Inventing Landscapes of Hope: Our Educational Responsibility in Times of Crisis

• In Event: Difference, Social Engagement, and Responsibility: Perspectives From the Dewey-Soka Heritage

Abstract

This presentation explores perspectives on the politics of possibilities in an era of intolerance, violence, hatred, fear, and injustice. Daring to hope in impossible times demands volunteer exile (Panelist 8, 2010) from commodified (Illich, 1970), and deskilling societies (Apple, 1986) to make the impossible possible (Ayers, 2016). It entails to keep the boundless human potential evolving, to keep questioning and challenging authoritarian and dominant narrative, and to fight back all forms of suppressions, repressions, and oppressions. Hope seeks a balanced human condition in-between contradictions and complexities; it offers a clear vision to cultivate beauty, integrity, justice, and humanity (Panelist 11, 2009). The imagination, especially what Maxine Greene (1995) calls radical imagination (see also Anyon, 2005; Freire, 2007; Olson & Worsham, 2007), emerges as a requirement for hope in impossible times. Radical imagination demands a sense of hope grounded in actual conditions, “an optimism of the intellect” (Harvey, 2000, p. 6), an “educated hope” (Giroux, 2007, p. xiii) that evokes “different histories and different futures,” “substantiates…ambivalence while problematizing certainty” (Giroux, 2007, p. xiii), inspires “optimism over despair” (Chomsky, 2017), and politicizes possibilities (Olson & Worsham, 2007) without romanticizing or cynicizing the world where we live.
Daring to hope in impossible times demands engagement in solidarities and joined efforts to move beyond boundaries, transgress orthodoxies and bureaucratic procedures (Giroux, 2017, p. 3), develop creative insubordination strategies for “challenging forms of domination,” create “more equitable and just public spheres within and outside of educational institutions” (Mohanty, 1989, P. 207), and passionately participate in the life of schools, families, and communities. It calls for what Ikeda (2010) calls creative coexistence. Daring to hope in impossible times thrives on passionate involvement, strong commitment, and unfaltering advocacy for disenfranchised, underrepresented, and invisible groups and individuals. This passion, commitment, and advocacy cannot be cultivated in isolation. It calls for an exile community, “the hybridity of imagined communities” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 5), a movement of community organizing, where teachers and educational workers with shared experience of teaching against the grain (Cochran-Smith, 1991, 2001, 2004; Simon, 1992) to work together as allies, to take to heart the predicaments of the oppressed, suppressed, and repressed groups and individuals, and to develop ideas, languages, and strategies to enact educational and social change that fosters equity, equality, freedom, and social justice. This exile community can only flourish when the efforts of teachers join with the efforts of other educational workers such as educators, administrators, policymakers, students, parents, and community members (Panelist 8, 2010, 2016). This expanded community embodies possibilities and creates hope that we can invent a more invigorating gathering place for differences, where we might live more robustly, develop our human capacities more fully, and become humane and peaceful in inquiry and life. Daring to hope calls for committed members of communities to invent a landscape of hope where love, justice, and education (Panelist 11, 2009) are possible for all in what Dewey (1939) called creative democracies.

Authors

• Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University

• William (Bill) H. Schubert, University of Illinois at Chicago