Pedagogies of Joy in Higher Education

This talk will focus on the design implications of incorporating Pedagogies of Joy (POY) (Scipio et al., 2026) in the realm of Higher Education using the IslandWood EEC program as a designed learning environment. Exploring affordances and constraints at the programmatic level of POYful design intended to 1) focus on relational epistemologies; 2) deepen our focus on humanity within higher education and; 3) deepen our engagement with ArtScience teaching and learning practices. Exemplars from our ongoing work include reframing gratitudes to joys and delights, infusing ArtScience and Relationality into coursework, and lands and waters based relational work within the program. We have been leveraging conjecture mapping (Sandoval, 2014) as a design and analytic window into the impacts of this design-based work.