Purpose: Critical entrepreneurship education (CEE) has the potential to foster learners’ critical thinking and to contribute to renewed entrepreneurial action beyond mere business creation. However, despite the growing recognition of (critical) entrepreneurship’s potential in research and practice, there is still a lack of clarity about its definition and scope in general and from a learner’s perspective in particular. We create a more detailed understanding of how students' reflective processes relate to criticality in CEE. Design/methodology/approach: Delving into reflective processes, we examine students’ learning in a course, which we conducted five times at two German universities. We analyze written reflection logs of 84 students (707 pages), supplemented with group discussions. Findings: Our findings illustrate learners’ reflective processes (reflectively engaging with others, reflectively understanding entrepreneurship, reflectively transforming the self) and explore how these facilitate learners’ transitions within the valence, paradigmatic and (newly added) narrative dimensions in CEE. Originality/value: Our research contributes a learner-centered, three-dimensional framework of CEE, in which reflection is the central mechanism driving movement and hence learning within this space. To develop this framework, we draw upon insights from Dey et al.’s (2023) framework on critical entrepreneurship research and transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991) vis-à-vis our fieldwork material.