For a pedagogy of hope: imagining worlds otherwise

ABSTRACT

For scholars across a wide range of disciplines, the work of building critical inquiry and guiding students to discover and hone the tools necessary to be attentive to the world is not new. Critical scholars have long understood that an engaged pedagogy of emancipation and transformation is not indoctrination but rather an invitation to become more open and develop critical thinking tools. Just as much as we have taken on this responsibility of opening our students to deeper awareness of various modes of violence, dispossession, war, displacement, and oppression that permeate our world, it is also imperative to work to imagine worlds otherwise – to raise the specter of hope and to not give in to despondency or cynicism. Following on bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Henry Giroux, I argue here that hope is a central imperative for an emancipatory education. I further suggest we educators must be careful to not over-simplify hope as either an ephemeral romantic notion or as a rigid radicalism. Rather, hope must be fluid and transformative even as it is able to be transformed – taking on new shapes in the face of a changing world. In this article, I center a pedagogy of hope in the need for an anti-racist and decolonial geography education. I further argue that a pedagogy of hope requires imagination and a recognition that we simply may not yet have the imaginative capacity to know what worlds-otherwise may be possible. Nonetheless, we have a responsibility to pave the way for future possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• transformation
• emancipatory education
• decolonial
• anti-racist

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. At the land grant university, this occurred in the small discussion sections of large courses, at the liberal arts college, my largest class has had 40 students.

2. For a thorough overgoing of the debate, see Gerry Kearns (2004) “The pivotal point of geography.”.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Dartmouth Class of 1962 [Junior Faculty Teaching Fellowship].