[Alice Beban]

A warm welcome everyone to this discussion space for Nurturing Hope: Mutuality, action, and the gift of listening.

Wow, I just read/listened through the stories and viewed the images, and I really encourage you to spend some time with them. There is so much beauty in this collection. Hope here feels very grounded in actual things, people, places, relationships…. the power of walnut pedagogy, listening to quails, golden cracks, foggy bridges.

I encourage you to use this forum space to respond to a particular image or reflection, make a connection between several pieces, ask a question that comes to mind as you look through the collection, or take the discussion somewhere else entirely. I’m really interested to see what stays with people, or maybe resonates with your own experiences.

I’ll put down a few ideas here to start us off. Feel free to respond to this thread, so we can get a conversation going, or you can begin a new thread – if you do so, please clearly label it, so we can all keep track of people’s ideas. For example, if you have a question for a particular contributor, you can include their name in the post title.

One image I keep coming back to is the bridge. A few bridges come up in the images – Ksenia’s beautiful water-lily image imagines students crossing a bridge while educators meet them halfway and help smooth the path. Leonie gives us another bridge, this time thinking about students moving from VET into higher education, often into spaces that feel unfamiliar or uncertain, and asks – who holds up the bridge? Other pieces got me thinking about the different ways we as educators can hold up (and bring together collectives to hold up) the bridge. Stuart writes about veterinary graduates mentoring students coming through behind them, disrupting some of the more traditional ways professions reproduce themselves. Zoha thinks about mentoring as creating possibilities without deciding where students should go, and asks something that I’ve been thinking a lot about too – how can we expand students’ capacity to act on their aspirations while still keeping the direction of their futures in their own hands?

So that made me think about hopeful pedagogy as partly about bridge-building. One thing I’ve been thinking about is how can we (as educators, and colleagues) help to hold up the bridge through building stronger collectives around students as they move through higher education. What might it mean to build and hold spaces where students, educators, communities can move into uncertain futures together, without any of us pretending that we know exactly where the bridge leads?

Another thing that struck me is how much these pieces are about listening in different ways.

Bronwyn takes us back to a largely ignored work on racial inequality and invites us to listen to voices that are often forgotten. Cebuan asks us to listen much further beyond the usual boundaries of the university, through questions posed to quails (I love the image of the questions!). Charlotte brings walnuts into the classroom as co-teachers and suggests a walnut pedagogy (great idea! I love bringing food into the classroom, but bringing these treasures from your own garden is such a powerful connection with students). I love how these reflections show the importance of us listening to different texts, and people and more-than-humans… perhaps we just have to have a big enough imagination about who is capable of teaching us.

There are also contributions on protest, resistance, challenging institutions, breaking barriers. It might be useful for us to consider how these different scales connect – How do we connect the everyday work of care, mentoring and relationship with wider questions of power and structural change?

I encourage everyone to take your time soaking in the contributions here, and then we can use this forum space to think more deeply about them.