Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how higher education might engage society in a hopeful manner with the climate crisis. I conceptualize hope as a practice that helps to navigate in phases of liminality. Drawing from reflections on two innovative courses, I empirically explore instances of hope within education.

Paper long abstract:

Climate change and sustainability have become key themes for higher education. During the heightened emotional and political reactions, traditional approaches centered on knowledge deficits arguably encounter their limits. Besides teaching about climate change, education could also aim to nurture hope. However, hope is a complex concept and in-depth theoretical engagement with hope in sustainability education is scant, notwithstanding e.g. Ojala’s (2017) valuable contributions. Therefore, in this paper, I explore how education might foster hopeful engagement with the climate crisis.

Theoretically, I approach hope as an active practice, exploring how, when and where hope is enacted in education. Inspired by Freire (1992) and by the way Solnit (2016) describes hope as ‘an electrifying force in the present’, I conceptualize a mode of hoping that is based on a dynamic tension between a feeling of friction with unsustainable aspects, and an attraction to a direction of change. I argue that such hope is practiced during phases of liminality, uncertainty, and plurality of moving in-between worlds, and that it can be felt through a meaningful discontinuity – an experience that signals to us that are moving in a valuable direction.

Empirically, I investigate such discontinuities through vignettes, based on my experiences as a teacher and reflective practitioner in two innovative courses that focused on ‘futuring’. Thereby, I distill characteristics of learning processes that might contribute to hope. Namely, that hopeful education amidst the climate crisis entails a combination of critical- and imaginative processes and engages learners in collective, active, and dialogic settings.