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The study explores how critical thinking can be practised and taught in the training of social work students. It investigates the nature and possible developments of critical thinking in an educational environment, asking which learning practices can be described as ‘critical thinking’ since this is not well defined or understood in an academic context or, particularly, in social work education. The approach, based on Legitimation Code Theory, allowed the creation of pedagogic interventions suitable for teaching skills and practices which clearly demonstrate what constitute examples of critical thinking. Students’ reflective writing showed a capability for recontextualising, generalising and assessing the meanings connected to the incident through weakening semantic gravity. High-achieving students produced ‘semantic waves’ by comparing different interpretations of knowledge, based on incident analysis, and successfully transforming these into a new form of individually ‘invented’ knowledge. Additionally, the study proved that mastering ‘semantic gravity’, the ability to manage knowledge which is to be decontextualised, transferred and recontextualised, may improve critical thinking skills. The analysis demonstrates how movements in semantic gravity in students’ writing assignments provide conditions for cumulative knowledge building that could be used in the future implementation of ‘semantic gravity’ in social work curricula.

Critical thinking in social work education. A case study of knowledge practices in students’ reflective writings using semantic gravity profiling