Making Sense of Hopefulness and Hopelessness in our Experiences

I often conjure up the extreme versions of hopefulness and hopelessness after 18 years of engaging in many conversations about the power of attending to threads of hope and hoping in the stories that we live and tell over time and in different places.

These two extreme versions include Pollyannaism at one end of the spectrum and individuals who, oftentimes through no fault of their own, cannot story themselves forward in the next moment let alone imagine themselves moving toward a future in which they envision themselves participating with enthusiasm and interest.

And yet, as one youth put it, we need pessimism and at times feelings of hopelessness to inspire hopeful ways of relating, feeling, acting and thinking. I often present hopefulness and hopelessness living alongside each other or on the flip sides of a coin. Other philosophers and researchers would agree with the above, which explains why I continue to find ways to make sense of stories like the following.

A classroom teacher and I were invited to present our experiences of finding ways to connect to her students' understandings of hoping and being hopeful at a conference. The teacher shared her stories of becoming less worried and in fact, feeling more hopeful about her students' feelings of hopefulness, despite the barriers they faced. I shared how a nursing researcher, Herth, (1996) encouraged me to suggest to this teacher that she and her students initiate their journey of making sense of hope and hoping by starting with drawings of their experiences of hope and hoping. I also shared other strategies that I had learned from working alongside and with Hope Kids.

At the end of the presentation, a gentleman approached us to tell us that what we suggested, in his opinion, was nothing more than 'Pollyannaism'. The teacher and I thanked him for sharing how he felt. Before leaving on our separate ways, the teacher and I agreed that although the gentleman was clearly not happy with what he learned that day, he was at least affected enough to courageously tell us what he thought. For me, that was enough to feel that perhaps we had nudged a response. Perhaps, not the response we had hoped for, but a response that one day might shift given that we prompted him to act on his feelings.

I am very okay with what transpired that day because I've learned that hopeful people ask themselves, "What's the smallest thing that I need to do to feel like I'm moving into a future in which I am interested and enthusiastic to participate in?" Knowing that perhaps, the gentleman had and/or is possibly still having conversations about hopefulness and hopelessness that I might in turn, learn about in the future, continues to sustain my way of being as I make sense of my own feelings of hopefulness and hopelessness.

Learned Hopefulness vs Learned Hopelessness: Part II

At one point in my dissertation, I wondered about the power of hoping alongside and hoping with as two teachers, Sheila and Carmen and I co-composed narrative accounts of their respective experiences of making hope visible and accessible in their interactions.

I was, at the time, contemplating my experience of co-composing narrative accounts with the two teachers. I did not ask Sheila and Carmen to write their own narrative accounts. Instead, we attended to and rewrote the stories that I pulled from our recorded conversations that extended back into their childhood and reached forward to future imaginings. We also attended to my field notes as a way of making sense of the experiences that they and other teachers told and retold in monthly professional development sessions and in the visits I made to their classrooms.

When I wondered about the notions of hoping alongside and hoping with, I was reminded of a fellow hope researcher/colleague's (Ronna Jevne) writing about the differences between caring with and caring for.

As I contemplated the hope-focused practice of attending to the 7 C's of hope and more specifically to the C of caring for and caring with, I could see that Sheila and Carmen cared for and with students. I observed Sheila asking a student to come and stand beside her to see from her perspective. I listened as Carmen shared how she began to tell stories to her students of her experiences of living away from her father when she was her students' ages.

Toward the end of our time together, Sheila and Carmen co-composed stories about attending to their own and their students' ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and relating as they shared and inquired into the threads of more and/or less hope in the stories that they lived, told, retold and retold with their students and me as narrative inquirers do when they engage in research.

Today, I see how both hoping alongside and hoping with are critical in inspiring others ability to access internal and external sources and resources of hope when one's hope is challenged or depleted. It is not enough to hope for another individual.

My experiences over the last 18 years, leads me to believe that modelling and making our experiences of hopefulness and hopelessness visible in our stories or as I've come to understand the process, a narrative pedagogy of hope, enables ways of relating, feeling, acting, and thinking that in turn, inspires learned hopefulness.

Inspiring A Narrative Pedagogy of Hope as a Way of Being and Knowing

I am thinking a lot, of late, about inspiring a narrative pedagogy of hope (LeMay, 2014) as a way of promoting the learning of personally relevant strategies to enhance future and present wellbeing in school settings.

The notion of a narrative pedagogy of hope unfolded as two teachers and I co-composed narrative accounts of their experiences of making hope visible and accessible in their interactions with a set of hope-focused practices from the Nurturing Hopeful Souls (LeMay, Edey, Larsen, 2008) resource.

As a way of beginning to make sense of the role of an educator inspiring a narrative pedagogy of hope, I found my most recent student list of characteristics of 'hopeful teachers'. The list was created by students who, very early in their study of hope and hoping, were also inquiring into the characteristics of hopeful places and spaces as part of a hope-focused service-learning project (Hope Kids™).

The characteristics of hopeful teachers, in their opinion:

are positive
are optimistic and pessimistic simultaneously
are happier
can see beyond the issues
are not superficial
are open-minded
don't scratch the surface
are imaginative
are futuristic


As I reflect on this list of characteristics, Havel's (1990) definition of hope as 'not having to have things turn out, but being okay with how things turn out' comes to mind.

Using this list and Havel's definition, I am off to ponder more about what I've learned from conversations with teachers and school staff who, like me, are increasingly inspired to support students' ways of hoping, personally and socially in different spaces and places over time when they also, make hope visible and accessible in their interactions.

I am off to ponder these learnings because my own stories of experience tell me that in addition to the above list, there is more for us to learn about how we inspire hopeful ways of relating, feeling, acting and thinking as beacons of hope on the school landscape.

The Question Is: What Are Students' Experiences of Hope and Hoping

I start with a quote from Dewey (1897/1972, p. 169) as teachers, students, volunteers and I gear up for working with hope-focused practices and activities once again. 

We must discover what there is lying within the child's present sphere of experience. . . .which deserves to be called geographical.  It is not the question of how to teach the child geography, but first of all the question of what geography is for the child.

The hope-focused practices from Nurturing Hopeful Souls enables the kind of understanding that Dewey is talking about.

I have witnessed countless examples wherein teachers and students have shared deeply hidden hopes with each other as they make hope visible and accessible in their stories so that staff are able to support students' hopes and ways of hoping and coping.

I think about the teacher who reported that after making hope visible on the insides of the masks that she was able to support her students to find ways to take the small, but relevant steps they needed to take for the very first time.

I think about the teacher who shared childhood stories of coping with setbacks with her students as a way of helping her students understand that their experiences were normal; that hopefulness and hopelessness reside on the opposite sides of a coin; that we cannot feel hopeful without sometimes feeling hopelessness. We can, however, learn how to accesses sources and resources once we identify who and what they are to help us live with the cards we've been dealt with on the journey of life.

It is these stories that provide me hope, as I continue to put forth the notion of a narrative pedagogy of hope, that unfolded as I co-composed narrative accounts of two teachers' experiences of working with the hope-focused practices from Nurturing Hopeful Souls.

I cannot wait to share what I learn as staff and I listen with our whole beings to how students story their experiences of making hope visible and accessible in their interactions. 

Reflection and Educative Experiences

I have been thinking a lot lately about all the ways we learn about who we are and are becoming and what constitutes an educative vs. a mis-educative experience (Dewey, 1938) in preparation for my upcoming research project. I have also been thinking about the importance of reflection as one of the hope practices in the Nurturing Hopeful Souls resource.

With these two things on my mind, I got up this morning and started to write in my journal about an event that happened some years ago.

This event happened when I introduced a colleague to my father who was visiting me at the Hope Foundation. I noticed that my colleague's 'nice things about my work' seemed to slide off my dad's back as somewhat irrelevant.

Writing this morning, I stumbled upon an astounding awakening about my father's non-pulsed response to my colleague's comments. The revelation was this: It was not important about what I accomplished. It was important for my father to see and hear how I was a kind and caring person that brought a smile to his face.

This represents for me, an example of why it is important to find moments to reflect on the tensions we feel in our interactions. I also believe that if I had not made the time to reflect on what troubled me about this experience, I might have carried around the notion that for some strange reason my dad did not care about who I am and am becoming and that just did not make sense.

Nurturing Hopeful Souls Book Review

We are all hanging on to some positive expectation for the future, that vital notion that we have a future worth working toward. Yet, life and world events deliver a steady stream of evidence to the contrary: vacuous morals, competing sorrows, and fatiguing compassion embedded in a depressing global economy. Regardless of our age, we are striving for independence, social competence, a sense of purpose, and the capacity to be functional, as we work toward a future worth embracing.

So how do we as adults, working with children, help prepare them for the 21st century with all its flaws? How do we find the courage to name our own deeply held hopes and help children discover hope as an antidote to fear?

            An exciting new book, Nurturing Hopeful Souls: Practices and Activities for Working with Children and Youth, helps do that. The creation of educational specialist Lenora M. LeMay, this inspirational and practical resource, aligns itself with the bountiful research on hope and resiliency. Hope motivates. It provides the framework necessary for kids to bounce back from life's problems. It holds the power to transform lives; for children and for those who work with them.

Nurturing Hopeful Souls is not a curriculum, a list of activities, nor a program; it is a way of "being" in the world. It is a way of “being” with children. Nurturing Hopeful Souls is a wake-up call for all of us who work with children and youth about how powerful our interactions are.  
Not just what we say, but who we are and what are actions relay. How do we express our own hope? Can children see hope in our actions and in our relationships with them? Are we really working with them to build personal futures and futures for their communities that are sustainable, enduring, and important?

The book offers practical and well-tested activities, not in a “how-to” format but with the direction needed to begin intentionally practicing hope with children and youth. While all of the activities discussed in this book will engage youth in new ways of looking at the world and their lives, the section on community service learning may be its most inspired innovation. 

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Nurturing Hopeful Souls costs $34.00 plus shipping. Contact Lenora for more details on how you can access this resource and other opportunities.  

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 attend 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 in 2014 as two teachers and I created narrative accounts of their experiences of working with the five hope-focused practices. 

I am currently focusing on creating strategies to inspire narrative reflection because I am learning that creating spaces to attend to the stories that live on the edges of our current experiences, ensures that stories do not always 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 since 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.