Sensory, Affective, Imaginative and Land-Based knowledge and pedagogy

SAIL knowledge and pedagogy emerged from interdisciplinary research on the meaning and sharing of local experiential knowledge. It draws from a constellation of disciplines and bodies of literature chosen for pragmatic rather than theory-building purpose:

Sensory knowledge: “I know through my hands” , “I understand a place by walking it” , “I can taste the difference” (Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body; Camilla Groth’s Expanding Environmental Awareness in Education Through the Arts: Crafting-with the Environment)
Affective knowledge: emotions as signals of what is salient, to what extent and why; the role of positive emotional connection to objects, materials and topics vs negative emotions such as discomfort and disgust in learning (Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge and Political Emotions, Rick Anthony Furtak's Knowing Emotions, Alexa Weik von Mossner's Affective Ecologies)
Imaginative knowledge: imagination allows us to ‘test out’ ideas, to learn what it is like to be in someone’s else position, to empathize with people, objects and materials (Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, Dorothy Walsh's Literature and Knowledge, Mary Midgley's Science and Poetry)
Land-based learning: material practices, being (with/in) ecosystems (Tim Ingold's Perception of the Environment and Being Alive, John Dewey's Art as Experience)

Research on experiential knowledge and SAIL pedagogy

SAIL pedagogy is meant to help design and assess experiential learning activities in undergraduate education by guiding students’ learning in a way that helps them pay attention to their senses, emotions, and giving them prompts that trigger their imagination and enable them to better understand the nature and value of experiential knowledge. The SAIL pedagogical approach builds upon my previous research on local knowledge and its affective and narrative dimensions (Klenk 2018) as well as a research on the role of emotions in climate risk assessment and climate adaptation (Salas Reyes et al., 2021, Lemos and Klenk, 2021, Harada et al., 2022) SAIL pedagogy reflects the importance of emotions and embodied experience as ways of knowing in sustainability practice and daily life.

SAIL pedagogy recognizes that experiential knowledge is often shared through storytelling that describes an experience. Evocative and impactful stories cue the reader/listener to important emotional content, the significance of specifics actions and reactions as well as rich descriptions of the social and physical context of the experience.

Current SAIL pedagogy research projects

Crafting empathy in sustainability education: a sensory, affective, imaginative and land-based (SAIL) pedagogical approach. In undergraduate sustainability education, empathy is a crucial practice to develop to understand and be responsive to the complex problems facing humanity and the natural world. Empathy is important because appropriate and just individual and collective decisions are not just a matter of responsibilities and obligations that are prescribed by rules, social norms and policy, they are about how we engage in embodied and emotional ways with people and the land that sustain us. This study describes the SAIL pedagogical approach and the SAIL questionnaire developed to guide students’ observations of their emotions, the physical and social context of the experiential learning activity, the tools, materials and senses used, the task load, challenges, learning outcomes and level of satisfaction with what students have learned to do in the activity. The questionnaire prompts imaginative engagement with materials as a way to teach empathy.
The social and physical spaces of experiential learning and their impact on of SAIL pedagogy. This study focuses on different spaces used at the University of Toronto Scarborough for experiential learning activities and explores how students are prepared for and experience learning in these spaces and the impact of these spaces on SAIL learning.
SAIL pedagogy through doing and making. This is an interdisciplinary project investigating the design and implementation of sail pedagogy. This project involves colleagues from different departments at the University of Toronto Scarborough: Prof. Alen Hadzovic (Chemistry), Prof. Erin Webster (Art History) and Prof. Danielle Kwan-Lafond (sociology). We are testing the SAIL questionnaire in courses across our disciplines.

SAIL cross-departmental mentorship

This mentorship project brings together faculty and librarians from the University of Toronto Scarborough to discuss best practices in the design, implementation and assessment of experiential learning activities using a SAIL pedagogical approach.