A pedagogy of critical hope in South African higher education

Abstract

In Chapters One and Two, Zembylas and Boler portray critical hope as an acknowledgement of the unjust and unequal societies in which we live, where privilege comes at the expense of other’s abilities. They show how critical hope requires an analysis of the implications of how historical and material conditions have led us to our present positions. As Boler in Chapter Two points out, ‘[c]ritical hope directly challenges inscribed habits of emotional attention and signifies a willingness to exist within ambiguity and uncertainty’ – this willingness includes changing our relationships with others with compassionate responsibility. Naive hope, on the other hand, is what Boler regards as ‘platitudes that directly serve the hegemonic interest of maintaining the status quo including ‘the rhetoric of individualism; beliefs in equal opportunity; the puritanical faith that hard work inevitably leads to success; and that everyone is the same underneath the skin.’ As Zembylas notes, it is important to distinguish naive hope - which is blindly optimistic - from critical hope - which calls on us to be reflexive and so leads to transformative action. Thus, we argue that in order to achieve critical hope rather than naive hope, ongoing dialogue and reflexivity are a necessary part of educational practice to address what Boler refers to as ‘inscribed habits of emotional inattention’, by which she means embedded, cultural habits of seeing. It is also important to realize that dialogue and reflexivity may also unleash further despair, however well intentioned the educators might be. In this chapter, we examine the potential of dialogue and reflexivity through an example of a teaching and learning project. Through this initiative we aimed to foster critical hope in students in higher education in a continuingly divided socio-political and material South African context. We begin by describing aspects of South African higher education in brief, before describing the setting in which this study took place.