* An inspirational and holistic approach to teaching by a renowned Latina scholar
* Defines seven steps to unlocking the potential of teachers and their students
* Deeply informed by the author's educational journey as a minority woman from a background of rural poverty

Laura Rendón is a scholar of national stature, known for her research on students of color and first-generation college students, and on the factors that promote and impede student success.

The motivation for the quest that Laura Rendón shares in this book was the realization that she, along with many educators, had lost sight of the deeper, relationship-centered essence of education, and lost touch with the fine balance between educating for academics and educating for life.

Her purpose is to reconnect readers with the original impulse that led them to become educators; and to help them rediscover, with her, their passion for teaching and learning in the service of others and for the well being of our society.

She offers a transformative vision of education that emphasizes the harmonic, complementary relationship between the sentir of intuition and the inner life, and the pensar of intellectualism and the pursuit of scholarship; between teaching and learning; formal knowledge and wisdom; and between Western and non-Western ways of knowing. In the process she develops a pedagogy that encompasses wholeness, multiculturalism, and contemplative practice, that helps students transcend limiting views about themselves; fosters high expectations, and helps students to become social change agents.

She invites the reader to share her journey in developing sentipensante pedagogy, and to challenge seven entrenched agreements about education that act against wholeness and the appreciation of truth in all forms. She offers examples of her own teaching and of the classroom practices of faculty she encountered along the way; as well as guidance on the challenges, rewards and responsibilities that anyone embarking on creating a new vision of teaching and learning should attend to.

Though based on the author’s life work in higher education, her insights and approach apply equally to all teaching and learning contexts.

Table of Contents:

Foreword—Mark Nepo; Acknowledgements; Introduction: A Need for a New Dream of Education; 1) Prelude to a New Pedagogical Dreamfield; 2) Learning From Another’s Story; 3) Refashioning the Dream: The Experience of Creating an Integrative, Consonant Pedagogy; 4) Refashioning the Dream: The Experience of Employing an Integrative, Consonant Pedagogy Rooted in Social Justice; 5) The Courage to Chart a Different Path; 6) Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy; 7) sustaining the Soul That Embraces a Different Truth; Appendix: The Story of My Inquiry; References; Permissions; Index.