Here's a little bit of what I've been up to and am thinking about as I wonder where the day goes and find myself looking back over the last few months, at the same time, with fondness.
Fondness because I've had many aha moments that not only feed my curiosity but make me jump out of bed each morning. Although writing, curriculum development for upcoming courses, and research can feel daunting and draining at times, I find that I am loving the overlapping learning that is happening as I contemplate what a narrative of hope and a narrative pedagogy of hope, which I uncovered as I attended to the experiences of two teachers working with hope-focused practices in my dissertation, look, sound, and feel like.
A narrative conception of hope inspires mindfulness as we attend to the stories we live, tell, retell and relive over time and in different places and spaces. As such a narrative conception of hope aligns with and builds on Clandinin & Connelly's (2000) notion of narrative inquiry.
A narrative conception of hope encourages us to attend to our experiences of hoping so that we feel our stories make sense or as Carr (1986) posits to enable narrative coherence in our stories and as a result a sense of well-being.
A narrative conception of hope enables us to live alongside and with the grand narratives of hope so that when we have trouble following and/or living the grand narratives of hope, which I've named the goal-setting, faith-based, and critical theory of hope, we are able to magnify aspects of our stories that nourish who we are and minimize the hope suckers (LeMay, Edey, & Larsen, 2008) that diminish our sense of well-being.
A narrative pedagogy of hope promotes strategies for making hope visible and accessible in our interactions; attending to hope and hoping with our whole being; and using narrative reflection to make sense of our storied experiences of hoping.
