PEDAGOGIES OF HOPE
Reflections on the Pedagogies of Hope Workshop Series
May 11-12, 2023
Let’s reflect on the 2023 Pedagogies of Hope Collective Workshop!
Day One took place in McMaster University, Togo Salmon Hall. It began with introductions from the team and an interactive presentation by Richa Nagar on Radical Vulnerability. Richa played an important role in the creation of the Pedagogies of Hope Collective, and engaged with the participants in a discussion about the responsibilities we carry when we listen to other’s stories. She encouraged us to think about the ethics involved in caring for these stories, and engaged with The Pundit and the Boatman story to examine who knowledge is extracted from and who seeks to master knowledge.Participants then took part in an activity where they first listened to a story from a partner, and then had to retell that story, as if they were their partner, back to the rest of the people at their table.
Two people sit at a table smiling.
Four people gather around a corner of a table, talking and smiling.
Four people gather around a table, drinking coffee and waiting for the workshop to begin.
Two people sit at a table smiling.
After a lunch break, the roundtables started. The first roundtable, Act-Based Learning & Community Practice, was moderated by Aytak Dibavar and Roya Motazedian. The speakers included: Samu/elle Striewski (Drag name: The Princess), Julie Fellmayer, Monika Ciolek, and Kate Lahey. This roundtable had wonderful discussion on communities of support, and the importance of multiplicities of perspectives and relations. We also discussed the importance of language within communities, and how justice-based language can be appropriated. We were reminded of the importance of engaging in embodied experiences when engaging in learning, and explored what it looks like to engage in radical care in the classroom, wherein students do not need to demonstrate suffering in order to earn care, but rather are freely given it.
Julie, a speaker from the panel, gives her talk.
A photo of the group of participants listening to the roundtable presentations.
The panelists are shown responding to discussion questions.
Julie, a speaker from the panel, gives her talk.
There was a brief break before Christopher Maclean and Maddi Chan led the second roundtable: Learning in Acts: Lessons from the Classroom. Speakers included: Selina Mudavanhu, Agustin Piancarte Fexas & Erin Finley, Arijit Nandi, Jemma Llewellyn & Sophie Brown, Eugenia Zuroski, and K’ien Debicki. This roundtable focussed on learning through the communal and local instead of exclusively the individual. This roundtable also focussed on turning to Indigenous and Transnational pedagogies, where we discussed the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Agreement, as we met on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations, which are lands protected by this agreement. We also learned about how to integrate the body and community into and across the digital space, and got to see how art can still be created through these intangible spaces.
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​The day ended with four spoken word performances in the Art Exhibit room. Several works were displayed by students who had taken Aytak’s courses, each work representing its own social issues and feelings.
Day Two began on a bright, sunny Friday morning at Centre 3. Diane Roberts and Julie Tamiko Manning led us through an interactive session of exploring what it really means to exist in our bodies. Diane told the group about four important questions that remind her of her emotional, embodied journey: who am I, what drives me forward, what takes me back, and what do I need to know. We were reminded of Richa’s presentation, and discussed how our bodies naturally want to go into ceremony, and into story. Julie asked us some important questions too: how do we inhabit the stories we embody; how do we embody the stories we inhabit?
We then danced around the room, letting one body part guide us at a time. It was a refreshing start to the day that led us to Arijit Nandi’s Bengali Folk Song Performance. His accompanying guitar and lovely voice filled the space, and connected us through the mutual enjoyment and appreciation of his music.
Lunch was brought to us by a local Hamilton restaurant, Papa Fresh Catering, who brought a variety of delicious Afghan foods and desserts for us all to eat.
The afternoon began with a Q&A session with Richa, who spoke with us about her own course that inspired Aytak’s Stories, Bodies, Archives course. We then watched a screening of a performance of the polyvocal script that was written by the students in Aytak’s course, and performed locally at Hamilton’s Frostbite Festival. Some of the students who took part in writing the script attended the workshop series, and were able to share their thoughts about the process of collectively writing something creative. It was a wonderful way to learn how art and pedagogy go hand in hand.
We then moved into the final roundtable, moderated by Fay Daemi and Cassidy Burr, titled Dreaming Together, featured the speakers: Samantha Sharp, Jake Pyne, Tayah Clarke, Ali Aslan, Melissa Murray-Mutch, and Ahmad Qais Munhazim. This panel examined storytelling as a pedagogical practice, and gave some examples about times where storytelling in a classroom setting has worked to create experiences of empathy and care. We discussed the importance of accepting and receiving criticism in the classroom, and the importance of creating spaces where critique can be expressed. Finally, we discussed how hope can at times be a double-edged sword, and yet how that pursuit of hope isn’t any less important because of these entanglements. While hope may feel naive at times, that doesn’t mean it is not worth engaging with, and it doesn’t make these better futures any less tangible.
To wrap up our final day and the whole workshop, we invited participants to trace their hand on a huge sheet, writing an idea or thought that they will carry with them after the workshop ends. From there we hope to connect the handprints with roots, showing how the collective learning that happened during this workshop series ties us all together in community and in hope for better futures. Please see Maddi’s artist statement below about the process of creating these hands and putting them all together.
We are so grateful to everyone who attended, to the speakers, the attendees, the volunteers who helped make the workshop happen. Thank you for sharing, dreaming, and imagining with us. Our first workshop is now over, but Pedagogies of Hope is not! We hope to keep in touch and meet again, soon.