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EdSurge
Can Teaching ‘Hope’ Revive Democracy?
By Jeffrey R. Young
Jan 14, 2020
A new book argues that hope is something that can be taught, and that
it is the key to countering today's heightened polarization.
The book is called “Learning How to Hope: Reviving Democracy through
our Schools and Civil Society” (available free as an ebook from Oxford
University Press), and it’s by Sarah Stitzlein, a professor of
education and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of
Cincinnati.
For this week’s episode of the EdSurge Podcast, we sat down with
Stitzlein to hear how her own attempts to teach hope have made an
impact, and to get her advice on how to approach teaching civics during
the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Listen to this week’s podcast on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify,
Stitcher, Google Play Music or wherever you listen. Or read the partial
transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.
Q: EdSurge: I think at first glance, it might seem to some that
encouraging hope is kind of obvious. You seem to argue though in your
book that we have a kind of hope shortage in this country right now.
What do you mean by that?
Stitzlein: We see our country struggling. We see democracy struggling.
We see citizens struggling—burdened down with hyper-partisanship, folks
struggling to work across the aisle,inability to get things done in
D.C. We're kind of struggling to find some common ground and work
toward a common good, and we see individual citizens who are struggling
and not feeling very hopeful in their personal lives. We certainly see
things like the rise of opioid addiction, suicide rates, but also in
their political lives.
The annual World Values Survey is given each year, and it shows us that
citizens are increasingly feeling cynical rather than hopeful. They're
feeling that they can't influence public policy, and they're feeling
more supportive of authoritarianism rather than democracy as a result.
So while hope might seem like something we all know and want and
celebrate, there's a lot of evidence right now that we're actually in a
significant swing of despair.
Q: It's a presidential election year in the U.S., and so the title of
your book made me think of the former President Barack Obama's
campaign, which encouraged hope on all those campaign posters. How do
you situate what you're talking about in relation to that message?
During the 2008 election we all remember those iconic images that were
on T-shirts and posters of Barack Obama with the “hope” slogan
underneath his face. It was during that time that Obama, of course, was
writing about what he called having the audacity to hope. And I had
been a longtime Republican. I'm born and raised in a farming family in
the Midwest and I was in a rather new courtship with Democrats, if you
will. And I kind of got swept up in that message of hope that was
related to Obama. So a lot of us were kind of cheering for Obama from
our couches and from home. And some of us actually took to the streets
to work for Obama's campaign or to do things to get behind his message.
And I did just that.
On the day before the inauguration in 2009, I took to the streets of
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I was living at the time. Obama called
for a day of public service. And I headed out to engage. I thought this
was a great hopeful way to start a new presidency. But within a few
months, like a lot of my peers, I found myself increasingly frustrated,
back at home on the couch, naively kind of content to believe that
things were going to get better, but not really doing anything to
participate in that change. And so—like many of my peers on the left as
well as some on the right today following President Trump's election—I
felt that a person might have had hope during election year, but we
weren't necessarily doing anything about it beyond casting a ballot.
So when we return to a new election in 2020, my book is trying to offer
a way to show us how to act on hope, not just have it from our couches
or from our ballot boxes, but to actually bring it into our everyday
lives as citizens.
Q: As we cover education we’ve written a lot about the notion of
‘grit,’ the idea popularized by Angela Duckworth about how perseverance
can and should be taught in schools. But this is something, it seems
like, you're kind of at odds with a little bit. Why?
I am. Certainly I want to celebrate the kind of tenacity and
perseverance that's a part of grit. That's certainly a good personal
character trait to have. But I want to move beyond it because grit
opens up a whole host of problems. [For one,] it's seen as this kind of
individualist trait, this “pick yourself up by the bootstraps
mentality,” where we almost find ourselves celebrating individuals who
are facing adversity without recognizing the fact that we should be
working to change the status of adversity so that we're overcoming and
improving our surroundings rather than to celebrating those who are
able to work hard and persevere within them.
And so my alternative in calling for hope is really an effort to move
us past looking at how individuals sustain themselves in difficult and
challenging situations to [focusing on] how can we work together as
citizens to improve the overall situation so folks don't have to endure
difficult struggles related to things like racism, sexism, poverty, et
cetera.
Q: In your book you argue that hope is something that can be taught. What does it look like to teach hope?
I conceive of hope as a kind of habit. It's a habit that we can develop
over time that can be nurtured, and in that way it's something we can
do in schools or in civil organizations, clubs and community groups,
churches, et cetera. These are all spaces where we can nurture this
proclivity.
And so if that habit of hope is a proclivity to want to change and
improve the world for oneself and often for other people, that's
something we can learn in schools through the way that we work together
in inquiry and deliberation, but also through the content that we
learned, the way that we learned to use history and storytelling and
imagination and creativity in our schools.
Q: You teach a class at your university called Save Our Schools about
problems in the K-12 system and how to fix them. What's that class like?
That was my favorite class to teach. Save Our Schools is a course that
is introducing students—some are pre-service teachers, but others are
engineers, biologists and across the spectrum—who come to tackle some
of the problems that we're facing in K-12 education right now. And so
we spend the course introducing them to those problems, but orienting
the entire course around what I see as the key civic question and that
is, “What should we do?”
This is a question that really gets at the pragmatists’ spirit of hope,
that kind of collective orientation toward possibility, toward change
and toward working together. So I start the course by getting my
students out in the community. I put them in the role of a listener so
they can learn from teachers and schools and nonprofits and others
working on education issues in the community to figure out what's going
on, what's working, what's not, what's been tried, what should we try.
And then back in the classroom, I'm arming the students with historical
understanding, helping them understand how we've come to the struggles
we are facing today in our schools. I give them data and scientific
studies and research to show them what's been happening, what's led to
where we are now, and then I'm guiding them through inquiry and through
problem solving so that they can come up with better solutions
I'd get them out in the community—volunteering with local nonprofits to
see how folks outside of physical school spaces are working on
education issues. And then I develop the kind of skills politically
that I think are really important to nurturing a spirit of hope in our
citizen lives. For example, they work on a project where they write
letters to the editor and here they're working to develop their skills
of argumentation and political descent and storytelling. You know, how
could schools be better, so that they can encourage others to get on
board with their plans for change and improvement in schools.
And then finally, the course closes with the opportunity for them to
present their ideas for improving and changing our K-12 schools. I
bring in a panel of state legislators who talk with the students about
next steps for implementing their ideas, for making policies about
them. I'm really pleased to share that there's been some significant
impact from that course, shaping some of the policies and practices
that we have in our K-12 schools in Ohio.
Q: But it seems like by having a class so steeped in political
activism, I'm sure you had students of varying political stripes in the
class. And one person's hope for a policy might be the nightmare of
another person. How do you manage that and keep people from being
frustrated with each other’s views?
That's one of the biggest challenges that we face right now as
educators, is how to find that common ground and how to work across
those differences. But one of the skills that students need, and this
could be K-12 students as well as university students right now, is to
have those kinds of values-clarifying conversations, to talk about why
one feels so committed to a certain view or value or a particular hope
for our country. And then to figure out how we negotiate and navigate
that space in between two opposing or differing views.
I talk a lot with the students about what does it mean to form common
ground together. Not necessarily find a common ground, but actually
work to build it between us. You know, what can we agree upon. And what
is it that's been a lasting, long-standing part of democracy that we
can return to, ideas like equality and justice and opportunity. Things
that folks from different political backgrounds can all get on board
with. But it's hard work. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort and a
lot of careful conversations in the classroom.
Q: What do you think then is the biggest obstacle to this advice you're
giving in your book, about encouraging hope in classroom settings?
I'd say two major obstacles. One is related to trust. The kind of work
that I'm talking about doing in political and civic life requires
trusting in others, especially those who may be different from
ourselves, whether that's in political views or demographic background.
And that can be hard, increasingly, in a hyper-partisan kind of
environment. We see folks driving further and further apart. And with
that comes this increasing mistrust of others. Believing others might
be out for their own personal gain or out to harm us in some way. And
so it puts a lot of onus on educators to create spaces where we can
build trust and overcome some of those factors that are working against
trust in society.
The second part is that my own background I think may give a limited
take on the kind of despair that is deep and difficult to overcome with
a hopeful vision of political life. The kind of despair that comes out
of enduring long-standing systematic racism, for example. Some leading
scholars of color today have turned, instead of to something like hope,
to argue for disengagement from political life in the way that I'm
describing it. More of kind of a self-protection, turning to others
like themselves to create spaces of community and protection. Whereas
I'm calling for this kind of continued ongoing work. This effort to
keep working across boundaries of difference. Those who have endured
more of struggles personally, some of them are turning to opposite
things, and I think I need to wrestle with that a bit more as I think
about how my calls to hope may impact particular individuals,
especially those of color and coming from some of our more impoverished
communities in the United States.
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