Places of Hope Gallery

Join Hope Kids in their search for 'PLACES OF HOPE' by submitting your photographs and/or descriptions to hope@ualberta.ca

Your images will be added to the HOPE KIDS section on the Hope Foundation of Alberta website for students and teachers to view, as they move toward the second phase of the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program.

Hope Kids will be conducting hopeful needs assessments of their communities in this second phase of the program so as to plan their hope-focused community service project. One of the first things that they do as they move into this second phase is to take photographs of 'places of hope' in their community. You can help by adding your places of hope to their collections.

Many things happen after and with the photographs depending on the academic focus and/or questions that the students and teacher have determined from their ongoing interactions with community mentors and members.

Student voice is a critical element of the service practice in the trademarked HOPE KIDS program, and especially in the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program. Interacting with community mentors and members at least three times, is another element. However, in addition to these and other elements of service-learning, the other four hope-focused practices, which can be found in the Nurturing Hopeful Souls resource are also critical to the success of each of the unique programs underway in the 36 schools in Central Alberta.

As students, teachers, community mentors and members come together this year, as they have in the past six years, 36 new school stories of working with the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program are evolving. These stories continue to contribute to the ongoing development of part two of the Nurturing Hopeful Souls resource, along with the accompanying professional development sessions that are provided for interested teachers, community mentors and members.

We look forward to your participation to add to our stories!!

Join Us...20th Celebration Planning

We are gearing up for our 20th Anniversary at the Hope Foundation of Alberta.

If you are interested in helping us plan for the celebration in May 2012, please let me know and I will forward details of our 1st meeting scheduled for October 4, 2011 @ 4:00 pm.

For those of you who want to speak in person, I can be reached at (780) 492-1222.

Hope Shapes How We View and Understand Our World

"Hope is clearly something humans recognize in themselves and others. It shapes how we view and understand our world and is manifested at many levels" (Andrews, 2010).

I found this quote in the editorial by Paul Andrews in the Cambridge Journal of Education Vol 40(4) as I was preparing for conversations and professional development sessions with teachers interested in working with the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program over the next school year.

I believe that making hope visible and accessible in our interactions with others helps us to make sense of who we are and are becoming. As such, the hope-focused practices and strategies in the Nurturing Hopeful Souls resource nurture a 'pedagogy of hope' that enables individuals to come away with new understandings about themselves and each other on many levels.

I look forward to sharing with you and hearing from you what it looks, sounds, and feels like to make hope visible and accessible in our interactions throughout this next school year!!

Hope and Responsilbity

Hope is about responsibility.

If you do the wrong thing,

you can take another person’s hope away.

You feel guilty.

This is a quote that I came upon when combing through some old files. The quote comes from a Hope Kid who participated in the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program a few years ago. A few months ago I was reflecting on the relationship between hope and responsibility and have been on the lookout since then for anything that I could find on the subject. I would love to hear other's thoughts on the relationship between the two!!

"If we dare to hope, should we not dare to look at ourselves hoping?"

It is this question, which was asked by Menniger in his address to the 115th annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1959, that fuels our work in the HOPE KIDS program. I believe the five hope-focused practices in Nurturing Hopeful Souls are one way of responding to Menniger's query.

Volunteers: Seeing Life in a Brighter Light

Volunteers are the backbone of the Hope Foundation.

The HOPE KIDS program exists because volunteers tirelessly work behind the scenes to get things done. They organize the post-secondary camp, work with youth who want to volunteer in out of school programs and assist students and teachers in the HOPE KIDS: Service-Learning program.

However, volunteers do lots of other things at the Hope Foundation. As a not-for profit organization we would not exist without the efforts of those who volunteer on the board, at the casino and at our annual fall dinner and auction to keep our door open for clients who need hope-focused counseling.

So THANK YOU volunteers, past and present, who make it possible for others to see life in a brighter light!!

Hope Harkens Us to See Life As it May Become

I came across the following quote in Finding Hope: Ways to See Life in a Brighter Light as I reflected on why we need to pay attention to hope.

Hope helps us live with the unpredictability we must face from time to time in our lives. It serves as a companion when the future is unsure or unclear. Hope stays with us and heartens us when our options appear limited. When the possibilities seem to diminish, it harkens us to see life as it may become. (p. 10)

Learning With Hope in the Health Sciences Curriculum

Last week at the Hope Foundation's Annual General Meeting, a student from the Health Sciences class, who is working toward her health care aide certificate in high school, presented an animoto about who she is becoming we work with hope-focused practices and strategies in the Nurturing Hopeful Souls resource.

She agreed that we need to share how she has integrated the work we have been doing with hope-focused practices and strategies in her curriculum and gave me permission to put her reflection on this blog as one example of learning with hope.

Enjoy!

I look forward to your comments!!

http://animoto.com/play/dpX5dLwu961Xh6I4zEx4aA

Learning With Hope Wonders

Today I finally changed the name of my blog to better reflect what I am learning as I work with others to make hope visible and accessible in our lives.

Learning to hope suggests that we do not know how to hope when we come into this world and that 'someone' has to 'teach' us to hope. I do not believe that is the case. In fact, I have never believed that to be the case. I suppose I chose 'to' hope way back when I started this blog as a way to attend to what we were and are learning in classrooms.

However, I believe that what we are doing in classrooms with the HOPE KIDS: Hope-Focused Service-Learning program at the Hope Foundation of Alberta is incorporating a way of working with hope-focused practices and strategies so as to encourage being with hope as a way of moving toward a personally meaningful future, which is no different than how most of us come into the world.

In this spirit then, I am changing my posts to ask you to share your responses to the kinds of wonders we put out to students to reflect the fact that learning happens everywhere and all the time.

With that in mind ~

Who nurtures your hope and how have they or do they nurture your hope?

By the way, from now on, you will find my new posts on learningwithhope.blogspot.com

Looking forward to seeing you there!!

Learning With Hope

Learning to hope suggests that we do not know how to hope when we come into this world and that 'someone' has to 'teach' us to hope.

I say this because as I attended to my storied experiences alongside Hope Kids and those with whom they interact inside and outside classrooms over the last 18 years, as a narrative inquirer, I have seen countless examples of how teachers and students have inspired each other to uncover and act on deeply hidden hopes.

Knowing how important it is to listen with our whole being (one of five hope-focused practices in the Nurturing Hopeful Souls resource published in 2008), I am in the midst of creating strategies to inspire narrative reflection in my interactions with three different groups of Hope Kids as an integral part of a narrative pedagogy of hope that evolved as two teachers and I created narrative accounts of their experiences of working with the five hope-focused practices. 

I am focusing on creating strategies to inspire narrative reflection as part of a narrative pedagogy of hope because I have learned that creating spaces to attend to the stories that live on the edges of our current experiences, ensures that stories do not get buried like hopes that have, in the past, been squashed by an interaction wherein we felt that the hope we verbalized, even if it was a whisper, was not correct or worthy of pursuing because of another's reaction when they heard it. I believe that the practice of narrative reflection also allows us to recognize when certain stories about ourselves need to be retired because they harm our ability to envision and work toward a self-sustaining future like the story I told myself about not being an artist for many years because a teacher laughed at my attempts at drawing. I have sense re-storied myself as creative.

Being creative nourishes my ways of relating, feeling, acting and thinking as I continue to learn with hope as I imagine a narrative pedagogy of hope being embraced by teachers as a way of understanding and supporting students to be who they are and need to be now and in the future.

When I listened to President Obama's healing speech I was struck by the following words that he made at Arizona University on January 12, 2011:

Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.

I believe this statement speaks to what I hear teachers say when they talk about what happens when they work with hope-focused practices and strategies in the 21st Century classroom. The Hope-Focused Service-Learning Program at the Hope Foundation of Alberta encourages youth to make visible and accessible their individual and collective hopes as they work with community members and mentors.