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.