Brian Grant

Brian Grant is a Learning Scientist with Action Lab in EdPlus at Arizona State University, where his research explores how learning experiences contribute to the cultivation of human flourishing. His work focuses on the integration of Principled Innovation (PI) across ASU learning programs to promote human flourishing. Utilizing qualitative and mixed-methods research, he explores student and faculty experiences with PI and potential contributions to character development, inner growth, and practical wisdom. Through this work, Brian seeks to understand how PI can be integrated into diverse educational contexts in ways that are meaningful, inclusive, and impactful for both students, faculty, and the ASU community broadly.

Brian's approach to research and education is informed by his interdisciplinary background in sustainability, transformative learning, and qualitative inquiry. He earned his PhD from ASU's School of Sustainability in 2025, where his dissertation investigated how transformative change happens from the inside out. Through an autoethnographic walking inquiry, he explored the role of inner work in personal and systemic change. Building from this personal inquiry into transformative change, his dissertation then examined how transformation occurs collectively through a qualitative case study with a sweat lodge community in Phoenix, Arizona. The research explored how participation in an Indigenous-based sweat lodge ceremony facilitated spiritual experiences associated with healing and transformative change. The study offers insights into transformative change toward sustainability by illuminating how ceremony and spiritual healing can facilitate processes of reconnection—with oneself, community, spirituality, and the more-than-human world—that reshape both inner experience and ways of acting in the world.

Brian previously earned an MA in Sustainability from ASU in 2019. His master's research examined garden-based learning and how sustained experiences with a biodynamic school garden shaped high school students' relationships with nature. Using arts-based methods, this research explored cognitive and experiential dimensions of students' understandings of nature alongside emotional and embodied dimensions of their connectedness with nature. His earlier undergraduate work in political science, religion, and applied ethics explored social justice and human rights in relation to U.S.–Mexico border policy. Grounded in his experiences providing humanitarian aid with No Más Muertes/No More Deaths, his undergraduate thesis examined how changes in U.S. border policy and increasing border militarization contributed to human rights violations against migrants.

Brian also has extensive teaching experience across higher education, secondary education, and outdoor education programs. His pedagogical orientation is informed by transformative and relational approaches to sustainability education that emphasize inner awareness, epistemological diversity, and relationality. He is currently working with Arizona Tortoise Tubes to develop a tortoise-based learning curriculum for schools interested in tortoise adoption.

Across these varied contexts, Brian's work is connected by an enduring interest in how learning and transformative experiences can help us heal and transform our relationships with ourselves, our histories, our communities, and the places and living world to which we belong.