Learning to hope and about hope happens most often when I am in conversation with one or more individuals. This happened last week when I met with a group of junior high students. They were sharing what they have been creating in their explorations of hope in their health classes. We were taking photographs of their work from their hope folios so that we could create a digital story of their experience of connecting with their hope individually and collectively.
When we turned to what they have noticed since doing the hope study one of the students said it has made him more courageous to work toward becoming a soccer player. I remembered that it was grade five students who told us courage was missing from our list of 7 C's. Hope research and literature suggests courage is needed to hope and hope is needed to have courage.
Knowing from experience that the original list of 7 C's are a good starting point in a hope discussion, but like hope are unique to everyone and change depending on one's circumstances, we began to tease out the original list of 7 C's. I was surprised that this group of students listed four from the original list. Usually I have to add most of the original list. They listed commitment, creativity, caring, and community. One of the students suggested cooperation, which is not on the original list.
Like I said earlier, this list is really a jumping off point for being able to identify and make explicit one's hope in the moment. If we had created our 7 C symbols on that day, I am certain that they would be different than they will be when we do them this week. Our hopes change. What I gleaned from this activity, is that we could create symbols of our individual and group 7 C's at different points and then reflect on how they have changed depending on what we were experiencing at the time. I believe this is one example of where we can reflect and track how we use hope to overcome adversity and uncertainty in our lives. This would, in my opinion be an excellent hope tool to use when experiencing feelings of hopelessness about an outcome. An adult and child could use these to determine actions, thoughts, feelings, and relationships from the past to overcome a current obstacle in one's life.
On my walk back to the Hope Foundation, I thought about cooperation. After spending a year making hope explicit from time to time, these students identified cooperation as an important component of hope. Studying what contributes to a hopeful community is part of the hope-focused service-learning program. Working cooperatively in teams is one of the service-learning competencies. The fact that these students identified cooperation as one of the 7 C's of hope tells me, once again, that we are on the right track. Imagine what our world would look, feel and sound like if we cooperated with each other?
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