Hope in the unexpected: How can teachers still make a difference in the world?

Teachers College Record

Volumn 112, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 386-406

  Edgoose, Julian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77950665970     PISSN: 01614681     EISSN: 14679620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Marilyn Cochran-Smitii, "Defining the Outcomes of Teacher Education: What's Social Justice Got to Do with It?" Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 32, no.3 (2004): 208 (my emphasis).
2. Sonia Nieto, What Keeps Teachers Going? (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003), 16.
3. Larry Cuban, foreword to The Call to Teach, by David Hanson (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995), xi.
4. Vito Perrone, A Letter to Teachers (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991), 131.
5. Luc Bovens, The Value of Hope," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (1999): 667.
6. Despite their tides, even Herb Kohl's The Discipline of Hope and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of Hope contain little more than passing references to their own understandings of the term. Yet recent years have seen the publication of two detailed, if specifically focused, studies of hope for educators: David Hatpin's Hope and Education: The Role of the Utopian Imagination (London: Routledge, 2003) and Stephen M. Fishman and Lucille McCarthy's John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
7. For a fuller explanation of this definition, see Julian Edgoose, "Radical Hope and Teaching: Learning Political Agency from the Politically Disenfranchised," Educational Theory 59, no.1 (Feb 2009): 105-121.
8. Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1.
9. David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2.
10. Lyndon Johnson, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, DC: United States Office of the Federal Register, 1970), 1140.
11. Hannah Arendt, ThePromise of Politics (New York: Schocken, 2005), 155.
12. Hannah Arendt, "Home to Roost," in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2003), 262.
13. Jonadian Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005), 19.
14. Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation, and the Need for New Integration Strategies (Los Angeles: Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, UCLA, 2007). There are many ways of measuring segregation, but Orfield and Lee show that fewer black students in the South currently attend majority-white schools than at any time since 1970 (25), and more black students in the Northeast and West currendy attend majority nonwhite schools than was the case in 1968 (29).
15. Parents Involved In Community Schools V. Seattle School District No.1 et at, 551 U.S.June 28, 2007.
16. Kozol, The Shame of the Nation, 25-26.
17. Interestingly, Arendt herself expressed her concerns about the forced integration of segregated schools back in the 1950s. Her essay "Reflections on Litde Rock" was so controversial when it was written that its commissioning publisher at Commentary refused to print it; when it did appear two years later (in 1959) in Dissent, it was accompanied by a disclaimer from the editors, who stated, "We believe in freedom of expression even for views that seem to us entirely mistaken." Quoted in Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 146. While Arendt strongly supported the legal end to segregation, she did not support what she saw as forcing children to integrate schools where they are not wanted, although she did think that parents who wanted to should be able to start new integrated schools that should be defended from any who try to stop them.
18. Hannah Arendt, "Reflections on Litde Rock" in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken, 2003), 19. What she wanted to preserve was freedom of association (and thus pluralism, even in its intolerant forms) from being trumped by equality. This was motivated by her understanding of the best interests of the children involved, but also from her sense of the best interests of the republic. While this concern led her to defend a version of state's rights and even the fact that clubs and other social organizations (as opposed to political ones) should be able to choose to function by excluding African Americans or Jews (she was herself, of course, Jewish). These positions, and the division between the social and political on which they depend, seem no less tolerable now than they did to many 50 years ago.
19. Yet James Bohman has argued that if we take her seriously as a committed pluralist with a concern for enabling genuine interactions across lines of difference, then she does seem somewhat justified in her belief that forced integration would not achieve that end. The Moral Costs of Political Pluralism: The Dilemmas of Difference and Equality in Arendt's 'Reflections on Litde Rock,'" in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MTT Press, 1996), 53-80.
20. Hannah Arendt, "On Freedom," in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin, 2000), 459-460
21. Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Education," in Between Past and Future, rev. ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 192.
22. Arendt, "Crisis in Education," 183.
23. Crisis in Education, Ibid., 192.
24. Arendt, "Home to Roost," 262.
25. Natasha Levinson, The Paradox of Natality," in Hannah Arendt and Education, ed. Mordechai Gordon (Bolder, CO: Westview, 2001), 19.
26. It also echoes the ways that hope is defined in other fields, such as psychology, where the work of C. R. Snyder is most prominent In this articulation, hope is "a positive motivational state that is based on an interactively derived sense of successful (a) agency (goal-directed energy), and (b) padiways (planning to meet goals)." (C. R. Snyder, L. M. Irving, and J. R. Anderson, "Hope and Health," in Handbook of Social and Clinical Psychology: The Health Perspective, ed. C. R. Snyder and D. R. Forsydi (Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1991), 287.)
27. Halpin, Hope and Education, 2. Hatpin's use of the term owes much to Gabriel Marcel.
28. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7-8.
29. Arendt, The Human Condition, 220.
30. Arendt, "On Freedom," 459.
31. On Freedom, Ibid., 459-460
32. Arendt, The Human Condition, 247.
33. Jonadian Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103.
34. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176.
35. Jurgen Moltmann, "Progress and Abyss: Remembrances of the Future of the Modern World," in The Future of Hope, ed. Miroslav Wolf and William Katerberg (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 3-26.
36. Internet Movie Database (IMDb) Top 250 Movies as Voted by Our Users, " http://www.imdb.com/chart/top.
37. Stephen King, "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," in Different Seasons (New York: Viking, 1982), 66. This line from the script is also found in the Stephen King short story on which the movie is based.
38. Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 59. As someone with a Jewish background who wrote her dissertation on the philosopher and saint Augustine, Arendt had an interestingly nuanced relationship with Christianity. Her mentor Karl Jaspers claimed that she "wants to justify her freedom from Christian possibilities, which also attract her."
39. Quoted by Elizabedi M. Meade, The Commodification of Values," in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MTT Press, 1996), 115.
40. Thus, she credits Jesus Christ with "discover[ing] the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs" (The Human Condition 238)
41. and quotes the Gospels to justify her claim to the primacy of human forgiveness: "God forgives 'our debts, as we forgive our debtors' " ( The Human Condition, 239 n. 77). This enables her view to be compatible with a Christian view and with a completely secular one.
42. Arendt, The Human Condition, 241 (my emphasis).
43. The Human Condition, Ibid., 241.
44. The Human Condition, Ibid., 244.
45. The Human Condition, Ibid., 241
46. The Human Condition, Ibid., 241
47. Hannah Arendt, "Understanding and Politics," in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 318-319
48. Arendt's prescience here is remarkable. In the 1980s and 1990s, the emergence of chaos theory and the science of complexity helped illuminate just this difficulty of understanding cause and effect in the complex interactive systems that characterize human life. Social scientists who grapple with this new work reach remarkably similar conclusions to Arendt See, for example, Duncan Watts, "A Nonlinear View of History," in Six Degrees: The Science of the Connected Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 244-250