“…we explore clowning as part of a pedagogy of transgression to be offered to leaders who need to break free from habits of the mind and resistant power structures that keep us stuck in unsustainable models.”
Surely one of the most exciting papers that have contributed to recently is the one that came out today in Environmental Education Research. Francine Cruz de Lima came to us at Wageningen University just over a year ago as an external PhD canditate from the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. In her PhD she is exploring how humor, and clowning in particular, can help people, leaders in particular, become unstuck from normalized ways of thinking, being and acting. The paper led by her “Clowning as a pedagogy for leaders: learning to transgress unsustainable ‘normality’” makes up the first study of her PhD. The paper is publishedin EER which published a Special Issue on Humor and Environmental Education in 2023. It will be followed by empirical studies of workshops conducted in São Paulo with (business) leaders who will experience clowning in practice.
From the abstract:
The sustainability polycrisis that the world is facing can be understood as a systemic response to a relational crisis that comes from the normalization of unnatural separations and hierarchies. These separations prevent conscious connection with interdependent parts of the whole, including diverse social groups, ethnicities, species, ecosystems, and personal dimensions. Decision-makers of our time are expected to have the capacity to transcend such separation paradigms to foster systems transformation towards sustainability. A few scholars are investigating the role of leadership programs in this challenge. Hoping to contribute to this scholarship, we explore clowning as part of a pedagogy of transgression to be offered to leaders who need to break free from habits of the mind and resistant power structures that keep us stuck in unsustainable models. This article is a narrative literature review that seeks conceptual and methodological affinities between clowning, humor, playfulness, adult play, critical pedagogies, transformative learning, and inner-outer transformation frameworks. The results are synthesized into initial educational design principles, aiming to guide the creation of group learning opportunities that facilitate making power dynamics visible, denormalizing unjust hierarchies, and promoting a paradigm shift towards relationality. We discuss the implications of our propositions to formal and non-formal sustainability education of adults, including leadership programs, and suggest how they can be refined and tested in future research.
Full citation:
Cruz de Cerqueira Lima, F., & Wals, A. (2026). Clowning as a pedagogy for leaders: learning to transgress unsustainable ‘normality.’ Environmental Education Research, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2026.2744862
