Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice, and Liberation (review)

Laura Rendón's new book, Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy, is challenging, inspiring, beautifully written, and unusual. Written by a highly regarded scholar of higher education, this book calls readers to find ways to link mind and heart—thinking and feeling—to transform teaching and learning in higher education. In Rendón's words, she is striving "to shatter the belief system [within higher education] that has worked against wholeness, multiculturalism, and social justice" (p. 1).

Rendón is concerned with the stress, loneliness, and dearth of time that many faculty members find for developing relationships with their students and in their own lives, and with the fact that teaching often does not involve helping students explore their emotions, connect with their life experiences, learn to be good listeners, handle conflicts, or embrace diversity. Drawing on a wide range of literature concerning education, philosophy, and psychology, the wisdom of her Latino ancestors as well as that of other indigenous peoples, her own experience with reflection and meditation, and systematic interviews and data analysis, she organizes the book around a core question: "What is the experience of creating a teaching and learning dream (pedagogic vision) based on wholeness and consonance, respecting the harmonious rhythm between the outer experience of intellectualism and rational analysis and the inner dimension of insight, emotion, and awareness?" (p. 2).

Following a useful introduction that frames the purpose and organization of the book, Chapter 1 names, defines, and analyzes what Rendón calls seven "agreements"—widely held assumptions—that typically guide teaching and learning in American universities and colleges. These include agreements to privilege intellectual and rational learning, separation, competition, perfection, monoculturalism, outer work, and the avoidance of self-examination. For each agreement, Rendón offers an alternative that, if incorporated into a teacher's thinking and practice, would contribute to greater wholeness, growth, and authenticity in both teacher and learner.

After describing the 15 faculty members whom she interviewed, included in the study because of their reputations for and commitment to teaching in holistic ways, Rendón presents two approaches to teaching ("positions") that exemplify her pedagogic vision. This vision for "an integrative, consonant pedagogy" (p. 65) involves the ability to see the connections between seeming opposites, such as thinking and feeling.

Faculty members who adopt the first approach see the connections between intellectual understanding and reflective practice and, choosing to honor but not to privilege mental knowledge, use contemplative practice, as well as other teaching practices, to help students deepen their learning. While maintaining a commitment to academic rigor, the teaching strategies highlighted in the descriptions of these teachers' work include the use of storytelling, photographs, music, meditation and reflection, and retreats. For those teaching from this position, the goal of the learning process is for students to gain both knowledge and wisdom.

The second teaching position presented is "an integrative, consonant pedagogy rooted in social justice" (p. 92). In addition to the goals just described, teachers holding this vision are committed to social justice, activism, and liberation. Rendón explains how this kind of teaching can help students who have been disenfranchised to see their potential, feel validated, and find ways to link their life experiences with their academic work. Pedagogical strategies include the use of writing as contemplative practice, the use of participatory epistemology that connects with students' contexts and backgrounds, involvement in service learning, encouragement of an ethic of care, and self-reflexivity to encourage awareness and growth.

Rendón devotes part of the last third of the book to exploring how the faculty she has studied came to hold and practice a new vision of teaching and learning that essentially, she explains, constitutes "pedagogical dissent" (p. 113) in the face of long-held assumptions about educational practice. The stories of the faculty are inspiring and offer practical ideas for those interested in effecting change in their own teaching.

The penultimate chapter then offers...