11: Cultivating Compassionate Ways of Being Through Embodied Ways of Knowing

Understanding holistic knowledge as emerging with and through our bodies, we connect embodied ways of knowing with artful ways of being to explore the capacity of a living curriculum to cultivate compassion and understanding across perceived differences. In the spirit of embracing the emergent process of re/making and re/imagining new insights and possibilities, we situate our chapter in post qualitative inquiry and engage arts-informed embodied inquiry to explore pedagogical practices that can contribute to re/humanization. In recognizing embodied ways of knowing and becoming as opening pathways to humanizing praxis, we re/examine our ongoing connections and relationships with art, with scholarship, and with each other. Re/presenting our experiences of teaching and learning and living and being through photography, music, poetry, dance, cooking, swimming, gardening, and meditation, we invite readers to consider the consciousness that emerges from embodied and holistic engagement with the arts. Our hope is to centre the role of embodied experience as a pedagogical practice that inspirits and awakens artful ways of being and becoming through curriculum that cultivates compassion and understanding of diverse and divergent ways of being artfully human together.