Abstract
Introduction: Awakening Sleepy Knowledge
As we tumble deeper into socio-ecological crisis, millions of people continue to deny that the climate is even changing. The disturbing continuity of “business as usual” in the face of increasingly alarming climate metrics belies how deeply dominant paradigms of thought are embedded into our social fabrics. Centuries of patriarchal, cis-hetero, neoliberal, white supremacist, settler-colonial capitalism, driven by master values of hyper-individualism and unlimited growth, have imposed hegemonic ideologies of separability and rank on our societal structures and internalized narratives. Reversing course on climate catastrophe requires identifying and rejecting the oppressive ideologies deeply embedded in our understandings of the world and recovering what has been silenced by the dominant epistemology. Cartesian binaries are at the heart of this epistemology, falsely dividing the world into hierarchical categories: human over nature; man over woman; mind over body; rational over emotional. Environmental injustice and the precarity of our planet are the ultimate manifestations of this epistemology.
Our ways of thinking and knowing are at the center of the intersecting struggles against the violent structures of settler-colonial capitalism. Dismantling oppressive structures begins with critically examining how they manifest within our own habits of mind. The violent imposition of “Western” 1 reasoning, which privileges the cognitive over all else, has dulled our awareness of our extrarational senses—the emotional, embodied, imagined, remembered, dreamt, spiritual, and ethereal—disconnecting us from ways of knowing that are critical to our collective survival and well-being. Re-entanglement with the entirety of our senses is essential to identifying and challenging these oppressive ideologies as well as imagining and constructing better ways of being.
Extrarational pedagogies that activate our creativity, tap into our subconscious, center our emotional and embodied experiences, and stretch our concepts of time allow us to bend the limits of the present and the imaginary lines drawn by hegemonic thought. We are able to see beyond the boundaries—into what was lost, what is hidden, and what could be. Extrarational pedagogies allow us to transform our perspectives to more accurately reflect a multiplicity of knowings to reconstruct a more just world. They encourage us to transform our perspectives toward environmental justice by providing space to critically challenge dominant paradigms and empathetically experiment with creative alternatives. Creative expression, as Freire (2004) noted, grants us the ability to simultaneously “denounc [e] how we are living and announc [e] how we could live” (p. 105).
Freire’s concept of
This paper builds on previous
The following sections offer a characterization and critique of Global North epistemologies and the problem of separability and its consequences and propose extrarationality, Indigenous and Global South epistemologies, and pedagogies of creative expression as an antidote. We draw on scholarship and examples mainly from the Americas. We conclude that our global socio-ecological crises urgently require deep engagement with creative, counterhegemonic and extrarational ways of knowing, being, and learning to envision and create a better world for future generations.
Epistemologies of the North: Separability in “Western” Ways of Knowing
“Western” thought, or “epistemologies of the North” (Santos, 2018), is defined by Eurocentric paradigms of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, “the three modes of modern domination” (p. 23). While these parameters are painfully real, their existence is predicated on ideological domination. The fictitious but powerful boundaries drawn by colonial modernity function as “a grammar that defines what is intelligible, legitimate, viable, and desirable” (Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures, 2018, p. 4). This grammar is a clever self-defense mechanism promoted by interrelated systems of oppression that declare anything outside, not definable by them, to be worthless or even sinister. Separability, “the attempt to deny our entanglement with the earth, the cosmos, and each other,” is a key precept of these forms of domination (p. 5). Separability rejects the notion that humans are part of the ecosystems that sustain us and that our survival depends on our collective and mutual well-being.
Rooted in Enlightenment era Cartesian thought, Northern epistemologies divide the world into binary and often antagonistic categories: mind versus body, rational versus emotional, human versus nature, man versus woman, and individual versus collective (Hoggan et al., 2017; Plumwood, 2002). Activists and scholars from many disciplines have identified these illusory Cartesian dualities to be at the foundation of the systemic inequalities that structure the modern world (Dirkx, 2008; Escobar, 2020; Foster et al., 2019; Hoggan et al., 2017; Plumwood, 2002; Santos, 2018; Walker & Hornstein, 2018; Walker & Palacios, 2016). The dominant social groups construct hierarchies of difference that solidify and perpetuate their rank and status, alleging these definitions to be universal, natural, and objectively true. The teleological epistemologies of the North narrowly define rationality according to this deeply colonial Cartesian logic, claiming to have a monopoly on “reason.” By marking themselves as superior beings, the powerful claim absolute ontological and real authority over anything marked as “other” and therefore inferior. By imposing this imaginary hierarchy and denying our socio-ecological interconnectivity, all things and beings suddenly “need to justify their existence by producing value in predetermined economies of worth” (Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures, 2018, p. 4). The allegedly innate differences outlined by Northern epistemologies “relegate some to a function of serving others, to being dominated, robbed, enslaved” (Collard & Dempsey, 2018, p. 1352), resulting in a social order in which “a vast group of people, nonhuman beings and activities—those involved in socio-ecological reproduction—are devalued, rendered ‘cheaper’... or sacrificial...” (p. 1358). Those deemed less valuable have always been bitterly exposed to the consequences of these flawed paradigms, absorbing the bulk of all shocks to the fragile systems of capitalism. Entire communities are relegated to “human sacrifice zones” (Bullard, 1993, p.12, p.12)—areas where policymakers allow or even encourage concentrated industrial contamination.
The hegemony of the Cartesian binary not only fallaciously divides us in a physical sense—but it also fractures our very ways of knowing. Alienation from our own senses has left us with a world of “confined or thwarted sensitivities” (Santos, 2018, p. 183). Separability severs the connections between other beings and our own ways of knowing—connections that offer vital clues to our health and well-being. Ignoring our interconnectivity and the totality of our senses not only deprives us of some of the most celebrated aspects of existence, but it also cuts us off from feedback loops that ought to be informing us of our ecological limitations. We are dangerously desensitized to the warning signs perceived by extrarational ways of knowing. Separability also obscures the connection between our shared feelings and deprives us of the ability to constellate our experiences. Northern epistemologies construct affective sensations as isolated, individual experiences—entirely separate from our thoughts, the affective experiences of others, and the socio-cultural systems we inhabit. Reflecting on the connections between our shared experiences is a key process in building critical consciousness. Obscuring the origins of our feelings prevents us from identifying and constellating structural causes that influence our affective experiences. Denying that emotions are shaped by socio-environmental factors perpetuates Cartesian myths, shrouding the impacts of systems of oppression in a cloak of individuality.
Decades of critical scholarship propose that “behavioral and expressive conduct is developed according to socially enforced rules of power” (Boler, 1999, p. 4). Epistemologies of the North maintain “the common idea that we must ‘control’ our emotions and, if we don’t, our ‘inappropriate’ emotional behavior may be pathologized and medicated” (p. 8). Affect is constructed, interpreted, and “mediated by sociological processes” (Dirkx, 2008, p. 13) that are heavily gendered and racialized. The separation and devaluation of feelings have led to a policing and silencing of affective ways of being, particularly of marginalized groups, perpetuating systems of oppression and the preeminence of masculinized “Western reasoning.” Women’s “association with emotion, nature, and passive subordination” (Boler, 1999, p. 9), all traits on the losing side of Cartesian binaries, has historically been used to justify “their exclusion from the rational polis” (p. 7), especially for BIPOC women. In the 1960s and 1970s, US Civil Rights activists recognized emotional subjugation as a basis for gendered and racial oppression. Activists for Black Power, queer liberation, and radical feminism took “emotions out of the (patriarchally enforced) private spheres and put emotions on the political and public map” (p. 112). These movements recognized that emotions cannot be disentangled from our other ways of knowing, proposing instead that “emotions inform the cognitive process and ‘rational’ production of knowledge” (p. 115). Revalorizing and reintegrating affect into our way of being are vital to expanding our perspectives toward paradigms of equity and justice. By intentionally incorporating extrarational ways of knowing into our pedagogies, we move with learners toward critical environmental justice learning.
Extrarationality: Beyond Epistemologies of the North
Extrarationality is an intentionally nebulous term that is meant to challenge the Cartesian binary of rational versus irrational. Extrarationality is simply that which “goes beyond rationality” (Lawrence, 2012, p. 471). Extrarationality is an “inclusive concept” that “does not reject rationality” but recognizes its complementarity with other, more holistic ways of knowing (p. 472). Extrarationality and rationality are inextricably woven together in our ways of perceiving, knowing, and being. Davis-Manigaulte et al. (2006) define these “expressive ways of knowing” as forms of imagination and intuition (p. 27). This includes knowing derived from emotion, physical sensations, intuition, memories, ancestral knowledge, dreams, imagination, creative practices, accessing the subconscious, and spiritual experiences. Epistemologies of Indigenous Peoples and the Global South have for millennia had understandings of how multiple ways of being and perceiving inform our existence in the world. Northern epistemologies have recently begun to appreciate the importance of “extrarational” emotions in transformative learning theory as well.
Indigenous Epistemologies and Pedagogies
Although it is not possible nor appropriate to universalize the multitude of evolving Indigenous ways of knowing, Indigenous scholars have identified commonalities shared across many cultures. Here, we rely on relatively recent Indigenous and adult education scholarship to outline what we see as some key points. Battiste and Henderson (2000) offer one possible unified conceptualization of Indigenous ways of knowing: “the expression of the vibrant relationships between people, their ecosystems, and other living beings and spirits that share their lands” (quoted in McGregor, 2004, p. 390). Indigenous knowledge is at once relational, land-based, sensorial, multigenerational, collectively constructed, grounded in survival and adaptability, and holistic (Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005; Castellano, 2000; McGregor, 2004). Such knowledge is spiritual, embodied, relational, and sacred. Indigenous knowledge and epistemologies, identity, learning, teaching, and being cannot be separated from the land, from place, from other humans, from our bodies, from emotions, from spirit, or from all our relations (animals, plants, rocks, streams, mountains, fish, birds, insects, and seaweeds—all the multiplicity of beings of the Earth).
Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge have been honed over thousands of years and are an educative, liberating counterpoint to the separability and alienation of epistemologies of the North. Their deeply relational understanding of knowledge, learning, pedagogy, and existence emphasizes our interconnectivity and collective planetary survival. Indigenous ways of knowing look to all our relations for cues about patterns and fractals that can be found in human and more-than-human worlds. Paula Gunn Allen of the Laguna Pueblo People writes that Indigenous ways of knowing hold a “basic assumption of the wholeness of unity of the universe,” in which “our natural and necessary relationship to all life is evident” (quoted in Simpson, 2014, p. 11). As such, meaning can be divined through studying this “compassionate web of interdependent relationships” (p. 11).
While empirical observations play a major role in Indigenous ways of knowing, Indigenous epistemologies would consider an ontology based on purely cognitive perceptions to be woefully incomplete (Castellano, 2000; McGregor, 2004). Other sources of Indigenous knowing include embedded traditional knowledge and “revealed knowledge,” which includes the dreamed, imagined, intuited, and otherwise sensed, including the practice of “envisioning” in which “people imagine a future [where] they rise above present-day situations…dream a new dream and set a new vision” (Smith, 2012, p. 254). Since Indigenous ways of knowing are intimately tied to the processes of learning, Indigenous pedagogies cannot be separated from Indigenous ways of knowing. Both Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies take into account all senses, recognizing learning as a spiritual, whole-body, learner-led process of “coming to know” (Simpson, 2014, p. 7) in which “one lives [Indigenous knowledge] rather than studies it” (McGregor, 2004, p. 394).
Indigenous pedagogies might be seen to include (a) those which have been traditionally practiced for thousands of years, (b) those developed for Indigenous resistance, revival, and resurgence in response to 500 years of colonial genocide, land dispossession, and violence (Fenelon, 2014; Nabakov, 2020), and (c) all manner of continuously evolving and innovating Indigenous pedagogies across history and in the present day (Atleo, 2016; Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005; Cajete, 1994; McGregor, 2004; Napan et al., 2020; Simpson, 2014; Tuck et al., 2014; Williams, 2018). These transformative pedagogies are grounded in tradition and decolonization, critical not only to Indigenous Peoples but also to all peoples on the Earth. They offer possibilities for addressing the ecological disaster in which we find ourselves. For example, the transformative pedagogies of Native American Land Defenders and Water Protectors involve traditional ceremonial practice; learning respect for all our relations; relearning ancestry, place, and identity; unlearning imposed colonial thinking, knowing, and being as well as the separations, subordinations, and subjugations wrought by settler-colonial worldviews, history, and epistemologies; and an abundance of educational practices, strategies, and policies for climate justice and Indigenous rights to land (Kluttz et al., 2020; Tuck et al., 2014; Williams, 2018). This is not just a revival of traditional Indigenous knowledge and cultures, not just a multitude of resistance pedagogies to settler-colonialism, but a powerful and creative fusion of transformative learning, education, and activism for all people as we encounter a looming climate crisis.
Epistemologies of the South
Epistemologies of the South (ES), like Indigenous transformative pedagogies, embody a rich counterhegemonic framework in the pursuit of global cognitive justice. A major ES framework formulated by Portuguese scholar-activist Boaventura de Sousa Santos draws on over three decades of conversations with people from social movements around the world (Escobar, 2020, p. 67). ES seeks to produce and validate “knowledge anchored in the experience of resistance of all those social groups that have systematically suffered injustice, oppression, and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy” (Santos, 2018, p. 1). ES represents both an interruption to the dominant hegemonies of the Global North and “a moment of imagination” (p. 126) in which ways of knowing disavowed by dominant epistemologies are redeemed. The Venezuelan Puerto Ayacucho environmental justice movement calls these ways of knowing “sleepy knowledge” (Hall, 2009, p. 55). ES is founded on two premises: “(1) the understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western understanding of the world; and (2) the cognitive experience of the world is extremely diverse, and the absolute priority given to modern science has entailed a massive epistemicide” (Santos, 2018, p. 296). In the wake of this epistemicide, the Global South is tasked with recovering what has been lost and obscured by narrow Northern epistemologies—of awakening the “sleepy knowledge” upon which our collective survival depends.
Working toward ecological justice necessitates an inclusive engagement with a diversity of ways of knowing often overlooked or actively repressed by settler-colonial capitalist epistemologies. ES “rebels” against Cartesian dualism and seeks to “erase the power hierarchies inhabiting them” (Santos, 2018, p. 7). In contrast to Northern epistemologies that perpetuate a myth of universality and objectivity, ES recognizes “the copresence of different ways of knowing” (p. 8) that inhabit an “ecology of knowledges.” Epistemologies of the South are born out of the knowing generated in centuries of struggle against colonial domination. ES recognizes the diversity of ways of knowing not in competition but rather as the foundation for “a world where many worlds fit” (Escobar, 2020, p. 74). This vision seeks to heal what Cartesian divisions have ripped apart, reweaving inclusive, sustainable futures.
Santos (2018) proposes the Andean concept of
Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda identifies the related concept of
Environmental justice education necessitates this type of warmer, more integrated reasoning of
Emotions and Perspective Transformation
For centuries, epistemologies of the North have treated emotions as “an anathema to reason and knowing” (Dirkx, 2008, p. 14), delegitimizing, dismissing, or even vilifying other ways of knowing. Northern education literature typically treats emotions as obstacles (as argued by, e.g., Dirkx, 2001, 2008; Walker, 2017; Walker & Palacios, 2016). Feelings have tended to be regarded as something that needs to be “‘overcome’ so that students can get down to the serious, cognitive, and rational task of learning” (Walker, 2017, p. 358). This negative treatment of emotions severely stifles the possibilities to enter classrooms as whole people. More recently, education scholars have also viewed emotions as potential “motivators of learning” (Dirkx, 2001, p. 67), though this approach still fails to challenge dominant paradigms of thought that separate our ways of knowing. Feminist scholar Elana Michelson (1998) indicated that cognition is
By tending to our emotions instead of ignoring them, we gain valuable insights into the perspective transformation process. Fostering awareness of our emotions better positions learners to “bring their affective states and conceptual sense making into alignment” (Davis-Manigaulte et al., 2006, p. 32), which is essential to perspective transformation. The disparity between our cognitive conditioning and our other ways of knowing can be immensely generative for learning. Boler (1999) highlights the study of emotions as an invaluable opportunity “to explore the revealed ‘space’ between ideology and internalized feelings” (p. 13). By noting this disparity and sitting with whatever discomfort it brings, we can reflect on how and why we developed certain habits of mind that may not be aligned with our current understanding of the world. Reversing course on climate catastrophe requires identifying and rejecting “inherently manipulative and duplicitous” (Brookfield, 2010, p. 219) ideologies that are deeply embedded in our understandings of the world, alienating us from our intuitive awareness, embodied experiences, and historical consciousness. Unpacking these tensions and diving into the roots of our beliefs are important processes in transforming our perspectives toward ecological justice.
Failing to heed our affective senses has had catastrophic consequences for our world. Challenging the stigma associated with expressions of emotion is an important step in recovering affective ways of knowing. While grief, rage, and anguish may be very reasonable reactions to a dying planet, displays of such emotions are “deemed hysterical or illogical” by the Cartesian gaze (Clover et al., 2013, p. 38). Our affective ignorance is allowing us to disregard the alarm signs that we are headed in a devastating direction. Joanna Macy’s
Pedagogies that embrace the difficulty and complexity of our emotions can help us sit with the discomfort of unpleasant emotions and learn from them instead of ignoring their critical lessons. Recentering our extrarational sense can help us become “more attuned to ourselves—our minds, bodies, and emotions,” and “ultimately become more attuned to others” (Walker & Hornstein, 2018), a prerequisite for constructing a more just world. Centering our affective experiences not only helps us to embrace uncomfortable feelings but also opens space for the tremendous positive potential for feelings to propel and sustain movements for social justice. Radical scholars such as bell Hooks (2003), Adrienne Maree Brown (2019), and Freire et al. (2014) have written extensively on the importance of hope, joy, pleasure, and love in social justice learning. Santos (2018) argues that “joy and revolt are the existential preconditions of resistance,” underwriting our hopes to overcome injustice (p. 97). Emotions such as hopefulness and joy are vital to sustaining individual and collective will to persist. We are more resilient to weather the difficult feelings that arise in climate justice work when we are buoyed by hope.
Pedagogies of Creative Expression
Creative and imaginative practices are crucial to the unlearning and relearning processes involved in shifting our perspectives toward environmental justice. Art helps us connect our extrarational senses with our cognitive understandings, a crucial process in the re-entanglement of our ways of knowing and the pursuit of meaning-making and cognitive justice. Creative expression is a tremendous conduit to the extrarational senses that have been dulled by the hegemony of “reason.” Activating our imagination helps us “access our extrarational knowledge,” which is often “hidden away in our subconscious mind” (Blackburn Miller, 2020, p. 341). When we are encouraged to cultivate our extrarational senses instead of being incentivized to ignore them, other paradigms and possibilities for understanding the world are free to emerge. Watkins and Shulman (2008, p. 233) write about how art can help us access and interpret “buried” extrarational knowing: Within buried layers of symbolic meaning, there are resources for lives lived otherwise, a compost where energy is building, where seeds of hope and transformation may take root. Because many of those resources will have never been spoken fully, the best access is often through image-making in the arts, a process that allows first for the creation of meaningful symbols and then for dialogues of interpretation.
Through creative expression, we are able both to access extrarational knowledge and to explore its meaning. Drawing this extrarational knowledge out in a supported pedagogical setting helps us recover and make sense of knowing that has been ignored or silenced. No longer bound to the confines of artificially imposed constructions, it is easier to temporarily step outside dominant paradigms. Creative pedagogies provide an open-ended space for experimentation, a fruitful environment for perspective transformation. Learning through art is not prescriptive but highly evocative. For Greene (1995), the importance of imagination in education is not to look for “specific blueprints for a better society,” but rather to look “beyond the actual, to play with untapped possibilities” (p. 48). Educators do not look to works of art to “provide the right answer,” but rather “open new dialogues among students regarding what can be otherwise in a society” (Monk et al., 2019, p. 232). Creative pedagogies help us develop the tools both necessary to analyze our present situations and construct better alternatives. Art empowers us and gives us the space to do both.
Documentaries, for example, can be powerful tools for building empathy and solidarity in environmental justice movements. In southeastern Morocco, the community of Imider is struggling against the largest silver mine in Africa, owned by a subsidiary of the Moroccan royal family’s holding company (Movement on the Road’96, 2019). Seeking international support for their struggle, the community collaborated with a young Moroccan activist-filmmaker to make a documentary,
Street art, as another example, is a creative pedagogy that provides a direct channel of communication with the public. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, artists and activists often use street art to engage in conversation about the city’s multiple environmental crises. The mARTadero cultural center offers a Bike Art Tour where visitors learn about featured murals and their artists as they pedal around the crowded streets of Cochabamba (Bike Art Tour, 2018). This multisensory experience forces visitors' attention toward our embodied responses to the climate crisis as they roast in the Andean sun under a hole in the O-Zone layer and choke on the city’s infamous air pollution. Hosts note often overlooked historical landmarks and events—a practice in “counter-memory” (Watkins & Shulman, 2008)—recovering that which has been buried under official accounts of the victors. The tour challenges both our sense of history and hints at alternative futures. With ample time to chat, the tour is also a forum to unpack the sensory inputs of the day and engage in community meaning-making.
A final example is Theater of the Oppressed (TO), a pedagogy developed by Agosto Boal (2009) inspired by Freire’s (2000)
We cannot develop viable alternatives to our world and ways of being without the opportunity to imagine and practice them first. Boal (2009) summarized the radical pedagogical potential of the arts: “…perhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself, but this is surely a rehearsal for revolution” (p. 131). The highly flexible nature of the arts makes creative pedagogies ideally suited for environmental justice education. The methods of TO, for example, have been taken up and modified for just about any circumstance or context. All levels of skills and experience are welcome. Since the emphasis is on the act of expression rather than the finished product, arts pedagogies can often be accomplished with a low budget. In promoting climate justice, pedagogies of creative expression free our imaginations to help us identify, analyze, escape our circumstances, and dream of better ones.
Conclusion
Centuries of domination by the “cognitive empire” (Santos, 2018) of Northern epistemologies have delivered our world to a place of disentanglement and dissociation. Settler-colonial capitalism has left us bereft of our extrarational senses, replacing them with hegemonic ideologies of separability and hierarchy that have become deeply embedded within our own. This silences other ways of knowing, deprives us of our ability to constellate our experiences, and shrouds deep-seated structural inequalities mediating our experiences in a cloak of individual responsibility, relegating those on the losing sides of Cartesian binaries to a position of subjugation. Marginalized communities bear the brunt of global environmental crises precipitated by paradigms of unlimited growth and are forced to absorb the externalized consequences of a viciously unsustainable system.
The cascade of ecological catastrophes we face necessitates an inclusive engagement with a diversity of ways of knowing often overlooked or actively repressed by dominant epistemologies. ES and Indigenous epistemologies offer frameworks for knowing and being that challenge the intellectual and literal violence of Northern epistemologies, proposing instead a diverse ecology of knowing to confront and repair global environmental injustices. The age-old traditions of Indigenous pedagogies challenge the isolationism of Western education philosophy, instead framing education as a sensorial, relational, collectively constructed, holistic, interconnected, and active pursuit. Such pedagogies promote perspective shifts toward empathetic solidarity, compassionate accountability, and an awareness of our interconnectivity. Although intellectual traditions of the Global South are seldom properly accredited, Northern environmental justice movements have no doubt derived some of their foundational values from these worldviews: interconnectivity, seeing beyond the present, connecting with the Earth, and building networks of collective care. The “warming up” of education and environmental justice movements in the Global North are signs that the weaving of an Ecology of Knowledges (Santos, 2018) is well under way.
Environmental justice educators can encourage the unlearning of hegemonic paradigms of exploitation and separability in favor of more sustainable, just alternatives by helping us access our extrarational ways of knowing. Extrarational pedagogies that center our affective experiences and activate our creativity support us in perspective transformation through the emotionally laden territory of the climate crisis. Strategically welcoming our feelings instead of eschewing them helps us reconnect with our extrarational senses, each other, our sense of time, and our sense of connectivity to the Earth and beyond. Drawing attention to our extrarational experiences aids us in reintegrating the senses that have been artificially bifurcated under Cartesian logic, assisting in the process of meaning-making. As we develop a keener sense of ourselves and our connection to those around us, we become more attuned to our needs and the needs of others, including the Earth.
Art gives us the freedom to embrace the discomfort, tensions, and unknowingness that arise when our perspectives are challenged. Art as pedagogy embraces contradiction and can help us sort out the tensions and complexities that arise when we are reflecting on our viewpoints and feelings. Art can also provide distance and protection that make it feel safer to experiment with new ideas. Creative pedagogies that challenge us to step out of our habitual cognitive safety encourage the flexibility required for perspective transformation. Creative pedagogies afford us the ability to examine our problems and offer new, viable solutions. Placing creative power in the hands of the learner increases our sense of agency and challenges the notion that we are powerless to change our circumstances. To alter our circumstances, we must first alter our idea of what is possible. As the late beat poet Diane di Prima (1990) wrote, “the only war that matters is the war against the imagination/all other wars are subsumed in it” (p.160).
Footnotes
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