As one of my students remarked insightfully in class the other day, things that seem to be great in the abstract are often way messier and difficult in actuality. This is a commonplace observation, in the sense that the experience itself is common. I, at least, find my gleeful careening after theory daily rebutted by this crabby, stolid stone wall of practice. No matter how many times I chase the bright balloon of theory over that wall into the happy plains of success, the crabby wall glowers on the horizon (which, like objects in the rear-view mirror, is always closer than I thought), and, resigned, I have to clamber over it again. I’m perpetually sweaty and my shins are scraped. My balloon bobs along on its string. I’m not sure that a balloon can snicker, but it if could, it would. Thinking theory is easy; living theory is hard.
Augustine has a nice phrase for the idea of living theory: facere veritatem. A little difficult to translate, the phrase suggests that truth is a verb. It’s not something that you have but rather something that you do. It’s tidy enough to make into a tattoo, and I would do it, if I could ever figure out where I want it. And I feel like I need it someplace where I will see it 100 times a day, to remind me to crawl over that wall again, that my truth is only in the making of it. Hamlet might suggest that thinking can make a kingdom of a nutshell, but he also admits that “enterprises of great pith and moment” can become “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
My doctoral supervisor, who quoted Hamlet’s self-recriminating line to me often as a critique of my dissertation, called my tendency to dwell in theory and avoid the work of practice, “All hat and no cattle.” This is another phrase I should have tattooed somewhere.
Currently, I’m writing a book with two dear colleagues, Dr. Shannon Murray (UPEI) and Dr. Jessica Riddell (Bishop’s), about CRITICAL HOPE and Shakespeare, in which we tackle this question about how we can embody hope and empathy in our teaching, in the immediate, living spaces of a classroom. Shakespeare, who is rightly venerated for his ability to give to the intangible je ne sais quoi of human being “a local habitation and a name,” has a great deal to teach us about how to live an idea, crawling as we do between “heaven and earth.” Clothing ideas in bodies was, after all, his stock-in-trade. But even he, who shoved Hamlet out on stage full of doubts about the relationship between thought and action, acknowledges that this is not an easy trick, even for a master like him. The rest of us mortals have a lot of sweating and climbing to do.
This semester I’m launching into another attempt at an experiment in hopeful pedagogy and trying to work out how my commitment to the idea of critical hope will actually work in practice. What does critical hope wear when it shows up in class? What space does it occupy?
In this particular iteration of my experiment, I’m asking the students to design the course, in terms of our daily practice, our assessment model and our assignments. I’ve given them some examples of how other classes have done it. I’ve told them about what previous students who came along on this little adventure over the wall had to say about what worked and what didn’t. They’re nervous. I’m nervous.
But we are standing on the shoulders of previous students who have done good work and provided thoughtful feedback. And we’re taking with us over the wall some basic principles that will guide our course design. These starting principles articulate, from my perspective, some defining conditions of the hopeful classroom:
First, FUTURITY. In order to have hope, the philosopher-teacher Paulo Freire says, we require “thinking which perceives reality as a process, as transformation rather than as a static entity” (Freire 92). It is crucial that we—learners and educators—recognize that the way things are is not the only way things can be and that the way things have been done is not the only way that they can be done. We must see the world as OPEN TO TRANSFORMATION.
Second, AGENCY. If we are are to see transformation as both desirable and survivable, we must reconceive learners as ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS in their own education. They cannot, as Ira Shor says, “sit waiting for the professor to do education to them.” Education is something we DO together. It is not something that is DONE TO US. Change is not positive if it is seen to emanate from a faceless or arbitrary or capricious power. Students must be partners in a system in which the processes of change are transparent, and that respects their perspectives and their courage.
Third, REFLECTION. In order for students to see reality as open to transformation, and to understand that they are capable of intervening in that reality in order to make positive transformational change, we must bake into the system itself opportunities for students to reflect on the conditions of their learning, analyse their performance, revise their positions and perspectives and try again. They must have the opportunity to see their learning as a PROCESS, rather than as a fixed or singular terminal performance.
What will these principles look like in action? How will we clothe them and give them “local habitation and a name?” I think, ideally, the answers to those questions will be unique to this particular classroom, these particular learners. In next year’s classroom, we’ll go over the wall again onto a different plain, chasing our balloon.