Making Sense of Our Storied Experiences of Hope and Hoping

As I listen to stories of hope and hoping during this pandemic, I don't hear many stories about setting and attaining goals.

What I am hearing, are stories of having the time and energy to participate in the meaningful and relevant activities that nourish our souls. I see and hear individuals reaching out to those they haven't connected with for a long time. I hear people telling stories about the small moments that make their day.

This makes me feel hopeful because I know how a narrative conception of hope (LeMay, 2014) has enhanced my own wellbeing long before the pandemic set in.

I imagine that when we look back at this time that we will see that although things did not turn out the way we hoped, that we are okay with how things did turn out. For this is how I've learned to understand my storied experiences with hope and hoping before the pandemic became a reality.

I am hopeful that individuals will join me in learning more about what transpires when attend to making hope visible and accessible in their storied experiences in the very near future!!

Dare To Hope

As I prepare distance opportunities to make sense of a narrative pedagogy of hope (LeMay, 2014), I am reminded of the following statements that were made by teachers and teacher assistants who attended a series of five professional development 'Dare to Hope' sessions over a period of seven months in 2008. Simultaneously, I look forward to the next iteration of 'Dare to Hope' sessions.

I used to be burnt out and detached, but now I am refreshed/hopeful.
I used to be overwhelmed, but now I can see each students' unique qualities.
I used to just care for, but now I know how to care with as well.

I used to have less of an idea of how to effectively build hope. Now I have community, caring, coping, creating, committing and celebrating as ways to think about building the courage to take hopeful actions.

I used to think only some people needed hope.
I now think everybody needs hope, needs to be a part of hope and to keep hope at the front of everything.

I used to think that hopefulness was an indefinable term.
Now I have started to use hopeful language and hopeful thoughts in a very discrete manner.

I used to teach to, hope for, see children as needing.
Now I learn with, do see children as giving.

Courageously Navigating Forward With Hope

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.

Being Okay with How Things Turn Out

I know that some individuals are surprised by my comments and/or ways of reacting of late since I am often told I am the eternal optimist or Pollyanna because I choose to live with audacious hope.

However, I believe courageously voicing how the daily news impacts my immediate and future wellbeing is not only a democratic privilege and responsibility but the only way I can remain hopeful in this time of uncertainty. For me, that means questioning how we might see things from different perspectives.

 Although ignoring what is immobilizing me is an option, experience has taught me that when I stuff my fears inside hoping it will disappear, the fear grows and consumes me like a smouldering fire that eventually erupts into a raging firestorm that I cannot control.

Living with audacious hope requires that I face my fears. Once I know what I am afraid of I can determine how I can react given the severity of the fear I am feeling.

Rather than ignoring a fear, naming it and thinking about what I or we can do to manage the fear while imagining at the same time how things might be different, enables me to cope, suggest, and/or wonder about other ways of relating, feeling, thinking and acting that we might want to embrace so that over time we are okay with how things turn.

So, when I do question or sound less than hopeful in my comments, I am not doing so to instill more fear or anger. On the contrary, I hope to inspire divergent and deeper conversations to inspire a brighter future for all.

The Smallest Things That Contribute to My Hope and Hoping

I remember alarm bells ringing when I started reading, in 2002, how hopeless children and youth were feeling about the state of the world and their futures.

17 years later, as I watch and listen to children and youth demanding that we start to seriously reduce climate change, I sit here on a Saturday morning, wondering what more I can do to make a difference so that children and youth do not succumb to the overwhelming sense of despair that I too feel around the attempts to silence their demands.

For me, attending to our storied experiences of how we manifest hope and hoping in our relationships, feelings, actions, and thoughts makes visible who we are and are becoming individually and as a society.

The children and youth are manifesting their hope and hoping by marching and chanting their message, hoping at the same time that we will be moved to act in a way that aligns with the message that children are our future. They are demanding that we make our actions match our talk.

Although their marches boost my hope, I know from attending to my experiences that I need to do much more to maintain a hopeful stance on any given day, let alone when I think about how inconsequential I feel at times when I think about issues like the effects of climate change.

Writing this blog post, in itself is one small action that helps me feel more hopeful. Just like walking or riding my bike whenever possible instead of driving, hanging my clothes to dry instead of using the dryer, bringing my own bags to the store instead of using plastic do.

More recently I've added another action and that's to research/read everything I can to inform myself so that I can respond to the hope suckers without becoming immobilized.

My ultimate hope is that my actions spur others to think about the small things they can do to make a difference; however, small that difference is. I believe that our small actions taken together add up to big differences over time and more importantly inspire others to consider how they might contribute to more hopeful outcomes both in the present and future.

I wonder what would happen if after children and youth shared other ways they are contributing to reducing climate change while and after they marched. Perhaps, my hope is already being realized without my knowing. How great that would be. Until I hear otherwise, I will continue doing the things that fuel my hope!

Hope, Hoping, and a Sense of Well-Being

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.

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.

Continuing to Make Sense of A Deweyan-inspired Narrative Conception of Hope

Just last week I talked with a group of educators about hope and courage as we made sense of the hope suckers that come into the lives of those with whom we interact and as a result seep into our stories.

Hearing about the words of grade five students who said, "You can't have courage if you don't have hope and you can't be hopeful if you aren't courageous," inspired me to leave the classroom to pursue another way of being with hope and hoping.

12 years later, I learned that attending to hope and hoping in our stories enables the "courage to be" as I worked alongside and with two teachers who co-composed narrative accounts about their experiences of making hope visible and accessible in their personal and socially constructed stories in different places/spaces, over time.

I learned that, for these two teachers, 'the courage to be' unfolded in the two narrative accounts.

“Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality.”

- Author Unknown

Dr. Anita Levine, hope researcher and professor at State University of New York @ Oneonta begins a chapter in her dissertation on teacher hope with the above quote.

Dr. Levine will be presenting her findings from her research this Wednesday, March 28, 2012 at the University of Alberta.

For more information call - (780) 492-1222.

On Being Hopeful

Imagine what we are doing for our students when we create spaces to make ways of hoping accessible ~ especially when hope suckers present themselves?

It feels like we are making spaces for empathy ...

I am surprised at how introspective students become when they reflect on their experiences of hoping ....

Reflecting on these comments, made by teachers while sharing stories of working with the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program in recent professional development sessions, reminds me that it was grade eight students who taught me about needing to put hope shields over our hearts to protect ourselves from the hope suckers. I remember another group of grade five students explaining to me that wishing is in the head and hoping in the heart. Finally, I remember the day another group of grade five students participated in conversations with Rotarians to plan community hope projects in conjunction with their academic studies.

These memories sustain my hope and determination to continue to find ways to create opportunities for teachers to make sense of how we can create spaces and places for students to story themselves forward in times of adversity and despair or as the grade eights put it ~ to cope with the hope suckers that can immobilize and/or make living feel too difficult in the moment.

I keep these stories close to my heart so that I do not become discouraged by the statistics of how quickly one can decide to terminate his/her life in a moment of anguish or choose to dull the pain over time with drugs or alcohol when hopeful ways of relating and acting are considered secondary to how we see ourselves moving into a personally meaningful future.

Places of Hope Gallery

Join Hope Kids in their search for 'PLACES OF HOPE' by submitting your photographs and/or descriptions to hope@ualberta.ca

Your images will be added to the HOPE KIDS section on the Hope Foundation of Alberta website for students and teachers to view, as they move toward the second phase of the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program.

Hope Kids will be conducting hopeful needs assessments of their communities in this second phase of the program so as to plan their hope-focused community service project. One of the first things that they do as they move into this second phase is to take photographs of 'places of hope' in their community. You can help by adding your places of hope to their collections.

Many things happen after and with the photographs depending on the academic focus and/or questions that the students and teacher have determined from their ongoing interactions with community mentors and members.

Student voice is a critical element of the service practice in the trademarked HOPE KIDS program, and especially in the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program. Interacting with community mentors and members at least three times, is another element. However, in addition to these and other elements of service-learning, the other four hope-focused practices, which can be found in the Nurturing Hopeful Souls resource are also critical to the success of each of the unique programs underway in the 36 schools in Central Alberta.

As students, teachers, community mentors and members come together this year, as they have in the past six years, 36 new school stories of working with the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program are evolving. These stories continue to contribute to the ongoing development of part two of the Nurturing Hopeful Souls resource, along with the accompanying professional development sessions that are provided for interested teachers, community mentors and members.

We look forward to your participation to add to our stories!!

Join Us...20th Celebration Planning

We are gearing up for our 20th Anniversary at the Hope Foundation of Alberta.

If you are interested in helping us plan for the celebration in May 2012, please let me know and I will forward details of our 1st meeting scheduled for October 4, 2011 @ 4:00 pm.

For those of you who want to speak in person, I can be reached at (780) 492-1222.

Hope Shapes How We View and Understand Our World

"Hope is clearly something humans recognize in themselves and others. It shapes how we view and understand our world and is manifested at many levels" (Andrews, 2010).

I found this quote in the editorial by Paul Andrews in the Cambridge Journal of Education Vol 40(4) as I was preparing for conversations and professional development sessions with teachers interested in working with the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program over the next school year.

I believe that making hope visible and accessible in our interactions with others helps us to make sense of who we are and are becoming. As such, the hope-focused practices and strategies in the Nurturing Hopeful Souls resource nurture a 'pedagogy of hope' that enables individuals to come away with new understandings about themselves and each other on many levels.

I look forward to sharing with you and hearing from you what it looks, sounds, and feels like to make hope visible and accessible in our interactions throughout this next school year!!

Hope and Responsilbity

Hope is about responsibility.

If you do the wrong thing,

you can take another person’s hope away.

You feel guilty.

This is a quote that I came upon when combing through some old files. The quote comes from a Hope Kid who participated in the Hope-Focused Service-Learning program a few years ago. A few months ago I was reflecting on the relationship between hope and responsibility and have been on the lookout since then for anything that I could find on the subject. I would love to hear other's thoughts on the relationship between the two!!