The American University in Cairo (AUC) considers critical thinking (CT) essential for academic
success, global employability, and effective citizenship. Nevertheless, CT remains a highly
contested notion, with insufficient evidence that universities succeed in developing it. This study
explores how CT develops in practice for diverse AUC students. After exploring different
understandings of CT, I synthesize a working definition, then draw on interview evidence from
students’ perceptions of AUC experiences that contributed to their CT, illuminated further by
faculty and administrator interviews, and relevant AUC documentation and research.
Students’ incoming CT levels differed according to high school experience, parental attitudes, and
interaction with diverse others. Key factors fostering CT were found to be: liberal arts education,
rhetoric and composition courses, opportunities for learning situated in authentic contexts, and
intercultural learning. The thesis explores how student backgrounds and the institutional structure
result in inequalities in students’ access to, and capacity to participate in, those beneficial AUC
experiences, and shows the limited notion of criticality developed through most of these
experiences - findings that are applicable to other university contexts. I conclude that AUC needs a
critical contextual approach to curriculum development and implementation: an approach that
encourages stakeholders to continually question the values behind learning experiences, recognize
power struggles within the learning environment, address ways of supporting students with
diverse capabilities and privileges in order to develop their capacity for CT, and question what it
means to be critical in Egypt’s changing, uncertain context.
Egypt's struggle for democracy after years of oppression and corruption needs a conception of
critical citizenship that involves both a social dimension focusing on empathy, and a critical action
dimension promoting a constructive social justice orientation. While the study addresses AUC
stakeholders, it has relevance for all educational institutions aiming to develop CT in
bi/multicultural contexts. Such institutions include Western-style universities located in
Arab/Muslim countries, Western universities with large numbers of international students, and
universities with local but diverse students and staff.
