November 17th, 2021—Hope is a word I hear tossed around, like a life-ring, in response to many contemporary challenges in schools. I “hope” we get back to normal soon. I “hope” the school board focuses on student learning not test scores. I “hope” my principal doesn’t ask me to take on a leadership role. Or the more heartbreaking, I “hope” I can hang on another year. It strikes me that “hope”, as life-ring, has become so ubiquitous that its true meaning is increasingly hard to grasp and attend to. It is tossed about so regularly that it is hard to tell if a real emergency exists or not. Hope, I fear, is something you say when you don’t know what else to say in the face of a world full of suffering, loss and disappointment. It has become, it seems, a passing comment you say to someone at the end of a conversation. A functional way of saying goodbye; “I hope you have a good day”.
One question I’m pondering is, why is “hope” so prominent in the thoughts and language of many educators? Is it just part of the vernacular, a sort of general opening to a conversation? A universal hello and starting point for interaction; “How are you? I hope our classes go well today”. Is the frequent use of “hope” an indication of underlying trouble in the deep fabric of teaching? Does it suggest a disturbance that is felt, but lack adequate language to describe? Is “hope” a wish or expectation for change that follows a predetermined pattern and outcome? Where “hope” actually means, I “want” change to follow my expectations and plans. Is “hope” a reasonable state of mind in the face of the COVID pandemic and all the changes it has fostered?
I started paying attention to hope after I read a post by Dan Rather in his blog “Steady”. On 11-3-21, the day after the midterm election, he wrote: “I have seen the road to progress in my lifetime take many detours... But the reason why progress often gets back on track is because people refuse to give up. They regroup, rethink, reorganize, but not retreat... I have no way of predicting where we will go. I do know, however, that fatalism has never been a winning strategy.” Although Rather never explicitly mentions hope, I hear overtones of hope in his text. Hope that is forward leaning, with a stubborn commitment to move out, with others, into an unknown future. As an educator who has experienced detours in my grand plans for reform or even the failure of a lesson to elicit learning, I resonate with this sense of hope as something to strive for without any presumptions about ultimate outcomes.
Hope that is transformative can be isolating and painful because true hope is more than a social greeting or functional wish. Victoria Safford in her reflections on hope makes a similar observation that standing at the “garden gates” of hope can be a “lonely place, of truth-telling about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be…” And in those moments of “truth-telling”, people who embody hope are also forming community as they tell “people what we're seeing, asking them what they see”. For Safford, hope becomes less a life raft and more a commons of shared lived experiences. I think this is what teachers who thrive, not just survive schooling, are doing. They are calling out to their colleagues, telling them what they see, the encouraging and discouraging, and inspiring them to share their stories. And in the story telling their humanity is acknowledged in the affirmations and encouragement they receive from others who are also sharing their stories of woundedness and healing.
Hope is far from a static endeavor. It is not something that one waits passively for. It is a verb, an action item. Rebecca Solnit argues that “hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with, in an emergency”. It sure feels like wielding the axe of reform is warranted these days. I feel a compelling impulse to create holes in the system to both let light in and to create new possibilities. Yet hope-filled reform is non-linear. It can be initiated but how hope manifests in the world is best left to an organic process of self-actualization. Vaclav Havel writes that, “hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” As an educator I find comfort in the thought that hope as something I strive for while also relinquishing any predictive result over it. I can invest my energy in action around social justice, equity and speaking truth to power without being overly focused on managing the outcome. Hope is not a passive response to adversity, it doesn’t accept stillness, rather it is a call to action that is not contingent on predictive outcomes for its value.
But breaking down doors, even with an ax, is no easy task. Dan Rather agrees with this sentiment, “But to change that fate requires energy and perseverance. Recovery is not inevitable but it is not impossible - not by a long shot.” Hope and its intention, change, requires active participation. As much as hope resists the human tendency to push for a predictable outcome where “I hope…” means I ordain that thing to happen as I want it to unfold; hope still needs the human hand and heart to become concrete in the world. Here is the challenge, acting in the world with hope in your heart, while stepping away from outcomes, performance indicators and external markers of success. For me, the energy and commitment to hope comes from colleagues and students who are also living these challenging times in education with integrity and commitment to the call to serve others. Where we will end up, I don’t know. I do know that together—you, I and others—can make a change in education for the better; that is what I hope for, in whatever form it takes.