Pedagogies of Hope emerges against the backdrop of ongoing economic, environmental, and public health crises that continue to exacerbate inequalities in the education system and in the lives of students who must negotiate uncertain futures marked by the continued impacts of COVID-19, economic precarity, and environmental degradation. In the wake of large-scale lockdowns and social isolation, tending to the physical, mental, and material impacts on postsecondary students requires pedagogical practitioners to engage in conversations on the future of teaching and learning in a (not-yet-here) post-pandemic world.

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Through reflexive and collaborative exchange of current pedagogical challenges and practical pedagogical methods, our collective seeks to gather scholars, artists, and community activists to co-design and mobilize critical pedagogies and praxes directed towards the cultivation of alternative learning realities and just futurities through a politics of hope. Theorists and educators in the fields of social justice, decolonial, anti-colonial, queer, and disability studies have long emphasized the importance of challenging the dominant pedagogical methods in post-secondary education that depend upon top-down forms of teaching and learning that separates students’ lives, fears, dreams, and anxieties from the classroom and its content

(Ahmed 2017; hooks 1993; Friere 1970; Nagar 2019; Singh 2018).

 

Guided by these interdisciplinary frameworks, our Pedagogies of Hope workshop series is intended as a collective effort to imagine otherwise; to explore how we might engage students and facilitate learning in ways that transgress the hierarchical systems and boundaries of knowledge production and dissemination in mainstream learning environments by reorienting embodied experiences of knowing, community engagement, and social awareness as legitimate sites of knowledge in and beyond our pedagogical praxis.