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.