institution towards their ongoing emotionally negative experiences. By holding up a mirror of ideal excellence prescribed in the essentialised 'graduate attributes' to reflect their performances, the higher education institution inadvertently relegates EAL international students to the 'antithesis' of the desired students. Some even go on to question the much promoted multiculturalism in Australian universities.
One such international student, at the end of his final undergraduate degree wrote in a shaky hand, 'Multiculturalism is a big fat lie' (Cadman and Song, 2012: 3).
as 'harmonious' or 'adversarial' (Ryan and Louie, 2007; emphasis in original).
What appears as absent in these students is allegedly characteristic of their ideal local counterparts. Such a 'large culture' approach describes the identities of international students as a 'fixed, reified, homogenous and homogenised group' (Clark and Gieve, 2006: 63), contributing to macro-discursive constructions prevalent in the academic debates in Australia, and reinforcing the discourse of remediation of international students.
Many scholars warn against the danger of over-generalisation of such a diverse group of students, and argue for a meta-cultural awareness that entails a willingness to meet the learning needs of all students irrespective of their background (Ryan and Louie, 2007; Cadman and Song, 2012). Ryan and Louie (2007) point out that the assumption of Western students as assertive, independent critical thinkers is just as problematic as the assumption of 'Chinese learners' as surface and dependent learners. In addition to supplementing a 'social imaginary' emergent in the process of globalisation of higher education, this particular discourse of 'deficiency' can have a negative psychological impact on the people who identify with them. These international students, mostly in their formative years, may experience seriously damaging psychological trauma as 'it is in education that students learn to develop their sense of self worth and acceptable modes of social communication' (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 160). The practice of setting up the binaries, or 'taxonomies of difference', between Western and Eastern scholarship (Ryan and Louie, 2007) serves to entrench perceptions of difference and feeds into the stereotyping of these diverse groups of students, perpetuating their 'obtrusive otherness' (Ryan, 2010: 43; Papastephanous, 2005: 545). The image of the 'Chinese learner' as socially inept, lacking creative initiative and being a passive rote-learner has become so entrenched that students have begun to internalise these descriptions of themselves, accept this construct as given and identify themselves with this 'social imaginary' (Ryan and Louie, 2007: 410).
Overseas studies support this argument, indicating that first-year students fresh from China perform better academically than the ones who had prior experiences of studying overseas (Li, Chen and Duanmu, 2010).
Yet the myth remains that the decline in standards so bemoaned by academics can be attributed to the internationalisation of higher education rather than its massification or managerialist trends. Academics express concerns that
the decline of educational standards can be directly attributed to the increase of non-Western students. Central to the 'deficit' construction of the 'Chinese learner' is the argument that these students lack critical thinking skills. In addition to their inadequate proficiency in English, Chinese learners are characterised as having different ways of thinking, which deviate from the 'critical thinking' established in Western academia (Ryan, 2010).
In the published 'graduate attributes' of all universities in Australia, critical thinking, independent learning and adversarial forms of argument are citied as virtues of Western education and 'seen as desirable goods available to international students' (Ryan and Louie, 2007: 413). Problem solving and critical thinking skills are regarded as essential attributes of university graduates and 'a primary goal of education' (Willingham, 2008: 12; Pratt, 1992; Greenholtz, 2003). Ironically, for many academics the definition of 'critical thinking' remains elusive — yet they somehow 'knew it when they saw it' (Ryan and Louie, 2007: 412). Some approach the term by considering what 'critical thinking' is supposed to achieve in education.
Richard Paul and Linda Elder (2002), for example, believe that teaching critical thinking skills promotes learners to become more open-minded and tolerant of alternative worldviews.
Copious amounts of research have gone into defining what 'critical thinking' really means in Western academia. For example, Mark Mason summarises some of the better-known philosophical positions regarding the nature of 'critical thinking' as, principally, 'the skills of critical reasoning; a critical attitude; a moral orientation; knowledge of the concepts of critical reasoning; and knowledge of a particular discipline' (2009: 6). This chapter does not intend to examine in detail what these positions entail. Rather, it seeks to question the practice of regarding 'critical thinking' as 'higher-order thinking' and as a 'generic' skill, as applied to international students in anglophone countries, and to explore alternative approaches to thinking and rationality. Of particular interest to the current research is, first, whether critical thinking as a 'particular skill' should be considered as 'generic' and universal for all learners in higher education; and, second, whether critical thinking as it pertains to particular disciplines should be regarded as an essential assessment criterion in the classroom.
Critical thinking as a 'particular skill' is generally considered to be the ability to assess reasoning and identify fallacious arguments (Mason, 2009) and cannot
be taught independent of what is being thought about. According to US-based researcher Daniel T. Willingham, this skill cannot be easily taught in classrooms because the processes involved in such activity are intertwined with the content of thought (2008). Challenging the practice of teaching a special type of 'critical thinking' in Western academia as a higher-order intellectual skill, Willingham speculates that critical thinking is not a skill like riding a bicycle, as one does not simply master a situation that is similar enough to be deployed regardless of content. One needs to be able to have adequate content knowledge, for 'thought processes are intertwined with what is being thought about', which in turn 'depends upon prior knowledge' (ibid.: 10, 17). The answer to the question 'can critical thinking actually be taught?' is not affirmative, as 'metacognition' or 'regulating one's thoughts' requires prior 'domain knowledge and practice' (ibid.: 17). A student's power of critical thinking begins 'from the earliest days of a child's school career' (Doddington, 2009: 110). The current assessment practice in Australian universities, which appears to privilege one particular type of critical thinking with no regard to what international students might have learned prior coming to the university, arguably disadvantages these students and renders them remedial, as no EAL learner could critically answer a question she/he has not encountered in their first language (Holmes, 2004).
In a UK-based study into the pedagogical discourses underlying assumptions of daily educational practices in higher education, Yvonne Turner (2006) takes up the much-debated notion of academic 'critical thinking' as the basis for analysing the performance of Chinese internationals in the UK. Turner probes how critical thinking is culturally privileged in Western academic discourse, and argues against the assumption that students from non-Anglo-European cultural backgrounds are generally 'cognitively limited' because of their lack of critical thinking skills.
Higher education classrooms in the Anglo-European education system, Turner notes, are governed by 'locally-relevant intellectual styles' rather than 'substance' (2006: 3). Through an erudite discussion of the Confucian intellectual tradition and the 'pedagogical role of criticality', Turner warns against the danger of 'conceptual colonialism', which can thrive where alternative 'rich indigenous knowledge traditions' are disregarded. Drawing from a qualitative longitudinal study, Turner states that critical thinking, as well as other academic conventions, are culturally-based, more related to style, and therefore should not be used as
the epistemological core to measure these students' cognitive capacity. Through a critique of the essentialised Western position, Turner concludes that university assessment methods should acknowledge the discrepancy between students' 'declarative knowledge' and their ability to 'be critical' (ibid.).
Academics in the current education debates often seem to be puzzled by what Watkins and Biggs (2001) call 'the paradox of the Chinese Learner' (2001: 3).
On the one hand, Chinese learners appear to be passive rote-learners, merely memorising what they are taught. On the other hand, they display high levels of understanding, especially in science and mathematics. Literature indicates that Chinese learners are capable of a 'deep' approach to learning, and often out-perform Western students in areas like science and mathematics (Watkins and Biggs, 2001; Turner, 2006; Olsen and Burgess, 2006). According to a large- scale study of 22 Australian universities conducted in 2006, involving a range of disciplines, there are no overall performance differentials between international students and their local counterparts (Olsen and Burgess, 2006). These research findings suggest that the perceived cognitive limitations and lack of critical thinking skills characteristic of these newcomers only manifest in some sections of academia, namely social sciences, humanities and commerce, where a certain type of critical thinking is deemed as 'higher-order' thinking. While these international students excel in the domains of scientific reasoning and thinking, characterised by universal approaches, they fail in the academic disciplines that are restricted by culturally specific reasoning.
Researchers also warn against the detrimental effect of essentialising certain forms of thinking skills that cannot be easily taught in a classroom setting. The graduate attributes in Australian universities align critical thinking with 'good', 'higher-order' thinking, and place value judgements and moral purpose on a particular form of thinking which is historical, temporal, culturally specific and empirical (Peters, 2009). The educational implication of emphasising critical thinking as the main source of respect for a person's intellect may imply that only the person who has developed the capacity for critical thinking is worthy of such respect (Doddington, 2009). Thinking, asserts Evers (2009), should not be confused with rationality. Any thinking individual can demonstrate rationality in their thinking; it is rationality that transcends cultural boundaries, not any particular kind of thinking itself (ibid.). The current assessment system, which
holds certain Western critical thinking skills to be 'good' and 'higher-order' thinking, automatically denigrates the capacity for rational thinking of those students who appear incapable of demonstrating particular 'critical thinking' skills. Such a system, says Harvey Siegel (2006), legitimates the criteria of dominant perspectives, and critiques alternative ways of knowing and alternative epistemologies on these bases, amounting to 'the hegemonic abuse of power' (ibid.: 9).
Cognitive scientists Day et al. (2010) have observed that education must validate an individual's need for hope, since 'hope uniquely predicts objective academic achievement above intelligence, personality, and previous academic achievement' (ibid.: 550). As a cognitive personality trait, 'hope' is positively related to academic achievement, since it is conceptualised as goal-oriented thinking, which leads to thinking around achieving those goals. The graduate attributes that demand the learning and teaching of culturally specific ways of thinking, and an assessment system that essentialises certain ways of thinking, can only be derived from a social imaginary, a mindset, which runs contrary to the great Western education tradition of educating the person not the subject, and takes away from these students the 'hope' for high academic achievements.
When international students first come to Australian higher institutions they are automatically rendered cognitively inadequate by the educational system and, what is more, have no hope of escape.