lesson 10: becoming, being and remaining hopeful - pedagogy of hope in/for the 21st century

documentary paralestine

Yasser, Ibrahim Abu Wazna

about people with dyabilities in Palestine (some due to the war)

hope

can be approached in many different ways

psychological approach to hope

This literature reduces hope to something that can be quantified

o   Hope than easily becomes something associated with individuals, rather than with generations

o   It’s something that’s represented in crafts, in things like a spectrum, where individuals can be positioned in different ways (low hoping – high hoping people)

o   They also consider hope as something that can be learned  you can learn to be more hopeful

educational approach of hope

Banking model of education

Education is the very force that will, in the end (according to Freire), enable people to change the world, where more equality can be created

banking model of education

the knowledge was being considered as a kind of money that could be positioned on a particular bank and this could be increased → all about making profit

• Turning individuals into productive beings that, in turn of the education they received, then would contribute to economic processes that were ongoing

• These economic processes were also associated with racism and depression

Freire

South American educator, published influential works and was heavily inspired by Marxist theories

Freire: hope

the condition that creates the possibility of educating individuals, of making people conscious of the fact that they’re oppressed and they have to do things to emancipate themselves, or the condition to know that you educate people about the fact that they’re oppressing individuals

critical approach of hope

o   Emphasizes that hope isn’t something passive

o   In order to realize a change, we need to take action, we can’t only hope

o   But we can connect that particular hope with action (here: educational action)

Maudlin

We have to rid of hope altogether, because it’s a very dangerous object

It runs the danger of reproducing the very kind of inequalities that kind of erose from it in the first place

criticism of Maudlin (at the critical approach of hope)

• She has a problem with the ideal world that is described by Freire and which is positioned in the future

  • The changes have been realized, and we end up with a kind of world where the ideal human being is realized → this is based on a Western ideal, not global

• This ideal human being can never be achieved, because there isn’t such a thing as unpolluted water

  • We will never achieve this kind of unproblematic world where everything is organized in a good way

  • This is in a way also a plea to keep being critical

Lea Dasberg

-        Born in 1930 in Amsterdam, died in 2018 in Jerusalem (moved to Israel to set up an educational experiment, she had a Jewish background)

-        Publicized a lot (ex: “grootbrengen door kleinhouden”)

-        Professor in the history of education and educational sciences at University of Utrecht and later also at the University of Amsterdam

Philippe Ariès

famous historian

o   Published a book in the 60’s

o   Children, childhood wasn’t something natural, but something that was discovered in a particular time period

o   He pointed out that the child as we know it today, was kind of discovered in the 17^th century

discovery of the child

in the 18th century according to Dasberg (17th according to Ariès)

• The way that we looked at children until that particular period, completely changed afterwards

• Before: the child was represented as a miniature adult, they grew up in the same conditions where adults could be found

• 17^th/18^th century: situation where children increasingly are taken out of the world of adults and being put in a separate world

ideas of Dasberg (hope)

• teachers, parents … should stop behaving in such a way as if there’s no future anymore

• Pedagogical professionals no longer believed in the future, this is problematic because: “The prospect of the demise of all life in the near future makes pedagogy meaningless and impossible”

Problematic for the new generation: they grow up with the idea that the future might not be there at all

• “We shouldn’t be surprised as our children, the new generation, start drinking, taking drugs, commit suicide …”

There is no other pedagogy than a pedagogy of hope

pedagogy of hope: Dasberg

consisted of 2 things:

1.     The pedagogy of hope had to be related to historical consciousness

2. The figure of the other is very important

Combination of the 2: precisely what can help us in order to escape from the sterile debate whether we need hope or don’t

historical consciousness

o   history teaching and making children conscious of particular historical evolutions should consist in knowing what kind of processes lead to such situations

o   Once you knew those, you could start identifying them in the present, and try to prevent the very things that made something possible (like WO II)

figure of the other

The idea of exploring the other, otherness and the other world is very important for Dasberg’s concept of the pedagogy of hope