HOPE IN THE CLASSROOM

Aaina Issue #1

{Ragini has been working in schools for the past few years and loves exploring ideas using music, children's literature, and writing with her students. Presently she is pursuing a PhD from Ambedkar University Delhi}

What may we hope for? Or why hope in the first place? These are questions I often find myself thinking about as a teacher. The pervasive hopelessness of the historical moment we find ourselves in—surviving in an unpredictable world that is terribly violent, divisive, and caught in crises of compounding natures—makes the question of cultivating hope more urgent. Hope itself is a site of struggle in our current moment. In the past few years, I have been part of teaching-learning spaces where students and teachers are collectively involved in analysing and learning to question the nature and history of oppression, structures and cultures of power. In doing so, I have struggled with and wondered—how do we move past the grief, denial, rage, discomfort, resentment or guilt that examining injustices brings up? Is it possible to imagine that our condition might be improved, that the world as we live in it and know it, is not here to stay the same forever?

I have been working as a teacher with Adivasi and Vimukta children and youth in an alternative school in a city for the past few years. The school’s work is laced with the recognition that teaching is a political and transformative act, and in the everyday practices of the school, one finds a deep commitment towards centering and enacting critical, meaningful and community-owned educational ideals and aims. Many of the members of the classrooms are working children earning through various informal skills and labours, living in bastis (informal urban settlements) and among the first generation to negotiate with formal schooling systems within their communities. Sometime back, while discussing with some of my former students about their plans after Class XII, I was taken aback when one of them resignedly said, “But even if we go to college, what good will come of it. We won’t understand anything there.”

Many others, too, echoed a deep-seated sense of hopelessness and confusion regarding what the future could hold. Despite the complex and resilient ways in which the members of this group often sharply asserted their space within their social worlds and became part of various movements for a more just and equitable world, the struggle to find signs of a future for themselves within the present troubled me for many weeks after. I wondered, how is it that critically analysing, recognising and explaining injustice is working towards affirming fatalism rather than inspiring hope? How is it that possibilities of greater freedom and learning for oneself are being seen as far-flung or ‘unrealistic’?

I began to realise that paying closer attention to the emotions associated with our beliefs and values as they play out in critical efforts in education is crucial; it’s not enough to focus on cognition, rationality and reason. As teachers part of such learning communities, we must ask: How do we develop affective, embodied, relational practices through which we are moved to act upon the world, to believe in liberatory possibilities for oneself and others? It also became clear to me that as a Savarna teacher working with communities on the margins of various intersections, I need to listen closely to the varied meanings hope holds for us, as we live and learn together.

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Hopefulness is often talked about in parallel with grit and perseverance, especially for children and youth from historically marginalized and minoritized communities. For instance, by highlighting the determination of individual exceptions who made ‘no excuses’ and ‘pulled themselves up by their bootstraps’ despite barriers and thus ‘achieved’ something. While celebrated as examples to learn from and emulate, these stories work to maintain the status quo by hiding structural and systemic exploitation and suppressing questions of equity and structural redressal. Such hopefulness is similar to the metaphor of ‘rosetinted glasses’—one that projects equality in terms of equal expectation rather than equal facilitation. It overlooks any need to critique the present social and political arrangements.

It is furthered by false narratives of equal opportunity erasing the political and historical exclusions which make such equality unfeasible, through rhetorics such as ‘acche din aayenge’ or ‘yes, we can’ . On the contrary, critical hope would have us recognize that we live within systems of inequality and requires us to think about how to work towards a collective and better future. The restlessness, the discomfort, the pain and longing this inevitably brings up are fundamental parts of the journey to continue to search for alternative and collective futures.

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I distinctly remember one day in February 2023, when we were reading and discussing the news in our Class XII classroom as a group, as was our morning routine. In our class, many of us were deeply troubled by the death of Darshan [a firstgeneration Dalit student of IIT Bombay who died by suicide after facing humiliation and discrimination from his batchmates]. Too many of the students in this classroom have lost family members and close friends to suicides and untimely deaths, and have seen up close the debilitating pain that makes one feel that this is the only way out. Darshan, though a stranger to us, felt like one of our own who had made it to a ‘big’ college, and yet couldn’t live out his dream. Raja* , an 18-year-old member of this class, journalled a letter afterwards in his mother tongue, Pardhi, and he titled it, ‘If I could, what I would tell Darshan’ . An excerpt of his letter (in translation) is as follows:

Dear Darshan, … I wish you had known that if you feel alone, stressed and anxious, then you have to find your friends and tell them everything…If only you would have fought for yourself a little bit more, we all would have become your voice and stood with you. Never think that your life and your voice was alone, we stand with you, for you and we will fight and end this discrimination.

When Raja shared this letter with all of us in the classroom, it ostensibly didn’t change anything concrete within the material world, but it opened a small door for all of us to sit with grief and anger together. It also reaffirmed a sense of mutuality and responsibility towards each other, that our individual actions have consequences beyond our own life, and hope becomes possible sometimes. Not for me, as an individual, but rather for us—in community. In my own practice, I often find that hope is cultivated within spaces (however small) aiming to imagine alternatives, and moving beyond mere critique to re-envision and re-script new pathways.

Sometimes, it is in nurturing an emotional willingness to exist in ambiguity and uncertainty as we inquire into our own lives and actions, which might bring us pain and discomfort. I glimpsed this when one of my students, Maya* (aged 24) decided to write a small letter to her past self, after fulfilling a long-held dream of appearing for Class 12 exams. She chose to address it to the point of time in her life when she had discontinued schooling after Class 8 for a few years.

Hello dear Maya, Do you know I have given Class 10 exams and even Class 12 exams. And I have passed Class 10th exams. The studies that I always kept running away from, Maya, today the same studies are giving me courage, love, identity and existence. Many personal changes have also happened till today and the journey is still ongoing.

Several critical, feminist pedagogues have written about how any thinking around hope also needs recognition of its limits. Hope alone will not transform the world, but to do without hope, or to assume that our struggles for a just, democratic and compassionate world could be sustained through calculated acts alone, is also an illusion. In the past, I have often asked fellow-teachers and communityleaders how they think about building hope into their practice and within the communities they work in. I realise after years of shadowing such teachers that there are no easy or quick answers to these questions, but their actions and presence in the spaces of their work often reveals something to me. I find such visionary teachers persistently standing with and dreaming for their people and communities, for worlds that are yet to be created.

Several critical, feminist pedagogues have written about how any thinking around hope also needs recognition of its limits. Hope alone will not transform the world, but to do without hope, or to assume that our struggles for a just, democratic and compassionate world could be sustained through calculated acts alone, is also an illusion. In the past, I have often asked fellow-teachers and communityleaders how they think about building hope into their practice and within the communities they work in. I realise after years of shadowing such teachers that there are no easy or quick answers to these questions, but their actions and presence in the spaces of their work often reveals something to me. I find such visionary teachers persistently standing with and dreaming for their people and communities, for worlds that are yet to be created.

The ‘work’ of such teachers is rooted in mutuality, humility and accountability, and the foundation for any such outward-facing work rests on necessary and continuous internal reflection on one’s own educational journeys and entanglements with networks of power and privilege. It also necessarily involves the task of acknowledging the shadows of hope—the hardening of despair and disappointment when things seem to get worse instead of better, or when we come together but nothing happens as a result of our efforts. Such teaching in the service of nurturing critical hope reminds us that the act of struggling for justice, freedom and fraternity are already worth living for, whether it results in agreeable or dismal outcomes.

Critical hope can make it possible for us to sit with loss and destruction, restlessness and longing, rather than be convinced by the inertness of despair. I find that Raymond Williams, a cultural theorist and key figure of the New Left, put it well when he wrote, “the more qualified outlines of practicable futures cannot begin to flow until we have faced, at the necessary depth, the divisions and contradictions which now inhibit them. ” As teachers and students, our everyday in the classroom entails facing these ‘divisions and contradictions’ and cultivating critical hope in a pedagogic and curricular sense might enable our classrooms to become sites of collectively moving through, with, and beyond despair.

*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the students.