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Kia ora koutou, a warm welcome to this discussion space for Hope, Uncertainty and the Work of Education discussion group 1 forum
What a buffet of delight, provocations, approaches, questions, and challenges we can see across and within our gallery here. I invite you to drop in and linger over the powerful images and reflections you have generously shared with us. I have been savouring the diversity and commonalities and complexities of your attention and intentions, let alone the crossovers with other themes and wider issues.
The forums are open for duration of the symposium and offer a chance to reflect and connect. Please visit regularly, use clear and concise thread titles, and enjoy. As a helping suggestion to kickstart your contribution: you can create a post, or you can respond to an existing post. Your post might: ask questions, extend your thinking, respond to other people’s ideas, variable expressions as responses (e.g., visual, poetry, or song, etc.), initial reactions to single image or patterns you see, and offer cross-references to other streams, for example.
Here are a few of my initial impressions:
One prominent feature that I keep being drawn to witnessing hope in quality of light and lighting objects/lens: the (missing/added) light from Christopher’s liminal classroom (between classes); William exploring the life-altering legacy of a teacher opening windows to a worldview; considering hope sitting on a park bench in the sunshine (Jessica); Shabnam’s lamp post in a storm; Sita’s light when teaching at the tear/threshold, her use of constellations and braiding of te ao Māori into hopeful practices and pedagogies. Even the qualities of light and perspective across the images such as those featuring plants (Emanuela’s blooming flower, Hina’s symbiosis, and Ewuradjoa’s seedling in a concrete crack) and landscape (Sita’s night sky, William’s reflective sky, and Dimanthinie’s sky and water). These made me ponder how metaphors and physical realities–vested in qualities of light, shadows, storms, and lifeforces (Tracey-Lynne)–shape our lifeworlds, living spaces, art, and imagination endure given “we must stand and act, create and connect while we can” (Tracey-Lynn). Many echoed that positioning from various vantage points.
My grey cells got buzzing over how our broad sciences, our communities, and we ourselves and our learners engage with hope as aspiration, remedy, creativity, and imperfections. Imperfections are explored by Utkarsh (via the desktop objects of deer and pot plant analogies) and failures (such as Shabnam’s recognition that “some of [my teaching choices] fail, and I find out late or not at all”). Sometimes we see and have bittersweet reflections. For example, Ran and Dimanthinie, respectively offer critical assessments from the binding tensions, firstly, of expertise and feasibility when non-cognate students do the work of responsibility and balancing lacking in feasible regime conditions, and, secondly, in four critical conditions and practices that inhibit our hoped-for educational outcomes.
In the big HE picture, Jessica professes, “the extraordinary promise of the liberal arts: an infinite conversation across time, place, and difference”, which I see as a clarion call to those in the arts and a cautionary warning to science and society that we forget our arts at our peril. The literal peril underwrites Despoina recital of Socrates apology (in original Greek and translation). His final point was to hold strong our real and troubling positions even as strong men testify otherwise as the truth will out. Countering peril from exclusion, isolation, and inequalities features in the hopeful pathways and relations to recovery shared by Rachael, Charlie, and Cherie along with Jennifer, Emily, Ceri, and Gemma: they emphasise the significance and means of countering the neglected transitions and demographics of hope (spatially and socially). Still others remind us of the necessity of a suite of practices and “tools of resistance” (Eddy). One particularly powerful dynamic is the imagination: the future image of ourselves (Syed and Ramsha), the recovery of radical imagination (Sheila). Such vital creativity is key to securing still-possible flourishing now and ahead.
In a bigger picture still, we must recognise (and repair/reorient) connection to the spiritual and creativity. The gallery offers examples of passion, grace, stamina, and passionate braiding of knowledges and embodiment. One striking example is when Tracey-Lynne asserts “creativity offers strength and connection” as a repeated practice where art-making and “enhanc[ing] collective vitality’. In closing, she invokes the Life-Death-Life and Skeleton Woman to embrace ‘the cycles of our creative life [as] a cycle of beginnings and endings, creation and decay, the spiralling out and the resting’. Tracey-Lynne’s reference and tale is a favourite of mine so I will gently embellish here to bring others into the story: Estѐs’ retelling of an Inuit legend begins with the story of how the “Skeleton Woman” came to be (murdering father, ocean cliffs, fish leave only her skeleton, a long time passes deep in the ocean) until a lonely fisherman hooks her rib thinking he has a great fish. In an epic effort, as they both get further entangled in the struggle, he hauls up Skeleton Woman. So when he hightails it home with her along behind, he thinks she is chasing him when in fact he has her hooked and is dragging her with him on a journey where evolving dynamics emerge. While different legends have different details, the legend’s common lesson is life-death-life and specifically about “untangling the bones”; the pivotal act of healing, understanding entanglements and repairing connection. Like Tracey-Lynn’s rich reflection of itself, this particular tale offers many synergies with hope in higher education.
In and beyond this gallery of nuances and evocative contributions to our symposium, we can register glimpses, layers, and overlooked opportunities of hope to explore how hope can recalibrate the work of education, educators, the actors, and neoliberal university sector as well as the role of the contemporary university in relation to the public (as critic and conscience) in an era of genAI, omnicrises, authoritarianism, and pluralism.
In closing: across our stream, we have a many points for opening discussion and generative conversation, so please take these simply as starting points. I’m really interested to hear which images or ideas stay with you, trouble you, make you rethink something, or maybe connect with your own experiences of teaching and learning in this moment.
What are your thoughts?
Nothing as profound as what Clare has written I’m afraid, but I just wanted to thank all the contributors. On Friday I was feeling grumpy and maudlin, that higher education was a difficult place to work, that the polycrises were too much, and really what difference was I making? I allowed myself a dive into all of your submissions, after I had completed the task of checking my own, and I felt my spirits lifting. Here was hope and it filled me up and enabled me to get excited about teaching again and value my job again. So thank you to you all, diolch yn fawr pawb.
