Centre for Intellectual Development
The Centre for Intellectual Development in Higher Education (CIDHE) is founded on the desire to help others develop holistically so that they can contextually evaluate knowledge.
Whether considering the complex problems of climate change, artificial intelligence, ethical uncertainty, professional dilemmas all require contextual thinking, weighing competing evidence, tolerating ambiguity, and making principled judgements under uncertainty.
That kind of thinking can be deliberately cultivated, through curriculum design, dialogic learning environments, playful challenge, and a belief that every student has the capacity to grow as a thinker.
CIDHE brings together research, frameworks, and practical resources to help educators create those conditions. Our work is grounded in decades of scholarship and tested in the realities of contemporary higher education, including large cohorts, professional formation, AI in the classroom, sustainability demands, and students navigating an increasingly uncertain world.
We are independent, openly accessible, and committed to sharing what we know freely with the educators and researchers who can use it.
Pedagogical Influences
CIDHE's work sits within a rich and interconnected tradition of scholarship combining William Perry’s Institute on how students develop with Freire’s dialogic pedagogies encouraging mutual transformation:-
William G. Perry
Perry's landmark scheme of intellectual and ethical development, first published in 1970, remains one of the most generative frameworks in higher education research. Perry identified a developmental journey that students move through: from dualistic thinking, where knowledge is either right or wrong and the educator is the authority, through multiplicity and relativism, to the most sophisticated position of contextual relativism, where learners can evaluate competing perspectives, make commitments under uncertainty, and take genuine intellectual responsibility for their judgements. CIDHE's work asks what it means to actively support students on that journey, rather than simply hoping it happens.
Paulo Freire
Freire's critique of what he called the "banking" model of education, in which knowledge is deposited into passive students, remains as urgent today as when he wrote it. His vision of dialogic education, in which facilitators and learners think together, challenge each other, and are mutually transformed by the encounter, is at the heart of everything we do at CIDHE. We do not believe learning flows in one direction. The most powerful learning environments are ones where the educator is genuinely curious, genuinely challenged, and genuinely changed.
