Making Sense of Our Storied Experiences of Hope and Hoping

As I listen to stories of hope and hoping during this pandemic, I don't hear many stories about setting and attaining goals.

What I am hearing, are stories of having the time and energy to participate in the meaningful and relevant activities that nourish our souls. I see and hear individuals reaching out to those they haven't connected with for a long time. I hear people telling stories about the small moments that make their day.

This makes me feel hopeful because I know how a narrative conception of hope (LeMay, 2014) has enhanced my own wellbeing long before the pandemic set in.

I imagine that when we look back at this time that we will see that although things did not turn out the way we hoped, that we are okay with how things did turn out. For this is how I've learned to understand my storied experiences with hope and hoping before the pandemic became a reality.

I am hopeful that individuals will join me in learning more about what transpires when attend to making hope visible and accessible in their storied experiences in the very near future!!

Dare To Hope

As I prepare distance opportunities to make sense of a narrative pedagogy of hope (LeMay, 2014), I am reminded of the following statements that were made by teachers and teacher assistants who attended a series of five professional development 'Dare to Hope' sessions over a period of seven months in 2008. Simultaneously, I look forward to the next iteration of 'Dare to Hope' sessions.

I used to be burnt out and detached, but now I am refreshed/hopeful.
I used to be overwhelmed, but now I can see each students' unique qualities.
I used to just care for, but now I know how to care with as well.

I used to have less of an idea of how to effectively build hope. Now I have community, caring, coping, creating, committing and celebrating as ways to think about building the courage to take hopeful actions.

I used to think only some people needed hope.
I now think everybody needs hope, needs to be a part of hope and to keep hope at the front of everything.

I used to think that hopefulness was an indefinable term.
Now I have started to use hopeful language and hopeful thoughts in a very discrete manner.

I used to teach to, hope for, see children as needing.
Now I learn with, do see children as giving.

Courageously Navigating Forward With Hope

My life as an educator began when I was five. My first classroom was my bedroom. My imaginary students sat on my bed. I worked alongside my mother in her classroom for 17 years before I had my first real classroom. However, three years in I began searching for something that was missing for me ~ something I had learned to rely on in those first 22 years of practicing to become the teacher I imagined I would be. I left the classroom for two years and worked with youth in a Youth Assessment Centre to see if I could find what it was that I needed at that time in my life only to realize that I belonged in the classroom.

12 years later I embarked on my master’s to explore how I might establish professional development opportunities for myself that I needed to be and become who I needed to be. My thesis shifted halfway through. Instead, I wrote a thesis on my hope as an educator. Shortly thereafter I became the Hope Kids Manager at the Hope Foundation of Alberta on the University of Alberta campus. 

Being alongside other colleagues who were interested in this thing called hope, and residents in Continuing Care Centres who interacted with Hope Kids, and later with teachers who were experiencing long-term disabilities, allowed me to wonder out loud why I could not align my way of being with the goal-setting theory of hope that dominated the school culture.

I watched as Hope Kids shared the contents of their personal hope kits and then made collages of hope with residents. I remember the day when one of the Hope Kids said; “We need to put a hope tree with hopeful actions on leaves at the entrance so that residents and families can take a leaf if their hope is being challenged.” I will never ever forget the day a resident with later stage dementia turned to me after Hope Kids and residents shared what they had learned about hope and hoping after their visit and blurted out, “You could never do what we are doing here with a million dollars.”

Then I read about a study conducted at the Hope Foundation with people experiencing a variety of chronic illnesses sharing their stories of hope and hoping. I still hear myself to this day, silently repeating the mantra: Do hope my way, not your way, the phrase that stuck with me as I attended to the individual stories and story gatherers reflections at the end of the monograph Minerva Dialogues: Hope and Chronic Conditions (Jevne, Williamson, & Stechynsky, 1999).

Later when I and two other teachers attended to their experiences of working with hope-focused practices in their personal and professional lives, four threads resonated across their narrative accounts. The threads suggested that 1) the two teachers learned to live with hope in early childhood, 2) they were in the midst of living with hope when we began our conversations, 3) working with hope-focused practices and strategies sharpened who they were and were becoming, and 4) enabled the courage to live the stories that nourished and sustained their way of being and knowing. After what felt like a very long time of being with the narrative accounts and the four resonant threads, three emergent learning(s) surfaced. The three emergent learning(s) were: 1) hope matters but it cannot be imposed; 2) attending to the commonplaces of narrative inquiry inspires an understanding of a narrative conceptualization of hope as an embodied lived experience, and; 3) the Deweyan-inspired narrative conception of hope makes it possible to live alongside the dominant conceptions of hope in education (LeMay, 2014).

My experiences alongside Hope Kids and teachers like Sheila and Carmen who participated in research conversations with me awakened me to how important it was for us to share and reflect on threads of hope in the past and present stories that we lived, told, retold and relived in different places and spaces so that we could story ourselves forward with interest and enthusiasm.

Imagination grounded and continues to ground my hopes and dreams as a hope-focused practitioner and scholar. However, it is the courage to be who I need to be that I garnered by storying myself forward with hope and hoping as my guide, that inspires me to continue to make sense of how a narrative pedagogy of hope (LeMay, 2021) enhances wellbeing and quality of life.

Courageously creating a space and place to make sense of a pedagogy of hope at this time with others from around the world feels like the right thing to do as we navigate ourselves forward at this time. 

Contact me if you want to be a part of this incredible undertaking and opportunity.

Being Okay with How Things Turn Out

I know that some individuals are surprised by my comments and/or ways of reacting of late since I am often told I am the eternal optimist or Pollyanna because I choose to live with audacious hope.

However, I believe courageously voicing how the daily news impacts my immediate and future wellbeing is not only a democratic privilege and responsibility but the only way I can remain hopeful in this time of uncertainty. For me, that means questioning how we might see things from different perspectives.

 Although ignoring what is immobilizing me is an option, experience has taught me that when I stuff my fears inside hoping it will disappear, the fear grows and consumes me like a smouldering fire that eventually erupts into a raging firestorm that I cannot control.

Living with audacious hope requires that I face my fears. Once I know what I am afraid of I can determine how I can react given the severity of the fear I am feeling.

Rather than ignoring a fear, naming it and thinking about what I or we can do to manage the fear while imagining at the same time how things might be different, enables me to cope, suggest, and/or wonder about other ways of relating, feeling, thinking and acting that we might want to embrace so that over time we are okay with how things turn.

So, when I do question or sound less than hopeful in my comments, I am not doing so to instill more fear or anger. On the contrary, I hope to inspire divergent and deeper conversations to inspire a brighter future for all.

The Smallest Things That Contribute to My Hope and Hoping

I remember alarm bells ringing when I started reading, in 2002, how hopeless children and youth were feeling about the state of the world and their futures.

17 years later, as I watch and listen to children and youth demanding that we start to seriously reduce climate change, I sit here on a Saturday morning, wondering what more I can do to make a difference so that children and youth do not succumb to the overwhelming sense of despair that I too feel around the attempts to silence their demands.

For me, attending to our storied experiences of how we manifest hope and hoping in our relationships, feelings, actions, and thoughts makes visible who we are and are becoming individually and as a society.

The children and youth are manifesting their hope and hoping by marching and chanting their message, hoping at the same time that we will be moved to act in a way that aligns with the message that children are our future. They are demanding that we make our actions match our talk.

Although their marches boost my hope, I know from attending to my experiences that I need to do much more to maintain a hopeful stance on any given day, let alone when I think about how inconsequential I feel at times when I think about issues like the effects of climate change.

Writing this blog post, in itself is one small action that helps me feel more hopeful. Just like walking or riding my bike whenever possible instead of driving, hanging my clothes to dry instead of using the dryer, bringing my own bags to the store instead of using plastic do.

More recently I've added another action and that's to research/read everything I can to inform myself so that I can respond to the hope suckers without becoming immobilized.

My ultimate hope is that my actions spur others to think about the small things they can do to make a difference; however, small that difference is. I believe that our small actions taken together add up to big differences over time and more importantly inspire others to consider how they might contribute to more hopeful outcomes both in the present and future.

I wonder what would happen if after children and youth shared other ways they are contributing to reducing climate change while and after they marched. Perhaps, my hope is already being realized without my knowing. How great that would be. Until I hear otherwise, I will continue doing the things that fuel my hope!

Hope, Hoping, and a Sense of Well-Being

Here's a little bit of what I've been up to and am thinking about as I wonder where the day goes and find myself looking back over the last few months, at the same time, with fondness.

Fondness because I've had many aha moments that not only feed my curiosity but make me jump out of bed each morning. Although writing, curriculum development for upcoming courses, and research can feel daunting and draining at times, I find that I am loving the overlapping learning that is happening as I contemplate what a narrative of hope and a narrative pedagogy of hope, which I uncovered as I attended to the experiences of two teachers working with hope-focused practices in my dissertation, look, sound, and feel like.

A narrative conception of hope inspires mindfulness as we attend to the stories we live, tell, retell and relive over time and in different places and spaces. As such a narrative conception of hope aligns with and builds on Clandinin & Connelly's (2000) notion of narrative inquiry.

A narrative conception of hope encourages us to attend to our experiences of hoping so that we feel our stories make sense or as Carr (1986) posits to enable narrative coherence in our stories and as a result a sense of well-being.

A narrative conception of hope enables us to live alongside and with the grand narratives of hope so that when we have trouble following and/or living the grand narratives of hope, which I've named the goal-setting, faith-based, and critical theory of hope, we are able to magnify aspects of our stories that nourish who we are and minimize the hope suckers (LeMay, Edey, & Larsen, 2008) that diminish our sense of well-being.

A narrative pedagogy of hope promotes strategies for making hope visible and accessible in our interactions; attending to hope and hoping with our whole being; and using narrative reflection to make sense of our storied experiences of hoping.

Making Sense of Hopefulness and Hopelessness in our Experiences

I often conjure up the extreme versions of hopefulness and hopelessness after 18 years of engaging in many conversations about the power of attending to threads of hope and hoping in the stories that we live and tell over time and in different places.

These two extreme versions include Pollyannaism at one end of the spectrum and individuals who, oftentimes through no fault of their own, cannot story themselves forward in the next moment let alone imagine themselves moving toward a future in which they envision themselves participating with enthusiasm and interest.

And yet, as one youth put it, we need pessimism and at times feelings of hopelessness to inspire hopeful ways of relating, feeling, acting and thinking. I often present hopefulness and hopelessness living alongside each other or on the flip sides of a coin. Other philosophers and researchers would agree with the above, which explains why I continue to find ways to make sense of stories like the following.

A classroom teacher and I were invited to present our experiences of finding ways to connect to her students' understandings of hoping and being hopeful at a conference. The teacher shared her stories of becoming less worried and in fact, feeling more hopeful about her students' feelings of hopefulness, despite the barriers they faced. I shared how a nursing researcher, Herth, (1996) encouraged me to suggest to this teacher that she and her students initiate their journey of making sense of hope and hoping by starting with drawings of their experiences of hope and hoping. I also shared other strategies that I had learned from working alongside and with Hope Kids.

At the end of the presentation, a gentleman approached us to tell us that what we suggested, in his opinion, was nothing more than 'Pollyannaism'. The teacher and I thanked him for sharing how he felt. Before leaving on our separate ways, the teacher and I agreed that although the gentleman was clearly not happy with what he learned that day, he was at least affected enough to courageously tell us what he thought. For me, that was enough to feel that perhaps we had nudged a response. Perhaps, not the response we had hoped for, but a response that one day might shift given that we prompted him to act on his feelings.

I am very okay with what transpired that day because I've learned that hopeful people ask themselves, "What's the smallest thing that I need to do to feel like I'm moving into a future in which I am interested and enthusiastic to participate in?" Knowing that perhaps, the gentleman had and/or is possibly still having conversations about hopefulness and hopelessness that I might in turn, learn about in the future, continues to sustain my way of being as I make sense of my own feelings of hopefulness and hopelessness.