Critical Thinking in the AI Era: Creating Spaces for Authentic Reflection

When I introduce the concept of critical thinking to my students, I often begin by asking them what they believe it means. The responses tend to follow predictable patterns: “questioning everything,” “not taking things at face value,” “analyzing information carefully.” While these descriptions certainly capture elements of critical thinking, they often miss the deeper, more transformative dimensions of what it means to think critically—especially in an era where AI tools can generate seemingly thoughtful analyses in seconds.

Critical thinking is not merely a set of discrete cognitive skills that can be mastered in isolation. Rather, it is an embodied practice deeply intertwined with our positionality—the unique constellation of social identities, lived experiences, and cultural contexts that shape how we see and make sense of the world. True critical thinking emerges when students recognize that their perspectives are not biases to be eliminated but valuable standpoints that offer unique insights.

Beyond Skills: Critical Thinking as Embodied Practice

Educational discourse often reduces critical thinking to a checklist of skills: evaluating evidence, recognizing logical fallacies, distinguishing fact from opinion. While these analytical competencies are certainly important, this skills-based approach can inadvertently reinforce the myth of the detached, neutral thinker—someone who stands apart from their sociocultural context to arrive at “objective” conclusions.

As we discussed in our exploration of positionality, this notion of neutrality has historically privileged certain perspectives while marginalizing others. When we teach critical thinking solely as a set of decontextualized skills, we risk perpetuating what Donna Haraway (1988) critiqued as the “god trick”—the illusion of seeing everything from nowhere, the false promise of unmediated knowledge.

Instead, I invite students to understand critical thinking as an embodied practice that begins with recognizing and valuing their own situated perspectives. As bell hooks (1994) reminds us in Teaching to Transgress, education at its best is “the practice of freedom”—a process that encourages students to claim their right to think critically from their particular location in the world.

This approach to critical thinking aligns with what Patricia Hill Collins (2000) describes as an “Afrocentric feminist epistemology” that values concrete experience as a criterion of meaning. When students bring their lived experiences into dialogue with theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence, they practice a form of critical thinking that is both rigorous and authentic.

Creating Spaces for Critical Reflection

How do we create classroom environments where this kind of embodied critical thinking can flourish? The paper airplane activity described earlier in this guide offers one powerful model. By inviting students to share fragments of their thinking anonymously, this exercise creates a communal space where diverse perspectives can be encountered with reverence.

This activity embodies several crucial principles for fostering critical thinking:

1. Safety in vulnerability: The anonymity of the paper airplanes allows students to take risks in their thinking without fear of judgment.
2. Collective wisdom: As students read and reflect on each other’s thoughts, they experience thinking as a communal rather than isolated practice.
3. Honoring multiplicity: The activity makes visible the diversity of perspectives within the classroom, challenging the notion that there is a single “correct” way to think about complex issues.
4. Embodied engagement: Unlike AI-generated content, each paper airplane carries the physical trace of human thought—folded, tossed, and caught in a tangible exchange of ideas.

When we extend these principles throughout our courses, we create learning environments where critical thinking becomes not just something students do but something they embody and experience collectively.

Cultivating Critical Consciousness in the Digital Age

The rapid integration of AI tools into educational spaces adds new dimensions to how we understand and teach critical thinking. When students can generate seemingly sophisticated analyses at the click of a button, what does it mean to think critically?

I believe this technological shift makes the connection between critical thinking and positionality even more essential. As AI systems process and reproduce patterns from vast corpora of text, they mirror back the dominant perspectives embedded in that text—often without the capacity to recognize whose voices may be missing or marginalized.

Critical thinking in the AI era requires students to ask not just “Is this information accurate?” but “Whose perspectives are centered here and whose are absent? How does my own positionality shape how I engage with this information? What questions arise from my particular standpoint that might not be visible from other positions?”

These questions move us beyond what Paulo Freire (1970) called the “banking model” of education—where knowledge is deposited into passive students—toward a liberatory pedagogy that positions students as active producers of knowledge.

Autoethnography as Critical Practice

One powerful way to connect critical thinking with positionality is through forms of autoethnography—structured practices that invite students to examine how their personal experiences relate to broader social, cultural, and theoretical contexts.

In my classroom, I often assign reflective journals where students document their encounters with course materials, paying particular attention to moments of resonance, dissonance, or confusion. These moments of “sticky engagement” (Ahmed, 2010) often signal places where their embodied knowledge offers important insights or challenges to established frameworks.

For example, when teaching about theories of human development in psychology, I might ask students to reflect on how their own developmental experiences align with or diverge from mainstream developmental models. A student who grew up in a multigenerational household might notice assumptions about autonomy and independence embedded in Western developmental theories that don’t reflect their lived reality.

This autoethnographic practice doesn’t replace engagement with research evidence or theoretical frameworks—rather, it places these in dialogue with students’ embodied knowledge, creating richer, more nuanced understanding.

From Critical Thinking to Critical Action

Ultimately, critical thinking is not an end in itself but a means toward more just and equitable futures. When students recognize the value of their positioned perspectives, they become more confident in their capacity to contribute to knowledge creation and social transformation.

As Bettina Love (2019) argues in We Want to Do More Than Survive, true educational freedom involves equipping students not just to analyze the world but to reimagine and reshape it. Critical thinking, in this sense, is inseparable from what Love and Muhammad (2020) call “mattering”—ensuring that students understand that their perspectives, experiences, and voices are essential to the collective process of knowledge construction.

The paper airplane activity creates a microcosm of this mattering—each folded paper containing thoughts that deserve to be caught, unfolded, and held with care. When we extend this ethic throughout our educational practices, we create spaces where critical thinking becomes not just an intellectual exercise but a form of collective care and world-building.

In an era when AI can generate convincing essays in seconds, this human-centered approach to critical thinking becomes ever more vital.

Practical Strategies for Cultivating Critical Thinking

Beyond the paper airplane activity, there are numerous ways to create classroom environments that foster this embodied, positioned approach to critical thinking:

1. Position journals: Invite students to keep ongoing reflections on how their social positions and lived experiences inform their engagement with course materials.
2. Dialogic reading practices: Rather than asking students to produce traditional reading responses, invite them to “talk back” to texts—noting questions, challenges, connections, and expansions that arise from their particular standpoint.
3. Collaborative analysis: Have student groups analyze the same text or data set, then compare how different groups approached the analysis based on the unique perspectives represented in each group.
4. Critical media workshops: Provide frameworks for students to analyze how their positionality shapes their response to media representations, particularly representations of communities they belong to or differ from.
5. Knowledge creation projects: Instead of traditional research papers, assign projects where students identify questions arising from their lived experiences and design investigations that draw on both academic and community knowledge.

These practices help students recognize that critical thinking isn’t about achieving an impossible neutrality but about bringing their whole selves—including their social positions and lived experiences—into thoughtful dialogue with diverse perspectives and evidence-based reasoning.

Conclusion: Critical Thinking as Collective Liberation

I want to emphasize that teaching critical thinking as an embodied, positioned practice is not about abandoning rigor or evidence-based reasoning. Rather, it’s about enriching these values by recognizing that our best thinking happens not when we try to transcend our positionality but when we thoughtfully engage from within it.

When we create learning environments where students’ unique perspectives are valued as sources of insight rather than biases to be eliminated, we not only foster more authentic critical thinking but also contribute to what bell hooks calls “education as the practice of freedom.”

Like the paper airplanes activity—where truths are gently released into shared air and caught with reverence—this approach to critical thinking creates spaces where students can bring their full selves to the collective project of understanding and transforming our world.

References

Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.

Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press.

Love, B. L., & Muhammad, G. E. (2020). What do we have to lose: Toward disruption, agitation, and abolition in Black education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33(7), 695-697.