Reflection and Action

At the moment I am working with teachers and students who are connecting what they are learning about hope to their curriculum and service in the community. This program is called the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program. It is a program of the Hope Foundation where I am Director of Educational Services. As I put the finishing touches on the "Nurturing Hopeful Souls: Hopeful Practices and Activities for Children and Youth" resource and consider how we move from phase one of the H-F S-L program into phase two, I am ever conscious of how important it is to make room for reflection.

I am certainly not the first to consider the important role of reflection in the hoping process, but I do want to share how children and youth do like the opportunity to have quiet moments in their busy lives to reflect on hope. I was in a Junior High not too long ago. It was Friday and it was the end of the day. I asked the students to draw hope. We only had thirty minutes. Once the students settled into their desks and into the task it became very quiet - almost too quiet. Sure, at first there was the awkward giggle and talking, but soon after silence prevailed. After fifteen minutes I was torn. I was curious. When I asked the students what they noticed one of the male students replied with, "The time flew by. That is the quietest it has ever been in our class." I think I understood what he said.

These were students who were at different places in their learning and so much of their classtime, students are interacting with the teachers about their independent assignments. Since that time, those same students have made and shared hope power points. We have not yet, had time to share what they uncovered during their individual reflections, but I will once we meet mid week.

For now, let me say that I believe that we need to continue to find ways to reflect in our own lives and to make spaces and places for children and youth to reflect if we want to create hopeful learning communitites.

Hope is an outcome and a process. We have to teach and model hope as a process. Because as Vaclav Havel (1990) said, "Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out," we need to be part of the process to understand why things turn out as they do. Reflection is part of the process that helps to make that understanding possible.