In the final hours of the 2023 Pedagogies of Hope workshop, a large piece of canvas was spread across a table and the remaining participants were invited to trace their hand around one aspect, thought, or feeling that they would carry with them in the wake of our 2-day gathering. In the following weeks, Pedagogies of Hope co-organizer Maddi Chan cut out the handprints and their accompanying messages and spread them across a painted canvas to create the piece photographed above, titled, “Dreams We Hold, Hope We Carry”. Placed across the canvas in no particular order, the roughly cut handprints offer hope for the future of pedagogy, as well as promises to collectively dream, imagine, co-design, and enact decolonial knowledge and world-making projects in and beyond the classroom.

 

What becomes clear in the messages offered in this collage is that pedagogies of hope require a collective commitment to renegotiate community, knowledge, and world-making as an ongoing and unfinished process. This requires that we unsettle the hierarchical structures of dominant pedagogical frameworks, engage ourselves in the dynamic process of co-learning without disregarding the relations of power within pedagogical spaces, and reconcile the historical, material reality of our multifarious locations within colonial worlds. In other words, it requires that we commit to a pedagogical praxis of hope that will inevitably falter and fail but as an ongoing process will offer generative and productive potentialities that can mitigate the disappointments of failure.

 

As José Esteban Munoz (2009) suggests, “The fear of both hope and utopia, as affective structures and approaches to challenges within the social, has been prone to disappointment [. . .] [but] hope can be disappointed [and] such disappointment needs to be risked if certain impasses are to be resisted” (9). Because learning is a happening—an event, an ongoing process—rather than a static or predetermined thing, to enact a pedagogical praxis of hope is to embody—rather than transmit—the process. In gathering at the 2023 Pedagogies of Hope workshop series, embodying the process includes holding onto, and carrying forward, the potentialities of collaborative learning and counterhegemonic knowledge-making to displace the quagmire of political pessimism rooted in and beyond the academic institution that continues to teach us, and our students, that there is no other way but the current world order.

 

Pedagogies of Hope is thus rooted in the recognition that there is another way, and, in fact, there are a multiplicity of ways to learn, to move, and to build better worlds together, to dream, imagine, and co-design decolonial, queer, disabled, and counterhegemonic futurities.