As a professor at the Centro de Lenguas Modernas (CLM), I’ve maintained close ties with the GRIIS program over the years, and I’ve had many of its students in my Grammar and Oral and Written Production classes.
In mid-2013, GRIIS director Amalia Pulgarín introduced me to one of her former students who was visiting Granada. After five years, Laura Qirko had returned to revisit the places that shaped her professional future. By then, Laura was already teaching at Brockton High School in Boston, and she shared with me the work she was doing in collaboration with EducaThyssen, the educational department of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.
That unexpected meeting became the starting point of a fruitful research direction for my doctoral thesis, as well as the foundation for an educational innovation project developed in collaboration with the museum’s educational team. Today, using visual and meaningful learning, I apply EducaThyssen’s resources to enrich my teaching, accessing art in context to activate language learning. This project also serves as a source of inspiration to extend the proposed activities and design classroom dynamics that link the museum’s collection to each student’s learning journey.
Painting is a flexible and valuable tool for working across linguistic levels and reference frameworks. It allows for cultural comparison, sparks curiosity, and helps consolidate knowledge. It also enables the integration of linguistic and non-linguistic content in a transversal, effective, and engaging way while placing students within specific historical and social contexts. Far from being an isolated element, painting provides a broad range of possibilities and can be incorporated into the curriculum in ways that deepen and diversify learning.
Learning language through the art collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum offers a complementary and refreshing classroom approach. It introduces new tools that enhance both language acquisition and student motivation.
Virtual visits, becoming “classroom visitors” to the museum, and engaging in real exchanges with museum staff ignite genuine interest in discovering the works and spaces firsthand. The result is a stronger sense of involvement, clearly reflected in student comments during class.
Over the years, a spontaneous initiative sparked by a GRIIS student has turned into a structured and enduring educational project. It now bears fruit for new GRIIS students arriving each year in my classes at the Centro de Lenguas Modernas of the University of Granada.
By Dr. Dolores Fernández
