My international undergraduate and graduate students would often critically challenge/engage me on the content of whatever I was presenting, as well as (sometimes) even the form of the pedagogic encounter [all this tempered on occasion with excessive deference for the ‘professor’]. I learned a lot from them.
To begin with, my Amurikan students would frequently challenge me as to why should they have to extend any effort to learn; who was I to tell them what to do; and why should they be required show up at all to the pedagogic encounter; it was rare to have the fruits of a critical thought process emerge in what passed for (stultifyingly obtuse) discourse anchored firmly in cryptic language usage (think Palin) and pop media snippets (think any form of advertising being passed on as ‘information’).