The Space Between Intellect and Intuition

Beginning with Rendón

When I first encountered Laura Rendón’s Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy (2009), I felt something click into place. Her book begins with a dream for education: intellect and intuition, analysis and emotion. She writes, “In essence, the calling many of us are now hearing is about how to place in balance and how to tune with a greater awareness… the harmonious rhythm between the outer experience of intellectualism and the inner dimension of insight, emotion, and awareness” (p. 7). This framing matters because it pushes against the ways education has been narrowed into a set of outcomes, standards, and test scores.

Rendón is clear about what gets lost in that narrowing. “Very little time is spent cultivating relationships among students and between teachers and students,” she notes, “precious little time is spent helping students to work with others, deal with their emotions, recognize personal strengths, develop social responsibility, be good listeners and communicators, resolve conflicts ethically and creatively, and embrace diversity” (2009, p. 4). Reading this, I recognized what I have often felt but not always had the language to name: when education privileges only intellect, it fragments the whole.

Rendón’s pedagogy of sentipensar—to think and feel together—pushes against that fragmentation. For me, reading her work was less about adopting a new technique and more about remembering something I had always sensed but rarely saw validated in academic texts.

Thinking & Feeling

Rendón draws on Rudolph Arnheim’s (1985) claim that “intuition and intellect do not operate separately but require each other’s cooperation in almost every case. In education, to neglect one in favor of the other… cannot but cripple the minds we are trying to assist in their growth” (p. 1). She expands this into a pedagogy that “represents the harmonious rhythm between the outer experience of intellectualism and rational analysis and the inner dimension of insight, emotion, and awareness” (Rendón, 2009, p. 2).

This feels significant to me because I know what it means to experience the opposite. In my doctoral program, I have felt the implicit demand to silence my emotions, to tuck away the parts of my work that feel spiritual, intuitive, or embodied. Even when professors acknowledge these dimensions, they are rarely given actual space in the academy. Rendón speaks to this directly, recalling her own sense of alienation in higher education: “I often felt I did not belong, that my voice was not valid, and that who I was as a whole person was not welcomed” (2009, p. xii). That admission matters. It offers solidarity to anyone who has been told that intellect belongs in the classroom but feeling does not.

I am reminded here of Audre Lorde’s (1984) insistence that “I feel, therefore I can be free.” Lorde refuses the separation of intellect from emotion, knowing that freedom requires the full presence of both. bell hooks (1994) echoes this in her writing on engaged pedagogy, arguing that teaching should be a practice of freedom rooted in the union of mind, body, and spirit. Rendón’s work feels like a continuation of this lineage, one that insists education without feeling is not only incomplete but dehumanizing.

Why This Still Matters

What strikes me about Rendón’s vision is that it matters far beyond the walls of K–12 or higher education. Many of us carry the lessons of school into every space we inhabit. If we were taught that only rational, measurable knowledge counts, then we likely absorbed the idea that intuition, emotion, and spirituality are secondary, or even suspect. Those early lessons ripple outward: into how we approach work, how we design curriculum, how we run organizations, how we relate to one another.

This is why Rendón’s work continues to feel so relevant to me as I build a practice in curriculum consulting. Curriculum is never neutral. It is the framework that shapes culture, values, and ways of being. Paulo Freire (1970) argued that education is always political; it either domesticates us into reproducing systems of oppression or invites us into new possibilities of liberation. Rendón adds another layer by reminding us that fragmentation, separating thinking from feeling, intellect from spirit—is itself a political act. It keeps us disconnected from wholeness.

I see this same fragmentation reproduced in business, leadership, and organizational life. Metrics, efficiency, and productivity are often elevated above reflection, relationship, and care. Rendón’s pedagogy offers another perspective, to honor all of the senses we bring to our work. If we allow ourselves to think and feel, to analyze and to intuit, we make different choices. We open space for joy, creativity, and connection alongside rigor and analysis. This balance is not only transformative for education, it is transformative for how we imagine and create in every arena of life.

An Offering

Writing this, I realize that Rendón’s pedagogy is less a set of instructions than an invitation. She is not telling us to discard intellect, nor to romanticize feeling, but to recognize that the two belong together. “The present dream of education privileges intellectual development,” she writes, “and social, emotional, and spiritual development are viewed as tangential to academic matters. Consequently, the harmonious rhythm of teaching and learning which involves thinking as well as feeling is absent from many of our classrooms” (2009, p. 4).

For me, this perspective matters because it expands what we allow ourselves to value. Education does not end at graduation. The ways we were taught to separate intellect and emotion follow us—into our relationships, our organizations, our businesses. Rendón’s sentipensante pedagogy offers another path. It does not claim to be the only way, but it does offer a reminder: we are more whole when we allow thinking and feeling, analysis and intuition, intellect and spirit, to inform one another.

References

Arnheim, R. (1985). The split and the structure: Twenty-eight essays. University of California Press.

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.; M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1970)

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.

Rendón, L. I. (2009). Sentipensante (sensing/thinking) pedagogy: Educating for wholeness, social justice and liberation. Stylus.