Sentipensar [Feel-Thinking] Cultivates Collective Scientific Sensemaking and Worldbuilding Within and Beyond Ecological Despair

Abstract

Educating youth about environmental and climate justice is crucial in realizing a sustainable and flourishing future. Yet this can be challenging given the intense eco-emotions youth experience and express while learning about these consequential realities and their implications. However, strong emotions are not to be ignored, feared, or controlled, as they play a powerful role in science learning. To explore how emotions support deep sensemaking, I centered Latina Eco-feminist and Anti-colonial perspectives and the concept of “Sentipensar” [feel-thinking], examining the eco-emotional responses of a single youth participant, Idra. By using Sentipensar as an analytical tool, I was able to recognize how Idra made sense of the environmental injustices she encountered while participating in a science education program studying marine plastic pollution in Baja California, Mexico. Her story revealed that she practiced Sentipensar as a critical pedagogy to (1) foster honest and communal sensemaking, (2) clarify and deepen existing understandings, (3) defend herself and her future, and (4) cultivate science identities and just worldbuilding. The findings advocate for a departure from dominant logics that divorce reason from emotion and suggest that nurturing Sentipensar can cultivate the relational and axio-epistemological shifts needed in science teaching and learning.