Sentipensar, or Feel-thinking: A Critical Pedagogy for Learning

What Is The Issue?

Authors:

Kelsie Fowler | APRIL 2026

Things To Consider

Science learning is an emotional experience—especially when it concerns culturally relevant, personal, and justice-oriented topics. While at times challenging, epistemic affect catalyzes scientific curiosity, concern, and ultimately stabilizes disciplinary engagement. Learners’ rapid shifts in emotions also point to important sociocultural connections and ideas, which “prime” educators and the learning community to commit to deeper sensemaking and explore different learning pathways. Many educators have not learned to engage emotions as key sensemaking resources—and it is common for heightened emotions (especially unexpected or challenging ones) to be misinterpreted, policed, mitigated, shamed, or neglected.

Instead, educators should embrace the Indigenous Latin American concept of Sentipensar (feel-thinking). This critical, fully embodied approach to learning and being in the world does not separate emotion from reason, nor care from knowledge. It legitimizes heart-mind sensemaking as a vital practice that supports collective thriving.

Research has shown that when youth and adult learners engage in Sentipensar (with or without the support, intentional or not), it can…

1. Foster more honest and communal sensemaking of observations, data, protocols, etc., often motivating a responsive action
2. Clarify, or deepen, existing understandings — which often shift or deepen important values and ethics around knowledge of the topic
3. Be used in self-determination to defend oneself, one’s community, surrounding environment, other life, and other things they care about
4. Cultivate science identities and collective worldbuilding toward future thriving that radically resists common doom and despair narratives

By drawing prolonged attention to particular ideas and events, Sentipensar is a compass guiding individual & collective thinking, ethical decision-making, and action. This feel-thinking often requires deeper engagement with accepted Science and Engineering Practices, because real contextual matters, people, community, and visions of the future are distinctly centered within learning. In this way, Sentipensar defies foreclosed futures by taking up speculative thinking to honor what the world should be as first steps of building a better future.

Attending to Equity

• Different cultures and communities have varying norms for how, when, and with whom to express and process emotions. Learning to desettle what learning science looks like, and accept diverse forms of sensemaking, will help cultivate respect for multiple ways of knowing.
• Learners from marginalized backgrounds, who are deeply impacted by what is being learned (e.g., local pollution, sea level rise), often experience and express more challenging emotions. Rather than censor or police these responses, offer support and understand these moments as indicators of deep knowledge, care, and calling for collective action.

Recommended Actions You Can Take

• Learn about eco-emotions from the rapidly expanding field! There are many resources for learning more about mental health and tools processing emotions.
• Develop a practice of slowing down to do personal emotional check-ins and engage in Sentipensar. Work on identifying how you are feeling, the cause, how this connects to what you’ve been learning/teaching/doing, consider responses, and reflect on this sensemaking process and outcomes once you have had more space.
• Learn to notice learners’ emotional responses during learning. Do so without judgment—focus on identifying what happened, what was said, and how others responded. Be curious about what is being expressed and the impact it has.
• Develop instructional routines to use with learners to support them in discussing their feelings and connecting these to learning, and their ideas of self and the future.

ALSO SEE STEM TEACHING TOOLS

• #108 Research on Climate Emotions
• PD Diverse Sense-Making
• #80 Reframing Eco-Anxiety
• #104 Socio-ecological Language