ARTS AND HUMANITIES AS A SOURCE OF CRITICAL THINKING DEVLOPMENT

Daniela Dumitru
Assoc. Prof., The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, ROMANIA, daniela.dumitru@ase.ro

Abstract

The paper is a part of a larger effort converged within a research project funded by the European Commission (Critical Thinking across European Higher Education Curricula – CRITHINKEDU, which looks for evidence that Critical Thinking is a specific domain and if there are different opinions among experts (employers, teachers, researchers) on what Critical Thinking should bring to their domain.

Methodologically, the present research is an exploratory literature review, an attempt of systematicity, that tries to put together in one place the preoccupations and results of worldwide researchers in Humanities, Arts and Culture regarding the role of Critical Thinking in their domains.

The results showed an unexpected situation, the main research question in the analysed papers is not how critical thinking is making us better artists or Humanities experts, but how these fields make us better critical thinkers. Searching for generic key terms like Humanities, didn’t return much relevant information, but searching for specific domains, like Literature, History, Linguistics, Philosophy had a better chance of finding papers concerning Critical Thinking.

It means that the topic is far more complex that it looked at first glance and it requires special attention on each case or sub-domain.

Keywords: Critical thinking, Critical thinking dispositions, Higher education, Humanities, Arts.