Elephant watering (w)hole: Transrational learning spaces

Abstract

Critical pedagogies, including postmodern, postcolonial and feminist approaches, highlight the importance of critical thinking, situated knowledges, ways of knowing and a politics of location. In this chapter, the author expands this terrain and explores transrational encounters and interpretations of facilitating in the classroom in the United States. A transrational pedagogical orientation both epistemologically and ontologically twists rationality as one mode of perception and offers cutting edge insights into creating multidimensional learning spaces for critical thinking, seeing, relating and being. Transrational approaches to facilitating are relational, experiential and a force of life. This chapter merges critical pedagogy and peace research and expands upon intersectionality and positionality within the classroom, utilizing transrational philosophy and its practical implications. In this context, (differential) power and privilege play out and are facilitated within a systemic approach to conflict, difference and plurality. In this sense, the classroom is a dynamic and living space of deep meaning where students explore their own unfinished processes of transformation, self-actualization and interconnectedness. Flowing in and through the relational and experiential individual, the author moves from intersubjective consciousness in the classroom to relational shapes of spirit of individual and transpersonal consciousness, an embodied and living transrational pedagogical space.