PANEL: Reimagining Educational Experience

My work examines love as a way of knowing, framed by epistemological considerations from a diversity and inclusion standpoint. It applies the findings in pedagogic contexts to support a revitalization of knowledge-making practices that address issues of epistemic injustice in classrooms and beyond.

The traditional western classroom operates on epistemological traditions that prioritize certain forms of knowledge over others, namely Descartes’s mind/body split (Paris & Winn, 2014) in a “banking” model of education that Freire critiques as "characteristic of the ideology of oppression” (Freire, 2017). Pedagogies that stem from these limited models of knowledge-making often alienate students who come from different epistemological backgrounds; as Junot Diaz wrote about the creative writing classroom in particular, “I was a person of color in a workshop whose theory of reality did not include my most fundamental experiences” (Chavez, 2021). This gestures to the need for not only radically inclusive practices that shift dynamics of privilege and marginalization but also distinct ways of knowing that honour other ways to be. 

I use theoretical frameworks outlined by feminist pedagogues such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Ursula K. Le Guin to argue that love is crucial to dismantling colonial understandings of “legitimate knowledge” in favour of “knowledge in the making” intersecting with “selves in the making” (Ellsworth, 2005). I also engage with decolonial methodologies like storytelling, connecting, and sharing (Smith, 2012) to honour the many forms in which learning has existed across cultures for centuries. Seeing knowledge as embodied, relational process foregrounds praxis that caters to diverse lived experiences and identities. While pedagogues including Freire have written about the role of love in pedagogy, I focus especially on the epistemological implications of love, based on definitions of revolutionary love outlined by queer Black feminists, including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, bell hooks, and adrienne maree brown.

I came to this topic while working with Indigenous youth in Canada, and with the federal government as a Policy Analyst in the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, where questions of what counts as legitimate knowledge and data are highly relevant. Different communities had different definitions of how to learn, how to transmit that learning, and even what counts as learning or knowledge itself; these concerns are not limited to the Canadian context but essential to engage with everywhere. As part of my project, I developed anti-racist and decolonial writing workshops to further accessible ways of supporting students historically excluded from institutions of learning due to the delegitimization of their lived realities. Based on my teaching experience, I will share examples of exercises that provoke attention to emergence, holding emotions, and embracing love as ways of making sense in community, in opposition to a Cartesian mind/body split.

With the increasing prevalence of AI in education, developing different ways to learn and know has become extremely relevant not only to marginalized students but to everyone. I argue that love is a deeply critical skill and a means to counter current challenges to engage students in critical thinking, as LLM models can bring about a "knowledge collapse" (Peterson, 2025): a gradual narrowing of the information humans can access, along with a declining awareness of other viewpoints and other ways of knowing, the more that we treat that knowledge as singular or static. As such, though my work has clear outcomes in classroom spaces, these epistemological considerations can act as a guiding framework across a range of settings and disciplines as we redefine what knowledge means and how to share it in this crucial time.