Teaching and learning are profoundly personal experiences, yet systems of education often prioritize agendas that alienate people rather than engage them. Reconceptualizing teaching and learning as a co-constructed praxis places individuals at the heart of education and, in so doing, regards knowledge acquisition as a process of understanding that is dynamically and personally negotiated at the intersection of self, subject, and relationality. This approach, at once pedagogical and practical, has the capacity to transform the classroom from a place of containment to one of expansiveness. Through critical, qualitative, creative, and arts-integrated approaches, this collection aims to explore the co-curricular capacity of lived experience to re/humanize education.

This is a timely project given the multiple race, health, environmental, and socio-political crises playing out on the world stage. Contributions include works by authors who explore: co-curricular inclusion of lived experience for its potential to create more equitable and representative curricula; co-curricular capacity of lived experience to advance relationality, both human and more than human; and co-curricular potential of lived experience to un/privilege the current prioritization of the quantifiable in favour of more inclusive and holistic epistemologies.