A last lesson on hope

Critical Literacy scholar Ernest Morrell was the keynote speaker in November 2008 at the Multicultural Education Conference held here at SUNY New Paltz. He spoke passionately about bringing (a critical analysis of) popular culture into classrooms to an audience of teachers, secondary, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, administrators, and community members. His most insistent message was that teachers should teach their students as though the students' grandmamas were in the back of the room, observing the class. Further, when a teacher feels like giving up on a student, on a lesson, an idea, Morrell urged teachers to consider what a student's grandmama might dream for her grand baby.

Concerning our work on neoliberal “logic” this summer, the most cynical read of the arguments of this class are that schools do exactly what they are designed to do: maintain the social order which depends upon wide disparities of wealth, the reinforcement of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and discrimination based on language and immigration status. The dynamics and social contexts of schooling in the United States do work to deny many youth access to meaningful schooling, and do so historically and systematically. Schools, in this sense, work to reproduce existing hierarchies of race and class.
Such interpretations of our course, while perhaps technically accurate, miss the significance of hope in our work these past weeks.

In the between-spaces of this course we have explored what can be determined about hope. What we have learned is that hope is complex, informed, creative, generative, sometimes contradictory, sometimes afraid, but always learning. This vision of hope, if infused into schools, into teaching and teacher education, into educational policy, can yield schooling that dares to delight in the future.

Here is our last lesson on hope in our course: Change does not usually happen in the ways we think change happens. Bewildering, yes, but worth remembering at the end of a long hard day.

It has been a pleasure to make meaning with you this summer. I hope our paths cross again soon, and that you keep me posted on your writing and thinking and teaching.
Happy, happy summer. I am thrilled by what you have accomplished this summer.