Exploring critical thinking in Makerere University Business School Bachelor of Commerce curriculum

Abstract

Critical thinking skills have gained prominence over the years as some of the essential employment requirements for 21st-century graduate employment. Inculcating critical thinking in the educational processes is of critical importance today, and graduate schools are increasingly questioning the existence of these skills in their processes. This is because the level of youth unemployment in Uganda is relatively high and, in many ways, is being attributed to the lack of, among other things, critical thinking skills in the graduates. To address youth unemployment, the Ugandan Government has focused on BTVET, entrepreneurship, science and industrialization, and youth funding schemes. There is a lot of existing scholarship indicating the centrality of critical thinking dispositions in being employable. However, there is no documented scholary effort that has been put into exploring whether the existing graduate unemployment is related to shortage of critical thinking skills in the curriculum of Uganda's higher education institutions. It is against this backdrop that I decided to explore the nature of critical thinking in the Makerere University Business School Bachelor of Commerce curriculum. To carry out the study, I adopted a qualitative case study design based on constructivist epistemology and rooted in the Hermeneutics philosophical school of thought. I obtained data through document analysis, overt non-participant observation, and focused interviews and used textual analysis to analyze the data. Findings showed that critical thinking was reflected in the MUBS BCOM content in some contexts but not in all. Also, some aspects of critical thinking were prevalent in the curriculum practice but not in all existing practices. I therefore concluded that aspects of critical thinking was prevalent in the MUBS BCOM Curriculum. But a lot more can be done. I therefore recommended that there should be an intentional increase in the prevalence of critical thinking taxonomic words in the curriculum content and deliberate attention to the use of curriculum practice that optimally supports instilling critical thinking skills in learners.