Loreta Zavadskienė

Complexity Theory-Based Insights Into What Is More Important in Higher Education: Critical Thinking or Reflective Thinking? Or Both?

Complexity Theory-Based Insights Into What Is More Important in Higher

Education: Critical Thinking or Reflective Thinking? Or Both?

Loreta Zavadskienė

Institute of Foreign Languages, Vilnius University, Lithuania

Abstract

Higher education is about complex learning. Amongst other things, it is about the development of critical thinking and reflective thinking, skills highly needed by university students to succeed in their academic endevours, and the ones employers want graduates with. Although having the same denominator, that is thinking, in theory and research on higher education both types of thinking are mainly approached as separate phenomena, in this way contributing to the fragmentation of understanding of both their significance and interrelationship. Therefore, to overcome such a fragmentation, this research draws on complexity theory as a lens for the holistic approach to re-conceptualising critical and reflective thinking. Against this background, the aim of the current study is to gain a deeper understanding of critical and reflective thinking as complex phenomena. The theoretical framework developed for this research uses complexity theory in two ways: as an epistemological frame and an interpretative tool. The aim of this research is pursued first by overviewing some complexity-based concepts characteristic of complex phenomena, such as a complex system, emergence, self-organisation etc., and demonstrating their relevance to the concepts under study. Following this, complexity informed investigations into the synergistic nature of the relationships between critical thinking and reflective thinking are discussed. Finally, the need for seeing critical thinking and reflective thinking as an emerging complex system in higher education is justified. In conclusion, assuming that there is an urgent need to foster a broader awareness of complex phenomena in higher education, seeing complexity theory as an alternative conceptual space for theorising critical thinking and reflective thinking as an emerging complex system seems to be of great promise for nurturing it in higher education.

Keywords: A complex phenomenon, complexity theory, critical thinking, higher education, reflective thinking.

Biography

Loreta Zavadskienė, a junior assistant and doctoral student at the Institute of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Philology, Vilnius University, Lithuania. Loreta Zavadskienė is an author and co-author of 5 research papers and 27 presentations delivered at the national and international scientific conferences. She has been teaching English for academic and scientific purposes at the Faculty of Medicine of Vilnius University for sixteen years. While pursuing her career at university, she has been constantly interested in the importance and proper development of critical thinking skills among her students. She is also a doctoral student of Educational sciences at Vilnius University. Her current research interests are in reflective practice-based studies of higher education with a particular focus on reflective practice in initial teacher education. Email: .