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

La entrada ‏Art as Language: A Cross-Cultural Learning Experience Born from GRIIS se publicó primero en Griis.

Our unique educational programs aim to take students far beyond getting good grades and learning useful lessons for their future careers; our experience and ambition have led us to believe that education can impart a worldview. In the ever-changing world that we live in, we must prepare our students from the very beginning to take on personal challenges that will help them adapt to diverse situations, like the ones they will face living and studying in a foreign country. Their capacity for admiration and their appetite for knowledge will serve them well in this process, as they learn to debate, express dissent, and engage in dialogue.

We therefore emphasize understanding and being aware of the goals we set for ourselves, as well as listening and tuning in to our environments to help us choose the projects that can best facilitate learning, moving beyond classes to lived experiences: internships, language exchanges, workshops, trips, tours.

We believe that together we can improve students’ academic performance in the classroom, while inspiring them to broaden their horizons outside it, helping them minimize the inevitable frustration they will feel as they leave their comfort zones and have to come to terms with unexpected circumstances. We convey the importance of knowing how to invest talent and effort in order to achieve results that, combined with past experience, will open doors and allow them to have great expectations for the future.

We mindfully observe and value what we do and what we have done, through critical, analytical and creative learning projects, using videos, sketchbooks, musical composition, poems, reflective writing, and more.

Our students use what they have learned and experienced to internalize a transformative learning experience, driving them to build bridges to the future and generously leave their mark on the present, adding to our story: Once upon a time… there was a group of inspired students who sponsored an olive tree and hung on its branches white-ribboned messages of peace and hopes for the future.

Look at all we’ve done.

By Dr. Amalia Pulgarín

La entrada ‏From Admiration to Action: A Journey Through the Vowels of Learning se publicó primero en Griis.