Learning With Hope Wonders

Today I finally changed the name of my blog to better reflect what I am learning as I work with others to make hope visible and accessible in our lives.

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 do not believe that is the case. In fact, I have never believed that to be the case. I suppose I chose 'to' hope way back when I started this blog as a way to attend to what we were and are learning in classrooms.

However, I believe that what we are doing in classrooms with the HOPE KIDS: Hope-Focused Service-Learning program at the Hope Foundation of Alberta is incorporating a way of working with hope-focused practices and strategies so as to encourage being with hope as a way of moving toward a personally meaningful future, which is no different than how most of us come into the world.

In this spirit then, I am changing my posts to ask you to share your responses to the kinds of wonders we put out to students to reflect the fact that learning happens everywhere and all the time.

With that in mind ~

Who nurtures your hope and how have they or do they nurture your hope?

By the way, from now on, you will find my new posts on learningwithhope.blogspot.com

Looking forward to seeing you there!!

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 attended 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 as two teachers and I created narrative accounts of their experiences of working with the five hope-focused practices. 

I am focusing on creating strategies to inspire narrative reflection as part of a narrative pedagogy of hope because I have learned that creating spaces to attend to the stories that live on the edges of our current experiences, ensures that stories do not 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 sense 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.

When I listened to President Obama's healing speech I was struck by the following words that he made at Arizona University on January 12, 2011:

Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.

I believe this statement speaks to what I hear teachers say when they talk about what happens when they work with hope-focused practices and strategies in the 21st Century classroom. The Hope-Focused Service-Learning Program at the Hope Foundation of Alberta encourages youth to make visible and accessible their individual and collective hopes as they work with community members and mentors.

Hope at Work in Our Schools and Communities

Way back on January 1 of this year, I wrote about how hard it is to find a hopeful news story. Since that time I have been a little preoccupied with the number of schools who are interested in working with hope and have missed many opportunities to share what I have noticed since. So when my husband passed a page from the Edmonton Journal to me this morning, like he does whenever he sees something that will elevate my hope, I decided it was time to address the letters to the editor under the heading "Growing up on 'rez' what you make of it' in today's Edmonton Journal!!   Students from Ermineskin in Hobemma wrote in response to "Ermineskin students find oasis of calm in a story place: School's steady, relentless approach held as a model for First Nations," The Journal Sept 20.

The letters written by 13, 14, and 15 year old students and especially Teisha's comment, "Just remember, it's not the place, it's the people," remind me of how I felt when students from Montana shared their artistic representations of  hope with us at the Hope Foundation some three years ago.  I remember leaving that conversation wondering how we could, as a community, work to magnify the hope that they depicted alongside the hopelessness that we so often focus our attention toward.  

The letters in today's Edmonton Journal, represent, in my opinion, an example of how applied hope, or in this case, 'paying attention to hope', which is one of five hope-focused practices in the Nurturing Hopeful Souls resource, enhances quality of life for both the students, community members and those who live outside the community.   I believe the letters ask us to consider what and who nurtures the hope(s) of ALL students and how we might contribute to their hopes from the perspective of what is meaningful to them.  

Working With Hope

 Audrey, who is a good friend and mentor to me, sent this podcast http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/tapestry.xml  with a note to me that said, "Although not complete as it did NOT include the Hope Foundation of Alberta http://www.ualberta.ca/HOPE/, CBC radio had an interesting discussion on HOPE today."

Listening to this podcast I thought about a comment I heard from an individual who participated in a teleconference that I presented last week on hope and resilience to mental health professionals working in schools who said, "Imagine what it will be like in ten years when we won't question what it means to work with hope-focused strategies."

Newspapers as Vehicles of Hope

"I had to read to page seven in the newspaper today to find a good news story."  I hear comments like this from Bart regularly at the breakfast table.  I choose not to read the paper, but look over the headlines from across the table to see what I need to know as a way of keeping myself up to date. 

I am not burying my head in the sand or pretending that horrible things are not happening on our streets and homes.  I believe, instead, that it helps us to work toward solutions when hopeful actions, thoughts, feelings, and relationships are made visible and accessible.   

This leads me wonder if more people, like myself, would read newspapers, if like Bart suggested, the good news story had been placed on page one.  

HOPE WEEK (February 1 - 6) would be a great time to experiment.  What do you think?

Good Read

I am off to the library to get my copy of one of the new additions in the Hope-Lit Data Base that caught my attention. I need to get it from the library because it does not have the HF label attached to the title. Anything in the hope-lit data base with HF means it is available in the Jack Chesney resource centre at the Hope Foundation (11032-89 Ave., Edmonton, Alberta). Please - do not put a hold on it till January 5, 2010 because I hope to have it till then.

Holleran, K. E. (2009). Meaningful matters: An autoethnography of hope for academically gifted high school achievers. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences, 70(1-A).

Abstract: Written as an autoethnography, this study explores the experience of six academically achieving gifted high school students alongside my experiences as a school counsellor working with gifted academic achievers in the Province of New Brunswick. Recent research in the area of gifted students suggests that high achieving students are at least as well adjusted as any other student in life; however, research also suggests that gifted students have a distinct set of qualities that may complicate their ability to set goals and to remain resilient against adversities. Research in the area of hope suggests that students with higher levels of hope indicate more satisfactory levels of academic achievement and greater competence in interpersonal relations than compared to students with lower levels of hope. Although hope has been studied in educational settings, researchers have not examined hope and how hope may be maintained with achieving gifted students who face the inevitable challenges that

competition and high achievement in school impose on a regular basis. Interactive interviews, stematic self-introspection, and retrospective observations were used to collect data detailing accounts concerning how academically achieving gifted individuals described their educational encounters and their experiences of hope on the educational landscape. Reflections from the participants are laid alongside my own accounts of hope and giftedness in high school education. Descriptions are presented as interwoven narratives and include my current thoughts as a researcher, my past experiences and observations as a school counsellor, and my understandings of the participants' stories. Several key ideas emerged from the collection of data. Hope for these six gifted academically achieving students was described as a dynamic and energetic sense of confidence about their own futures. Early high school years (grades nine and ten) often served as a meaningless period in their educational careers that stifled their hopes. Enriched classes and independent studies in later years (grades eleven and twelve) offered students hope in their learning, because the independent learning style often focused on application and exploration of knowledge which made the learning process more meaningful. Further, these academically achieving students often felt as though their hope was challenged as they struggled to belong and fit-in with their peers, evaluated their performance against their peers on a regular basis, and attempted to manage the pressures from teachers, parents, and themselves. These struggles often led the students to believe that their marks defined them, restricted what was possible, caused the students to dissociate from the learning process, and overshadowed meaning and hope within the classrooms. Possible implications for teachers, parents, school counsellors, and academically achieving gifted students are offered and implications for further research are suggested.