University and critical thinking: training in communication

We set out to show how the neoliberal discourse of the World Bank achieved, since the end of the last century, that the operation and purposes of universities were guided to a great extent by the logic of the market. Universities internalized its discourse, its instruments and its utilitarian reason. Both teaching and research have been traversed by the logic of competition, profitability and accounting. The curricula have been reduced and fragmented, and the fundamental is dissolved in the novelty. At the same time, the how is more deprived than the what. These tendencies increase in professional degrees, as is the case of journalism, which can also easily fall into technocentrism.

This work raises the challenge and the need to train Audiovisual Communication students in what we term critical thinking. This way of thinking, which is logical, reflexive and grounded, is a central pillar of audiovisual communication and university training, as it allows evidence, arguments and opinions to be analysed and evaluated in a reasoned way. It is a key skill for citizens in the digital age, where misinformation and manipulation are frequent and decidedly dangerous phenomena. Media and information literacy is an effective strategy for developing critical thinking in the audiovisual field. It is also necessary to face new educational challenges related to the inappropriate use of mobile phones, the internet or video games; the consolidation of gender stereotypes through social networks; the social isolation caused by abusive use of the mobile phone, and the ethical and credibility problems generated by the rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence.

The Communication Library and General Newspaper Archives at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), founded 50 years ago and closely tied to the Faculty of Communication Studies (UAB) —the longest-standing communication studies programme in Catalonia— has evolved to become a key actor for students, teachers, researchers and journalists, and for society in general, keeping apace with digitalisation.
This article sets out to further explore the evolution of this facility and the knowledge in its collections, both of which have made it a benchmark in the arena of university libraries and in support for teaching and scholarly research specialising in communication. The quality and uniqueness of the holdings also provide a glimpse into a time period and a country.

Digitalisation has caused changes in the job search strategies of young people, who are increasingly dependent on specialised internet portals. For Communication graduates, having digital skills is also a requirement to find a job in this professional sector. The present study examines the impact of digitalisation on Communication graduates in both facets of access to the labour market. With this dual purpose, a survey was conducted among recent graduates (N=198) to learn about their job search strategies, and interviews were carried out with professionals in the communication sector (N=11) to identify the competencies and skills that companies require from young graduates. The results indicate that personal contacts continue to be the main way to find a job, and that companies in the sector demand technical/technological skills from new graduates that university training does not seem to be sufficiently providing.

This article proposes the use of YouTube as a tool of formative dissemination of the activities associated with the final project in the bachelor’s in Advertising and Public Relations at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Specifically, it examines this formative approach through the creation of video tutorials, while also seeking to promote students’ active participation, giving them a prominent role in their own training process by asking them to produce videos to present and defend their final projects.