Chinese university English teachers' perceptions and practices of critical thinking: Challenging discourses of deficit

Critical thinking (CT) is established almost universally as a core goal in education, but continued association of practices involved in CT with education in the global north has constructed a discourse of deficit that underpins flows in higher education to institutions in the north, especially in the Anglosphere. The study presented in this paper is based on an analysis of the evidence of CT skills by a group of Chinese academics interviewed at the end of a short professional development program at an Australian university. Findings revealed that although participants voiced deficit discourses in relation to their own CT capacities and those of students and academics in China more generally, their responses to questions about any potential transfer of their learning to practice offered evidence of CT. We conclude that reductive assumptions assigning ownership of CT to particular groups or education systems need to be critically interrogated.