Student, Critic and Literary Text: A discussion of ‘critical thinking' in a student essay

Abstract

Students in higher education are generally advised to demonstrate 'critical thinking' in their essays. However, research evidence shows that students frequently fail to understand what is meant by such advice. This has generated projects which aim at teaching students how to produce essays which give evidence of critical thinking. Such projects tend, however, to emphasise underlying structures and to neglect the fact that a critical essay needs to reflect an engagement with selected items from the literature of the field. This paper seeks to remedy that neglect. It concentrates in some detail on an undergraduate's transformations of an example of literary criticism in her essay on The Woman in White. Within such a context critical thinking corresponds to a Bakhtinian conception of the 'dialogic' in which texts respond to other texts. The paper concludes with a challenge to its own text and so keeps critical thinking in play.