Högskolan i Skövde

This chapter is a collaborative meeting point for two educators at the intersection of performing arts and technology, who share a focus on topics often considered too subjective or taboo within teaching and learning, such as empathy, compassion, and interconnectivity. Even our focus on teaching and learning, because we are outside the pedagogy field, can seem transgressive, in technologically inflected disciplines where “hard” science research may be privileged. In contrast, we characterize teaching as a spiritual, activist endeavor centered in intuition and decolonizing practices and highlight the collaborative and embodied nature of our inquiry through autoethnographic duet as method. For us, teaching is personal, given the complexities of our identities. We both experience power and oppression in different contexts, including the classroom. From this intersectional feminist grounding, we reflect on our own formative student experiences and what has been modeled for us by teachers and mentors inside and outside of institutional settings. Through this critical, collaborative reflection we draw out a set of practices that come together to make transformative, cocreated learning possible across courses relevant to the Digital Humanities, such as multimedia performance, game design, storytelling, and music. We discuss ideas for how these practices seek to assemble not only mind but also body and spirit in the act of teaching and learning and can be utilized to remake and refashion more traditional curricula such that transformation, as opposed to information, becomes the goal.