[If there’s one thing I think we all need as we begin this new year, it’s hope. So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of cultural works which offer stories and images of that vital emotion—share the texts or voices which give you hope for a hope-full crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]
On perhaps the best of the many things I’ve learned from inspiring fellow teachers like Kevin Gannon.
Gannon’s Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto (2020) was perhaps the single most inspiring text I read in 2020. That’s partly for its specific ideas and recommendations, such as the ungrading practices that I began employing in earnest in my Fall 2020 courses and plan to carry forward into my Spring 2021 ones. But it’s mostly because Gannon’s book and perspective really does live up to the title, making the case for how all of our practices—from individual classes to entire institutions to the overarching world of education—can be amplified, reshaped, and strengthened if we embrace the kinds of critical, thoughtful, impassioned hope and optimism about which I’ve written throughout this week’s posts. I’ve traced them through various literary and cultural genres, but Gannon’s book and work remind us that both public scholarly writing and pedagogical practices can and should likewise model the possibilities, potential, and power of radical hope.
Crowd-sourced post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more time: what do you think? Texts or voices which help you find hope?
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