My life as an educator began when I was five. My first classroom was my bedroom. My imaginary students sat on my bed. I worked alongside my mother in her classroom for 17 years before I had my first real classroom. However, three years in I began searching for something that was missing for me ~ something I had learned to rely on in those first 22 years of practicing to become the teacher I imagined I would be. I left the classroom for two years and worked with youth in a Youth Assessment Centre to see if I could find what it was that I needed at that time in my life only to realize that I belonged in the classroom.
12 years later I embarked on my master’s to explore how I might establish professional development opportunities for myself that I needed to be and become who I needed to be. My thesis shifted halfway through. Instead, I wrote a thesis on my hope as an educator. Shortly thereafter I became the Hope Kids Manager at the Hope Foundation of Alberta on the University of Alberta campus.
Being alongside other colleagues who were interested in this thing called hope, and residents in Continuing Care Centres who interacted with Hope Kids, and later with teachers who were experiencing long-term disabilities, allowed me to wonder out loud why I could not align my way of being with the goal-setting theory of hope that dominated the school culture.
I watched as Hope Kids shared the contents of their personal hope kits and then made collages of hope with residents. I remember the day when one of the Hope Kids said; “We need to put a hope tree with hopeful actions on leaves at the entrance so that residents and families can take a leaf if their hope is being challenged.” I will never ever forget the day a resident with later stage dementia turned to me after Hope Kids and residents shared what they had learned about hope and hoping after their visit and blurted out, “You could never do what we are doing here with a million dollars.”
Then I read about a study conducted at the Hope Foundation with people experiencing a variety of chronic illnesses sharing their stories of hope and hoping. I still hear myself to this day, silently repeating the mantra: Do hope my way, not your way, the phrase that stuck with me as I attended to the individual stories and story gatherers reflections at the end of the monograph Minerva Dialogues: Hope and Chronic Conditions (Jevne, Williamson, & Stechynsky, 1999).
Later when I and two other teachers attended to their experiences of working with hope-focused practices in their personal and professional lives, four threads resonated across their narrative accounts. The threads suggested that 1) the two teachers learned to live with hope in early childhood, 2) they were in the midst of living with hope when we began our conversations, 3) working with hope-focused practices and strategies sharpened who they were and were becoming, and 4) enabled the courage to live the stories that nourished and sustained their way of being and knowing. After what felt like a very long time of being with the narrative accounts and the four resonant threads, three emergent learning(s) surfaced. The three emergent learning(s) were: 1) hope matters but it cannot be imposed; 2) attending to the commonplaces of narrative inquiry inspires an understanding of a narrative conceptualization of hope as an embodied lived experience, and; 3) the Deweyan-inspired narrative conception of hope makes it possible to live alongside the dominant conceptions of hope in education (LeMay, 2014).
My experiences alongside Hope Kids and teachers like Sheila and Carmen who participated in research conversations with me awakened me to how important it was for us to share and reflect on threads of hope in the past and present stories that we lived, told, retold and relived in different places and spaces so that we could story ourselves forward with interest and enthusiasm.
Imagination grounded and continues to ground my hopes and dreams as a hope-focused practitioner and scholar. However, it is the courage to be who I need to be that I garnered by storying myself forward with hope and hoping as my guide, that inspires me to continue to make sense of how a narrative pedagogy of hope (LeMay, 2021) enhances wellbeing and quality of life.
Courageously creating a space and place to make sense of a pedagogy of hope at this time with others from around the world feels like the right thing to do as we navigate ourselves forward at this time.
Contact me if you want to be a part of this incredible undertaking and opportunity.
