pedagogy of hope…

In his essay, “What’s Hope Got to Do With It?”, Dale Jacobs draws on the theories of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Gabriel Marcel to come to some conclusions about the need for a critical hope in education. Drawing on Marcel, Jacobs believes that “Hope…is social in nature” (785) and, drawing on Freire, that critical hope involves “pushing beyond simply dreaming of a better day and into consciously thinking about how to work toward that collective vision” (788). Hope is necessary for the dialogue that Freire proposes (790), as is love (796), which “is not abstract, but is, as Albert Randall observes, ‘always a concrete relationship which is possible only as communion (as an I-thou relationship)'” (795).

Jacobs also discusses the dichotomy of hope and despair: “Despair, then, is not inevitable, but the temptation to despair is and this is why hope is so important… hope puts time on our side wile despair pits time against us” (792). Disappointment, however, is inevitable, but “Disappointment silences us and pushes away from the kind of critical hope that can help us to intervene in our circumstances; when disappointment sets in, intervention in our future no longer seems possible and process seems to yield to inevitability” (795).

The need for hope is important because it denies that history has already written the future: “It’s important, then, to see the world as always in a state of change and as a site for change and intervention” (793). “If, as teachers and as human beings, we see the world as unfinished and open to revision, then we can resist the inexorability of social forces outsid our control and instead attempt to intervene to promote institutional and/or social change” (794).

Jacobs offers the distinction of what makes critical hope “critical”: it involves “reflection on action” (797). He quotes Macquarrie: “Hope can remain healthy and be prevented from lapsing into optimism and other aberrations only so long as its intellectual side continues to criticize the objects which hope proposes” (797).

I really appreciate this article for its emphasis on something that always seems hard to understand in intellectual ways: hope and love. It’s also pretty inspiring. However, I’m confused at the end of the essay when Jacobs criticizes “transformative intellectuals” like Giroux, McLaren, and Shor because “in this [their] version of critical pedagogy, the teacher is constructed as transformative intellectual and elevated above the student by virtue of a perceived ability to see more clearly the ideological structures underlying the world we inhabit” (798). This makes sense, I suppose, and I guess this comes from a lack of familiarity with Giroux and McLaren, and a separation of reading Shor by many years. I’m going to be reading a lot of Giroux this term, so I’m sure this will become elucidated soon, and I hope to read some works from this essay’s works cited.

It’s too hot in this coffee shop to continue writing. I’m off.

Jacobs, Dale. “What’s Hope Got to Do With It? Toward a Theory of Hope and Pedagogy.” JAC 25.4 (2005): 783-802.