Listen to thisThe imagination is an essential tool for creating hope in oneself and rekindling hope in one’s students. The author describes ways of understanding the hopeful power of the imagination and strategies for encouraging it in youth.
For many young people, a lack of hope stems from a sense of isolation, a sense that no one shares their values and that they are not cared for by others. Caring about people outside of one’s own circle of friends and family presents a challenge in a world where such concern is not a common value. I remember a quote from a song that was a favorite of my students in 1962 (Kohl, 1967):
Goodbye cruel world, I’m off to join the circus. I’m going to be a broken-hearted clown.
For many of these children, running away to the circus represented a dream of living in a magical world where everyday strife did not exist. Being broken hearted was a common experience.
Caring was what they longed for and often could not find.
Caring for youth and helping them develop the strength to face the challenges in their lives involves fostering hope and not promising the impossible. Optimism, which conveys the belief that things will tum out right, is not the same as hope, which is an abiding, psychological, sociological, and political faith that the world can be better if only you try. Hope promises nothing material but promotes dignity, self-respect, and a spirit of struggle.
Creating hope in oneself as a teacher and nourishing or rekindling it in one’s students is the central issue educators face these days. After 30 years of teaching and trying to reform public schools while continuing to work in a framework of hope, I have had to examine the sources of my own hope as well as my struggles with the temptation to despair and quit. This examination has taken me on a personal journey that has led to some ideas about how hope can be instilled and nurtured in young people. One of the most powerful of those ideas concerns the value of imagination in creating hope. The first step in gaining that value is to create an environment in which the imagination can thrive.
Creating Hope Through the Environment
The novelist George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch that “if
youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our
elders are hopeful about us" (p. 590). This is a profound truth that
caring adults must internalize and practice. We cannot teach hope unless
we ourselves are hopeful, not merely in a general sense but in specific
ways for individual children. Teaching hope involves focusing on
strengths and cultivating a hopeful learning community.
Focus on strengths. One way to teach hope is to get to know
children, not merely their weaknesses, but also their strengths and
beauty. It is easy to discover what children do not know just give them
a high-stakes test. But to know the strengths they have, their dreams
and aspirations, you have to be in affectionate dialog with them. That
is the challenge of creating hope-to establish a condition of mutuality
where you and the young people you work with are curious about each
other and share history, experience, and knowledge.
One way to identify strengths is to have children talk about what they love to do outside of school. The skills involved in these activities can become the basis for learning in other areas and the basis for dialog and mutuality in the classroom.
Another way to identify strengths is to introduce games, puzzles, and
complex building toys into the classroom and watch how young people
relate to them. You might be astonished at the strengths that emerge in
the context of play.
Cultivate a hopeful learning community.
This attitude should not be mistaken for the notion that young people
and the adults who work with them are the same and know the same things.
Adults have knowledge and experience that young people cannot possibly
have. It is vital that a hopeful learning community of adults and young
people acknowledge that they have things to teach each other.
In such a community of learners, the development of a moral and social imagination would be central. The imagination is best thought of holistically, as a mode of mental functioning that supplements the conventions of ordinary experience. The imagination does not merely represent the everyday physical and social world. It conceives of other possible worlds. And it is this opening of possibility that leads to hope. If the world can be imagined to be different and if young people have experiences imagining better, more caring possibilities, they have a resource from which to draw on their own strengths.
One strategy to help students imagine better possibilities is to have them build their dream community. The best way to do this is to discuss what they would like to see if they had the power to build a city or a neighborhood-they may even build a model of the world they imagine. Another strategy is to have students invent things no one has seen before, such as computers that walk, new secret languages and codes, and new musical instruments. The act of invention teases the imagination and helps to develop an awareness of the possible.
Creating Hope through the Imagination
Once a supportive, strengths-based environment exists, you can begin to create hope for children and youth by encouraging self-expression through their imaginations. There are many children on the verge of despair who echo, in their private moments, the sentiments expressed in a poem attributed to a Canadian high school senior who committed suicide. In the poem, the young man describes a picture he drew that explained things he felt no one else cared about-a picture that said things about himself he could not say otherwise:
The youth took the picture to school with him, to remind him of who he was and what he knew about himself. He struggled to preserve his individuality as his teacher and his mother encouraged him to conform. When he began to behave like the other students, the picture lost its power. After he threw the picture away,
... he lay alone looking at the sky.
It
was big and blue and all of everything, But he wasn’t anymore. He was
square inside, and brown, And his hands were stiff.
And he was like
everyone else.
And the thing inside him that needed saying didn’t
need it anymore. *
This poem illustrates the power of imagination to help one cope with the adversities of life. It also illustrates the responsibility adults have to preserve and nurture hope through imaginative thinking. The creations of youthful imagination may be just the strengths we need to try to understand in order to cultivate hopeful learning communities.
Feeling-thinking. How can we encourage and understand youthful imagination? In The Book of Embraces, Eduardo Galeano (1992), introduced a new word, sentipensante, that applies to such imaginative activity:
Why does one write, if not to put one’s pieces together? From the moment we enter school Or church, education chops us into pieces: it teaches us to divorce soul from body and mind from heart. The fishermen of the Colombian Coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, feeling-thinking, to define language that speaks the truth. (p. 32)
The imagination is sentipensante in an extended way. It does not speak the truth, but allows one to play with possible truths, to transcend everyday reality. As we begin to merge thought and feeling, we begin to define values. Thought and feeling merged in imaginative play or reverie can at times suspend the laws of logic and reason, and we begin to dream new worlds. Both thought and feeling are elements that can be played with within the realm of the imagination, and at the same time used to weigh and balance the values that emerge from these imaginative worlds.
Tutors of hope. The imagination is a major source of hope. What this implies is that the arts, music, drama, dance, literature, and poetry are not just things that have to be studied but essentials in the development of creative hopeful learning.
They do not preach. Instead, they invite participation and creation, and allow for dreaming and interpretation. For me the arts are the tutors of hope. One of the major challenges teachers face today is to find ways of using the arts to reach out to young people, to foster hopeful learning, and to express values not explicit in the results of comprehensive tests. Young people can create their own dances, develop plays about a future they might like to live in, write imaginary diaries about imaginary worlds, or create their own songs. Making something lively, expressive, and worth sharing with others is a way of affirming the self and inspiring strength and hope.
We need to take youthful creativity seriously as valuable
self-expression with the hope that our learning communities are
healthier, more caring environments in which individual lives are
honored and can flourish. When I think about the poem by the Canadian
high school student, I see a young man who was reaching out, crying for
help, and demonstrating creativity, insight, and intelligence. What if a
caring adult had read this poem and had become part of an imaginative
rescue attempt?
Maybe the young man would have become hopeful and not
taken his life.
Maybe not. But good teaching always involves “maybes” on the hopeful side.
References
Eliot, G. (1871-2, 1965). Middlemarch. Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.
Galeano, E. H. (1992). The book of embraces. C. Belfrage and M. Schafer, trans. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Kohl, H. (1967). 36 children. New York: New American Library.
* This poem originally appeared in Generation magazine, which is no longer being published. It also appeared on a poster for a Canadian educational group.
From Reaching Today’s Youth, Volume 4 Issue 4 (2000), pp. 39-41
