s implications for practice. Kuhn’s (2019) framing of critical thinking as discourse is a case in point, and one which largely informs the conceptual approach adopted in this study. The conditions of our study, however, specifically its focus on the dynamics of in-person dialogic discussion in the context of a university classroom, necessitated a slight adjustment of Kuhn’s term to discourse as critical thinking. Modified thus, the term ascribes at least as much agency to collective interaction as it does to individual cognition in generating elements of critical thinking. Discourse as critical thinking also reflects the ethos of Quality Talk, the discussion model employed in the study. Against this background, the present article documents an unconventional research and pedagogical approach to developing students’ propensity to collective inquiry, informal reasoning and argumentation. To illustrate this approach, we focus on a single student’s performance within a classroom reading circle of peers, foregrounding her disposition to critical and creative thinking. In tracking the group’s verbal engagement with each other about and around issues arising from given texts, we advance theorised explanations of the focal participant’s individual discourse as displaying elements of critical thinking.