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 Pensamiento crítico en la universidad de la postmodernidad 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 criticalreflective 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.