Friday, February 15, 2019

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. 

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