Making Visible the Invisible: Criticality in Student Academic Writing

Despite being regularly asked to ‘be critical’ in their academic writing, understanding how to do this can be both difficult and frustrating for students as they often fail to see what this construct does and indeed what it actually looks like. Therefore, in an attempt to make ‘the invisible more visible’ (Lillis, et al., 2015), this paper reports on a study carried out with a group of students and their course teacher on the topic of criticality in their academic writing. Drawing on data from a combination of interviews, stimulated recalls and text analysis that attempt to explore the ‘lived experience of teaching and learning from both student and tutor perspectives’ (Ivanič & Lea, 2006 p. 7), this paper will briefly highlight some of the challenges involved with criticality that emerged from both the teacher’s and students’ perspectives. These include a lack of understanding of what it means to be critical within the discipline, being overly superficial and unable to challenge existing knowledge.