Teaching Gender Equality through Art to Improve Students' Production Skills, Creativity and Critical Thinking

Abstract

[eng] This MA dissertation attempts to deal with gender issues through the usage of assorted art pieces with the language purpose of reinforcing students’ production skills as well as their capacity of creative and critical thinking. Social feminist values will be a major concern aiming to deconstruct stereotypical and biased sexist clichés, bringing to light concepts such as sexual objectification, the beauty canon and empowerment feminism. This MA dissertation is highly concerned with both our society and other cultures, contributing to the improvement of students’ cultural and social and civic competences. Mostly following a student-centred approach based on cooperative techniques, adolescents will be encouraged to produce knowledge and language in a way that they learn how to learn new things by themselves, hence, highlighting the learning to learn competence. The linguistic-communicative competence, however, will be central, since the activities will cover vocabulary and grammar from different units, aiming to promote students’ production skills. Creativity and critical thinking will be developed through motivational art pieces, which will revolve around three main fields: visual arts, street art, and literary and scenic arts. Hence, this teaching proposal uses art to focus on learners’ communicative competence and their ability to judge critically and creatively in order to be prepared to face gender unfairness and transform it into equality.