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Abstract
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The present qualitative research sought to investigate EFL teacher
educators’ experiences and attitudes toward critical thinking and its
role in teacher professional development. The adopted design was
a case study and the theoretical framework was the theory of
transformative learning (Mezirow, 1978). For the data collection
purpose, 30 EFL teacher educators participated in in-depth
interviews. The whole procedure of the data collection was
audiotaped for further reference in data analysis. The interviews
were transcribed to familiarize with the data and the transcribed
interviews were member checked with the participants. The
collected data were analyzed through reflective thematic analysis.
The data analyzed paved the way for generating three themes:
cognition, metacognition, and personal growth/self attainment. The
findings of the study comprise a number of implicatios for both
theory and practice. One aspect of our contribution is that the notion
of critical thinking can be conceived as more than cognitive and
metacognitive one; it should be conceptualized as possessing both
facets as well as other possible subsets. Beyond that, we suggest
that critical thinking should be conjectured as being both a process
and a product.
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