Experience and Learning with Critical Thinking
Critical thinking works best in communities of reflection. A perfect example comes from the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Loyola, who understand the role of those in his new order as what would come to be called “contemplatives in action.” When St. Ignatius first founded the order in the 16th century, there had been a division between Christian action and the life of contemplation, which had primarily been lived in monasteries. Ignatius decided to unite the two: The Jesuits would be “contemplatives in action.” They would engage in Christian action throughout the day and then in the evening, through a set of guided meditations called the Examen, contemplate the meaning of those actions in the light of God‘s grace. It was a highly structured system that united critical thinking about one’s day with reflection and experience, where experience provided the evidence upon which critical reflection would work. Learning took the shape of discernment; where was God present in my day and what was God doing? Ignatius was far ahead of his time, anticipating psychological insights from adult learning theory that wouldn’t come until later in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Experience provides the context, the ground, the evidence, the material for critical thinking. To borrow from an earlier learning theory, schema theory, if one simply operates based on pre-existing schema, experience doesn’t have much meaning; you can’t change the existing framework a person has in place, so they’re never actually learning. But if one takes the tool kit of critical thinking, where one is capable of bringing to bear complex, questioning reflection, and the interrogation of different points of view—“the ability to assess your assumptions, beliefs, and actions as an adult learner” (2025, p. 70)—and apply that onto one’s experience, then it’s possible that new forms of meaning or complex or deeper forms of meaning might be generated. A key insight from Bierema et al. (2025, p. 56) is that most college educators can’t actually define critical thinking; it’s the kind of thing they think they do, but they aren’t actually at a granular level able to describe exactly.
Another problem is that the experience of critical thinking often gets framed as a singular isolated or individual exercise, but it thrives in the experience of community, through what Bierema et al. call “collective critical thinking conditions” (2025, p. 80), which can turn groups into “communities of practice” (2025, p. 274). But there are all kinds of reasons why critical thinking got coded as an individualistic enterprise. Think of the essays of Montaigne, which can read like individual efforts to understand the subjective experience of one person. A good example is the essay where Montaigne falls off his horse and has a concussion. It’s essentially all about his own interior experience of a distorted mental state that’s the result of a physical injury. This individualistic trend gets picked up too in the great intellectual heroes of French critical theory who shaped the contemporary idea of “critical thinking.” if we think of Foucault or Derrida as two examples, we might often imagine a singular hero who is capable of challenging existing norms or presumptions; the Derrida movie did this at points (even though Derrida himself resisted this sense of him)—Derrida makes an appearance as “post-structuralism” for Bierema et al. (2025, p. 68). The best critical theory actually often comes about through co-authorship or through communities of intellectual inquiry, such as the Frankfurt school mentioned by Bierema et al. (2025, p. 58). Two quick examples are Dialectic of Enlightenment from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their two-volume critique of capitalism through schizophrenia. This experience of community places critical thinking in a broader social context, drawing from social cognitive theory.
But while critical thinking is often imagined as an unalloyed good that’s not always the case; it can often lead to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called “paranoid reading,” and it can also lead to projects that simply break things down without building them up. Bierema et al. (2025, p. 60-69) fall into this warning just a little bit in their admirably extensive survey of forms of critique—although they do, admittedly, followed these later with calls for action. Lisa Ruddick’s “When Nothing Is Cool” even described this trend in humanistic thinking as a “deadness and meanness,” one tethered affectively to the “thrill of destruction” (2015, n.p.)
The peculiar legacy of humanistic learning theory comes into play here, which, as Bierema et al. rightly observe, is a “paradigmatic assumption that has permeated adult education” (2025, p. 75). It’s not just Montaigne but all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, as Bierema et al. point out (2025, p. 70); you have a humanistic legacy at the roots of critical thinking, one engaged in community with Plato, who, through the figure of Socrates, critiques the dominant assumptions and attitudes and natural norms of all the poor Athenian citizens who had to deal with his constant nagging! One perhaps peculiar twist in the this humanistic line of learning theory as it interests with critical thinking is that if critical thinking draws from Nietzsche and twentieth-century French critical thought, the mechanisms of humanistic questioning get retained but turned on the “positive” aspects of that inheritance: human “flourishing,” “democracy,” “freedom,” “autonomy,” etc. all become themselves fed into the critical engines or the critique of critique itself. Bierema et al. save us from this by way of “taking informed action” as the endpoint of critical thinking (2025, p. 72; see also p. 82-86): “Now that I have thought about it, I am going to…” they propose as a course of action following critical thinking, one that should be evidence-based (2025, p. 75.) This moment of action forms a key part of Kolb’s Learning Cycle (2025, p. 284) and has clear connections to constructivism’s assertion that “learning creates meaning through engaging in and reflecting upon experience” (2025, p. 289).
Another crucial way that critical thinking and experienced are linked is in the more recent learning theory connectivism. The connection here appears obvious, but connectivism is a helpful way of thinking about the mechanisms by which experience and critical thinking come together. You can imagine experience as a data set and critical thinking as the sort of learning algorithm or systems operation applied to it. In another way, we could link together connectivism and schema theory to understand experience and critical thinking: you can think of rigid or set schemas as programs or algorithms. When these are applied to data, an expected result is produced. You can often see this in rigid forms of “learning” from some people who take an especially dogmatic approach to their beliefs. Any new experience is just converted via the algorithm to the expected outcome. Connectivism instead would be an adaptive mode of linking together critical thinking and experience where data set and learning systems create the opportunity for new outcomes, new and different outcomes, rather than just expected patterns.