The study investigates how discipline-specific, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary collaboration fosters criticality in architectural students, drawing on Barnett’s (2015) framework of critical reasoning, self-reflection, and action. It identifies a gap in understanding what role the different collaboration methods play in promoting criticality and not just promoting technically sound graduates, but socially just, critically aware graduates in the built environment. A comparative case study design was used to collect data across three architecture cohorts, each engaging with a different collaboration mode. Data were collected through student self-reflection narratives and analysed through a deductive process using Barnett’s framework.