A Pedagogy of Hope

I have been thinking a bit more about this idea of what a good teacher is, does and seeks to achieve. I’ve talked about it a little in the comments in response to Dave Peters. It seems that however hard I try to explore a question, I keep coming back to the meaning of life. This week has seen me reading up on existentialism and nihilism and finding hope in psychology and potentially a partial answer to the question.

In the last posting, I talked about Korthagen’s work on belief and teacher education, with an emphasis on the importance of key values and not just the topical key skills. This led me to think about likely beliefs of pre-service teachers, be they explicit or implicit. Starting with the worst-case scenario, what if people hold a nihilistic view that there is no meaning to life? Why would you even get out of bed in the morning, never mind teach? But then there is a deterministic view that we are merely the result of DNA or our social conditioning, which is also a bit depressing as it can also be devoid of hope and potentially damaging in the classroom. The existentialist promise of man defining himself seems to be a much healthier starting place and is inclusive of both theists (Kierkegaard) and atheists (Jean-Paul Sartre). Following in this tradition, Victor Frankl’s, Man’s Search For Meaning teaches, that while we cannot always control what is done to us, we can indeed control our response. Frankl’s experiences as a prisoner in Dachau, add authenticity to his arguments (his book really is a must read!)

So I would argue that in order to teach we should be possession of a belief that there is meaning to life and that we as teachers and learners have the power to engage with our own destiny and make meaning.

This then provokes the next question, teach what? What do we want to achieve? A simple answer might be framed in economics; we want a skilled workforce, which is competitive in the world. This is clearly important, but it is only part of the picture. To measure everything in terms of the mighty dollar is hugely shortsighted. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written some wonderful papers exploring happiness. He has argued against the focus of his fellow psychologists on pathologies and called for exploration of the positive attributes that make life rich and worthwhile. He identifies these as being, “hope, wisdom, creativity, future-mindedness, courage, spirituality, responsibility, and perseverance”. Perhaps educators should be enaging with these themes. While there are economic realities that dictate that we need to have the potential to earn a living, Csikszentmihalyi has argued there is a deeply ambiguous relationship between happiness and income. We might better serve our children by preparing them to live rich and abundant lives as well as providing for themselves materially.

Such an approach may also prove to economically worthwhile as it may act as a preventative medicine for the countless souls who end up shipwrecked into hopelessness and despair in our societies – offering them a pedagogy of hope