Critical Thinking in Agricultural Engineering Education: Pedagogical Approaches in the Vietnamese Context

While national reforms encourage the integration of critical thinking in Vietnamese universities, limited empirical research guides lecturers at agricultural institutions in how to conceptualise and apply critical thinking to their teaching. This study aimed to gain insight into educational pedagogies that engineering lecturers employed to support their students in improving critical thinking. Utilising a qualitative approach, the researcher conducted six in-depth, semi-structured interviews with lecturers from two programmes at an agricultural university in southern Vietnam. Obtained data, processed through the thematic coding method, revealed that lecturers applied three key pedagogies to foster students’ critical thinking: pedagogy for how to think, pedagogy for the enrichment of knowledge, and challenge-based pedagogy. These pedagogies do not simply comprise techniques but also the strategies or principles for their practice. While focused on agricultural engineering education, the study findings offer transferable implications for lecturers across disciplines and policymakers in higher education on how to foster critical thinking through disciplinary reflection and context-based pedagogy. The study also recommends further research involving students’ perspectives in order to fully comprehend how learners experience these pedagogies in practice.