Enhancing the critical thinking capacity through art analysis. A didactic proposal

Abstract

Due to the large amount of information and data provided by information technologies and the spread of fake news nowadays, enhancing the critical thinking capacity of citizens, specially students, has turned out compulsory in order to teach them on how to manage and process all this information. This study took place with a group of students in the Educative Innovation subject at the MA program for Teacher Training for Secondary Education at Universidad Europea in Madrid from Geography and History speciality. A first main objective was to enhance the critical thinking capacity of the students, but it was also important to give them the right tools for them to stimulate the critical thinking capacity of their future students. As most of them were going to be history teachers in secondary education, a workshop focused in enhancing the critical thinking capacity through art analysis were developed. Even though any form of art (i.e. painting, sculpture, music, poetry…) could be used for this purpose, the study focused mainly on painting.