Pepagogy Notes: False Hope Vs. Critical Hope

This post may not discuss much in the terms of technology but as an aspiring educator who envisions technology used to develop critical thinking skills I want to just highlight the topic of hope in the classroom. In Jeff Duncan Andrade's article Note to Educators: Hope required when growing roses in education, hope can be traumatizing.  The traumatizing hope that Andrade refers to false hope or "a reactionary distortion of the radical premise of hope" (Andrade, 2009, pg. 2).  False hope can be subdivided into three categories.  Here are the categories:

1.) Hokey Hope-A raise yourself from your bootstraps mentality.  Action of explaining that working hard will gurantee success when in reality that may not be true based on socieconomic status, race, environment, etc.  Very individualistic view.

2.) Mythical Hope-idea or symbol that models hope when that idea may just be an outlier or an exception.  Hope is chance opportunity rather than something can be achieved.  

3.) Hope Deferred-educator not taking the agency to create an environment for progressive change.  Anger without action mentaility.  Addressess issue but does not mobilize.  

These false hopes are interconnected and can cause or escalate the trauma learners have and bring to the classroom.  Andrade explains the counter narrative to false hope as critical hope.  The three subcategories of critical hope include:

1.) Material hope-bridging the gap b/w academia and critically responsive pedagogy.  Teachers make lessons relevant to the lives of learners so that progressive changes occurs.

2.) chaotic dialogue that is beautiful and empowering-sharing the pain and struggle in solidarity.  Most difficult to achieve.

3.) Audacious hope-hard to reach easy to obtain after going through material and socratic hope.  Once you go through connecting with student through culturally relevant pedagogy and sharing pain together the steps to breaking down ideology and brokens systems audaciously is easier to reach.

Critical hope is viewed as a holistic process with each subcategory building off the others.  Achieving critical hope is the way to not only to eliminate trauma but to have learners transcend the traditional expectations within a school.