One aspect of the Alverno College (Wisconsin) teacher education program focuses on the critical treatment (critical revisioning) of popular approaches to teaching across lines of race, class, gender, culture, and power. To illustrate the development of prospective students' ability to think critically about such teaching, this discussion explores the revisioning of learning styles and cognitive styles, with a focus upon the potential for miscommunications in learning interactions, rather than the ascription of cognitive characteristics to individuals or to groups of minority students. The paper examines four assertions in critical revisioning as they apply to the constructs of cognitive style and learning style: (1) styles are reified constructs best understood as patterned dynamics of interaction with parents, teachers, and learning situations, not as static characteristics ascribable to learners themselves; (2) the application of styles research must be grounded in a critical understanding of authenticated principles of human learning and development as well as of the school culture; (3) practitioners must draw upon specific decontextualized knowledge about culturally and ethnically linked styles and relate this knowledge to the practitioner's evolving understanding; and (4) the legitimate application of style constructs is particularly concerned with the creation of conditions that maximize communication between teachers and students across all lines drawn by poverty, racism, powerlessness, and underpreparedness. (SM)