Critical thinking in higher education has long been treated like a high-powered telescope: it sharpens focus, magnifies details, and exposes flaws from a distance. Within Western academic traditions, it symbolises intellectual sophistication, reified as the hallmark of rigorous education and a significant graduate attribute. Yet there are significant limitations to what this telescope can reveal. Its definition remains abstract, its teaching often formulaic, and its promise is narrow.
Critical thinking equips students to question, compare, and critique, however, most academic settings often leave it suspended in abstraction.
Students are directed to ‘think critically’, yet they are rarely shown what that really means, how to do it, or why it matters beyond assessment tasks. Consequently, the ‘critical thinking’ concept becomes a buzzword rather than a lived intellectual pursuit.
This wicked issue is further amplified in diverse classrooms, where students bring different cultural understandings of thinking, reasoning, and learning. In some cultures, thinking is communal and relational; in others – it is intuitive, embodied, or spiritual. When higher education upholds the dominant mode of critical thinking, often adversarial, individualistic, sealed-off and text-based, it risks alienating students whose ways of knowing do not fit that matrix, including First Nations Peoples. Instead of empowering learners, it can reproduce exclusion, confusion and colonial hierarchies of knowledge value, obscuring rather than expanding intellectual horizons.
The challenge goes beyond definition. It reflects a gap between the thinking we teach and the thinking the world now requires. In an era of complexity, diversity, and rapid change, critique alone is insufficient. Today’s challenges require not only analysis and evaluation but also the courage to imagine, connect, and create that is human and more-than-human centric. They call for thinking that is inclusive, innovative and expansive, valuing empathy alongside evidence, and imagination alongside logic while positing Generative Artificial Intelligence as either friend or foe.
Higher education must, therefore, shift its telescopic lens. This shift is not about abandoning critical thinking, but rather expanding it into a more generative, inclusive, and future-oriented practice of creative thinking. Where critical thinking interrogates what is known, creative thinking senses what-else and envisions what might be. It invites multiplicity, embraces uncertainty, and nurtures through practice the imagination necessary for transformation. Such a shift is essential because the future will not be built by those who only evaluate existing ideas, but by those who can envision and enact new ones, including AI as both distributor and collaborator.
To understand this shift, we must first distinguish between the two approaches to thinking. Critical thinking is evaluative and analytical. It asks what the evidence is, where the assumptions lie, and whether an argument holds. It is focused and rigorous, essential for reasoned judgement. Yet it often remains inward-looking, bound to established frameworks and disciplinary conventions.
Creative thinking, by contrast, is unreserved and generative. It asks what could be, what connections remain unseen, and how problems might be approached differently. It thrives on curiosity, experimentation, and uncertainty. Where critical thinking interrogates, creative thinking imagines. Together they form a continuum. An example of making this shift is rather than students being tasked to individually interrogate a text from one disciplinary framework, students are prompted to explore a real world setting together, imaginatively envisioning traces and possibilities of different forms of social dynamics.
To genuinely rebalance this continuum, we must also ask ourselves a deeper question: who is doing the thinking? All thinking is shaped by identity, culture, and positionality. Our habits of analysis, our sense of evidence, and even what we consider a valid question are informed by lived experience, disciplinary training, social and cultural context. Yet higher education often treats critical thinking as a neutral and objective process, as if reason could be separated from culture and lived experience. It treats critical thinking as a practice beyond disciplines, seemingly unaware of distinct disciplinary differences in perceptions of validity.
Reimagining thinking through the lens of identity and culture offers a way to widen that frame. It invites a more inclusive academic practice, one that recognises the cultural and relational dimensions of thought. It asks us to notice whose perspectives are amplified when we say, ‘be critical’ and whose ways of knowing remain outside the frame. Creative thinking helps open that space. It recognises that imagination and identity are inseparable, and that knowledge grows deeper and more dynamic when multiple voices and experiences shape its creation.
Here lies the deeper connection between critical, creative, and culturally responsive thinking. Thinking creatively is not the opposite of thinking critically, rather it is an expansion of it. It transforms critique from a tool of judgement into a practice of possibility. When thinking becomes an act of inclusion as well as inquiry, it sharpens understanding and extends what and who knowledge can hold. This is the shift higher education now needs – an expression from thinking critically to thinking creatively, from analysis alone to imagination that builds, connects, and transforms.
Such a shift toward thinking that is both critical and creative carries profound implications for higher education. It challenges us to move beyond critique as correction toward imagination as creation. When we value not only what is questioned but how and by whom, learning becomes a shared act of meaning-making rather than a contest of intellect. Classrooms, then, are no longer spaces of compliance or performance but sites of co-creation, where knowledge emerges through connection, curiosity, and care.
This reorientation expands the purpose of education from producing expertise to cultivating insight, from reproducing systems of knowing to reimagining them. It invites teaching and learning that are dialogic, relational, and humane, where thinking is a collective, evolving practice. Creative and culturally responsive thinking makes learning personally, socially and culturally meaningful. Students are recognised not only for what they know but for how they imagine, innovate, and contribute. Education becomes a process of becoming, shaping graduates who are intellectually agile, ethically grounded, and confident in their capacity to collaborate to generate change.
Higher education must do more than teach students to evaluate the world; it must prepare them to reimagine and remake it, including AI as friend, foe, distributor and collaborator. When creativity is nurtured alongside critique, learners gain the courage, curiosity, and empathy to act with purpose, innovate responsibly, and contribute meaningfully in ways that can be human and environment-centric. This ensures that AI is a partner in learning rather than delegating cognitive effort to AI.
Dr Nira Rahman is from the University of Melbourne, Professor Rachael Hains-Wesson and Dr Belinda Johnson are from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.