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.