ABSTRACT
The chapter explores faculty and students’ perceptions of factors contributing to the development of criticality in two British and two American ML departments. The chapter illustrates examples of how utterances from student interviews were coded according to the domains and levels theorised in Barnett (1997). Students’ descriptions of their own development of criticality provided evidence in support of Barnett’s framework, yet, while Barnett (1997) theorised three separate domain of criticality (knowledge, self and world) criticality development, as it emerged from the analysis, appeared to be much more fluid with utterances often making reference to more than one domain simultaneously. With regards to aspects of the curriculum which appeared to best foster students’ development of criticality, both staff and students made frequent references to the explicit coaching and engagement in critical discussions characteristic of content modules and in upper-level content-based language modules in the US universities. The year abroad was also linked to criticality development, however staff interviews suggested that students needed to be prompted to move beyond observation of difference in order to develop a more critical approach. The chapter concludes by critically examining Barnett’s model of criticality in light of the findings drawn from the interview analysis.
