After producing my dissertation, “Discovering the Pedagogical Paradigm in Art History Survey Courses,” I was left with a quandary regarding the term “Critical Thinking.” This is a topic that came up frequently when discussing both course skill and content objectives as among the leading desires for art history faculty to produce in students and an area that we all acknowledged was difficult to uniformly define.
I wanted to share a resource that has provided guidance to my thinking and may act as a great catalyst for change in teaching art history courses, especially the survey, The Critical Thinking Initiative. The work by Steven Pearlman and David Carillo is really a practical framework that was designed to be applied in any academic discipline, and in binge listening to their podcast, nearly every episode has direct implications for art history instruction that clings to pedagogical methods and assumptions of the way we learn that date back to the 1950’s.
I would be happy to team up and research with anyone willing to integrate the resources described by Pearlman and Carillo into their courses.