Critical thinking as an embodied criticality: The lived experiences of international art students

Using an adapted narrative enquiry approach, the purpose of the research is to present a model of criticality based on R. Barnett’s argument that criticality should ‘create epistemological and ontological disturbance in the minds and in the being of students’, which Barnett argues is a prerequisite to critical being, or in I. Rogoff’s terms, a ‘critical embodiment’. Inevitably, such a conceptualization involves a reformation of the student’s subject position including their sense of identity and it is clear that despite the ‘messy’ data provided by these unstructured narrative interviews with two international fine art students, there is evidence for Barnett’s and Rogoff’s positions. Indeed, identity is central to the practice of both participants who articulate their sense of othering in Foucauldian terms, operating at a very cognitive level within a western regime of truth.