Our Why
Learning spaces can be places where creativity, culture, and care shape how young people come to know themselves and one another. Yet many Latina students and other youth of color continue to move through environments that do not fully recognize their cultural knowledge, creative force, or emotional well-being.
Sentipensante Connections exists to support learning spaces where students experience connection, affirmation, and possibility—spaces where creativity and care are not treated as extras, but as essential conditions for learning, leadership, and long-term well-being.
Our Method
Sentipensante Connections is an educational consulting and creative wellness practice grounded in creativity, joy, cultura, and reciprocity. Our work is guided by Magic · Play · Love™, a sentipensante framework rooted in liberatory pedagogy, arts-based practice, and a sociocultural approach to language and learning.
Creative wellness is restoration through creativity and a pathway to social well-being. It is a practice and philosophy of attunement and care with self, others, and community expressed through arts, creativity, and cultural affirmation.
Through professional learning for educators and student-facing creative wellness workshops, we support individuals and communities in reconnecting with creativity as a pathway to confidence, connection, and holistic well-being. Our approach honors a sentipensante way of knowing—integrating mind, body, and spirit—so learning spaces become sites of reflection, imagination, and collective care.
Rather than offering one-size-fits-all solutions, we meet each context with intention. We design experiences that are relational, culturally grounded, and shaped by lived practice—inviting educators and students alike to experience magic, play, and love not as abstractions, but as conditions that support meaningful learning and growth.
Our Founder
Dr. Vianney A. Gavilanes is an educator, scholar, and creative practitioner with over a decade of experience designing and facilitating arts-based, culturally sustaining learning spaces across secondary and higher education. As the founder of Sentipensante Connections, she brings together research, lived experience, and creative practice to support environments where students feel seen, heard, and loved.
Her work builds on years of teaching, curriculum design, and program leadership, including the creation and direction of Liberando Nuestras Voces, a creative writing and confidence-building initiative for Latina middle school students. Through this work, Dr. Gavilanes developed and refined Magic • Play • Love™, an approach grounded in sustained engagement with students and educators and informed by real-world practice.
With a scholar’s mind and a corazón de poeta, Dr. Gavilanes bridges research and practice by guiding educators and leaders in cultivating sentipensante sensibilities—ways of thinking, feeling, and relating that support creativity, reflection, and relational care. She weaves together critical pedagogy, the arts, and creative wellness to support institutions in designing learning spaces rooted in imagination, connection, and collective thriving.
She partners with educators and organizations as a thought partner, facilitator, and guide—supporting them in implementing creative wellness practices that honor students’ identities and nurture communities of care.
If you are seeking to cultivate learning spaces where creativity and care guide practice, Sentipensante Connections offers a grounded, intentional approach shaped by years of practice and a deep belief in the transformative power of creative expression.