Beyond Naïve Hope: The Emotional Challenges of Critical Hope in Pedagogies

• In Event: 31.060 - Critical Hope and Social Justice

Abstract

The work of transformative social justice in education challenges students and educators to engage in reflexive criticality, which often represent volatile affective dimensions of educational relationships. This reflexive criticality, necessary for developing what we term “critical hope,” involves a willingness to question cherished values and beliefs, which calls for creative pedagogical approaches to challenging dominant cultural ideologies, alongside respecting people’s emotional investments in dominant ideologies such as meritocracy, an American Dream most students are told may be achieved through the virtuous hard work.

Engaging insights from the diverse philosophers and thinkers interviewed by Mary Zournazi in her edited collection of interview Hope, this presentation for the Roundtable Session first explores definitions of critical hope developed by drawing on these insightful interviews. It then applies these conceptual insights about hope to ask in turn, how social justice educators may translate such theory into pedagogical practices that take seriously the affective attachments to certainty and “naive hope.” Building on examples of white students’ resistance to critical hope, the essay moves instead towards an engaged “critical hope” and its related ethical and affective dimensions.

Author

• Megan Boler, University of Toronto