Critical Reflection

Critical reflection is the process of questioning assumptions, presuppositions, and meaning perspectives. The most crucial, challenging, spiritually valuable, and oft-avoided aspect of critical reflection is critical self-reflection - the process of questioning one's own assumptions, presuppositions, and meaning perspectives.

In his essay "How Critical Reflection Triggers Transformative Learning," Jack Mezirow writes:

"Critical reflection addresses the question of the justification for the very premises on which problems are posed or defined in the first place. We very commonly check our prior learning to confirm that we have correctly proceeded to solve problems, but becoming critically aware of our own presuppositions involves challenging our established and habitual patterns of expectation, the meaning perspectives with which we have made sense out of our encounters with the world, others, and ourselves. To question the validity of a long-taken-for-granted meaning perspective predicated on a presupposition about oneself can involve the negation of values that have been very close to the center of one's self-concept....

"We become critically reflective by challenging the established definition of a problem being addressed, perhaps by finding a new metaphor that reorients problem-solving efforts in a more effective way. This crucially important personal learning dynamic is analogous to the process of paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn (1978) characterized as the way revolutions occur in science; which, after all, is only a more formal mode of inquiry for construing the meaning of experience. As we encounter new meaning perspectives that help us account for disturbing anomalies in the way we understand our reality, personal as well as scientific paradigm shifts can redirect the way we engage the world."