(1887) PEDAGOGY OF HOPE AS AN ELEMENT IN THE BRICOLAGE OF BUILDING RURAL COMMUNITIES

摘要

Hope is one of those words that we often use but seldom define. We often use hope in a tentative and tenuous manner: I hope I will pass the test, I hope it will rain tomorrow; I hope we will have a nice dinner. But authentic hope is more than a dream - more than a soap bubble that vaporizes into thin air. That is why it is so important that when we talk of hope in education that we are clear on its meaning. This paper on hope is based on an autoethnographic/grounded theory study conducted over a period of 30 years. As a method, autoethnography combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography. When writing an autobiography, an author retroactively and selectively writes about past experiences and these experiences are assembled using hindsight. In this paper, I argue that grounded theory and autoethnography are highly compatible, as autoethnographic studies can provide the thick description that is very useful data for grounded theory analysis. I will use autoethnography combined with grounded theory to present a number of vignettes based on my research done over many years to interrogate the possibility of using ‘pedagogy of hope’ as a possible element in the bricolage of building and rebuilding rural communities. In this process, I will analyze the ideas of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Marcel, Carabajo and other philosophers/educationalists in search of a possible understanding of hope that could guide and direct educators working in disadvantage, impoverished and resourceless communities in building and rebuilding the education of their communities. Creating an understanding of hope in a despondent environment must be seen against the ideas of Levinas about useless suffering and Marcel’s ideas of despair, only then can we create authentic hope. Suffering provides us with an opening to what Levinas calls the interpersonal and Marcel the intersubjective, i.e. the ethical demand of the other or interdependency of humans. From this perspective hope is communal and resonates with the ideals of Ubuntu. The theoretical analysis is pitted against an own autoethnographic analysis to formulate grounded theory based principles that provides a way of seeing hope as an element in the bricolage of building sustainable rural communities. It is postulated that hope is pedagogical only when it has been born and has grown in the fertile ground of this inter-human and interpersonal relationship. In conclusion, I postulate six fundamental criteria for pedagogical hope.