Critical thinking in postmodern university

Abstract

in the current context of the university, the so called postmodernity, the role of the individual -human- and the collective spheres of critical thinking has been marginalized or omitted, although they constitute a perceptual-conceptual framework of the university formation, in which thinking skills should be encouraged through didactic dialogue to generate or provide linguistic and communicative tools, and optimize complex cognitive processes. As a contribution to the coherence between educational instruments and purposes aimed at helping students become subjects of their own reality, this critical-reflective field investigation within the qualitative paradigm was conducted. Its objective is to construct a definition of critical thinking to substantiate the pedagogical university action from the individual and collective empirical interpretation of it in the UNELLEZ-Barinas. This paper contains the first research ́s results, the theoretical aspects of: critical thinking, critical theory in teaching, postmodernity, and styles of teaching and learning that have been studied, in order to establish preliminary categories for the ensuing empirical research.

Keywords

• critical thinking
• University
• postmodernity
• pedagogical action.
• pedagogical action