The Pedagogy of Hope

We’ve spent years perfecting the art of diagnosing what’s wrong with schools—now it’s time to remember how to imagine what’s right.

Hope looks like this. © 2025 forwardED LLC

A quiet hum of despair echoes through our classrooms, policy debates, and scholarly discourse. I have called this “critical fatalism”—the idea that naming inequity is synonymous with addressing it, that admiring the problem is the same as advancing a solution. But naming is only the prelude. Without generative alternatives, critique collapses into performance.

We see this collapse everywhere:

• Narratives of “learning loss” that portray children as irreparably damaged (Pier et al., 2021).

• Policy debates that treat poverty as an immutable condition rather than as a solvable problem (Chetty et al., 2014).

• Commentaries that focus on teacher shortages, school violence, or political polarization without attending to the vast evidence of success, innovation, and resilience in classrooms nationwide (NCES, 2023).

We hear it in the stubborn lament that schools are “broken,” in the punditry that insists failure is final, in the analyses that focus more on systemic inadequacy than human possibility. This politics of despair has become so pervasive that it has been mistaken for clarity, as if cynicism were a sign of intellect, as if despair were a form of rigor. However, we now know all too well that when despair becomes the motif, imagination contracts, and systems lose the capacity to dream.

This isn’t a critique against critique. Critique is important—indeed, the abolitionist lineage in education has been indispensable in naming the structural violences that undermine Black, Brown, disabled, poor, queer, and multilingual children. Abolitionist educators and other critical intellectuals have helped us ask the necessary question: What must be dismantled for liberation to take root? But after the critique, something remains unfinished. After abolition, there must come the harder work of creation: What do we build? What do we keep? What must we grow toward?

Instead of abolition, which only lengthens our despair, we need a pedagogy of hope born precisely at the moment when our despair hardens into doctrine. The pedagogy of hope, thus, emerges as a refusal—not a naïve denial of harm, not a sentimental optimism, but a disciplined rejection of the false sophistication that cynicism performs. It refuses the quiet arrogance of those who believe they have already seen enough to stop believing. It refuses the shrinking imagination produced by a constant diet of crisis.

At its core, the pedagogy of hope asks three essential questions:

1. What is possible for our children—truly possible?

2. Where does the promise reside—in them, in us, in our collective capacity?

3. How do we keep that promise through collective power, pedagogy, policy, and practice?

These questions are not rhetorical. They demand design. They demand systems that assume growth, not stagnation; abundance, not scarcity; potential, not predetermined deficits.

This pedagogy of hope is further built upon four foundational pillars:

1. It Reorients Pedagogy Toward What We Are For

   A pedagogy of hope asks educators, districts, and communities to articulate what they stand for—not simply what they resist. For example, we are for belonging. We are for flourishing. We are for intellectual audacity. We are for dignity. We are for love as a public good. While criticality can tell us what we are against, hope tells us what can be for.

2. It Re-centers Earnestness Over Cynicism

   Earnestness is unfashionable in intellectual spaces. But earnestness is the chief engine of change. Social movements—from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement—were led not by cynics but by hope-workers, people who saw possibilities others dismissed. Education needs more hope-workers.

3. It Enables Policy Imagination

   Hope is policy imagination. It is the space where new funding mechanisms, student-centered designs, and equity frameworks take shape. Evidence shows that hopeful institutions take more strategic risks and achieve outsized gains in innovation (Bernstein & Solway, 2021).

4. It Restores the Moral Center of Education

   Education is not merely a technical enterprise; it is a moral one. The pedagogy of hope asserts: (a) Children deserve our belief. (b) Schools must be organized to keep the promises they make. (c) Learning is an act of becoming that requires adults to hold open the horizons of opportunity.

Where critical pedagogy interrogates power, hope pedagogy constructs alternative power arrangements that allow children to thrive. Further, hope itself is honest. It does not deny hardship; it denies inevitability. It does not pretend harm doesn’t exist; it refuses to believe harm is destiny. Finally, hope is not a philosophy of abstraction but one that offers real-world practices:

• asset-building curricula

• strength-compounding pedagogies

• systems designed for growth, not gatekeeping

• investments in student well-being (mental, physical, economic)

• relational trust as instructional infrastructure

• policies that enable possibility rather than enforcing punishment

Hope is often mistaken for naïveté—a soft sentiment unsuited for the hard realities of inequity. But as Paulo Freire (1996) reminds us, “hopelessness is a form of silence, of denying the world and fleeing from it,” while hope is “an ontological need.” Research affirms this. Hope is not a feeling; it is a cognitive and motivational framework that enables people to envision and pursue better futures (Snyder, 2002). In educational contexts, hope is associated with higher academic engagement, resilience, and long-term learning outcomes, particularly for historically vulnerable youth (Gallagher et al., 2019; Yeager & Dweck, 2020).

At a moment when despair has been professionalized—when deficit narratives have become the default grammar of our field—hope is both a counter-practice and a necessary corrective. It is not a refusal to see what is wrong. It is a refusal to be defined by it.

And so, the pedagogy of hope is not sentimental. It is structural. It is not escapist. It is a generative design for what comes after critique. bell hooks warned us that despair is “the enemy of love,” not because despair is false, but because it closes the door to possibility. Love, she wrote, requires “the courage to imagine otherwise” (hooks, 2000). Hope is the engine of this imagination. Hope is the willingness to lean toward a future that the present has not yet justified. Hope is the insistence—sometimes quiet, sometimes fierce—that what we see is not all that is possible.

In liberation theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez describes hope as “a commitment to the future that begins now” (Gutiérrez, 1973). Hope is not passive waiting; it is anticipatory labor. It is praxis. It is the work of beginning the future before the future arrives.

Education, at its best, is precisely this kind of labor—a sustained rehearsal for the world that is not yet. To educate is to build futures. Despair cannot build. Only hope can do that.

But let me be clear: the pedagogy of hope is not a retreat from the abolitionist or critical traditions in education. It is the next movement in those traditions. For example, abolitionist educators have shown us what must end—how systems designed to sort, punish, and exclude must be dismantled. They have unmasked the violence baked into the architecture of schooling. They have cleared the ground. But clearing ground is not the same as planting seed. To put it simply, abolition clears the soil. Hope seeds it.

Put another way, abolition is the necessary subtraction; hope is the necessary addition. Abolition names the harm; hope designs the healing. Abolition says “not this”; hope says “and now—this.” Without hope, abolition risks becoming an endless loop of condemnation without construction, demolition without design.

Sylvia Wynter reminds us that the category of the human itself remains under revision: “a hybrid, open-ended praxis” (Wynter, 2003). Children embody this open-endedness more than any other group. They are not finished; they are not fixed; they are not fated. They are improvisations in motion, human possibilities in early draft form. Schools should be the places that help them revise themselves toward flourishing. Instead, under regimes of despair, schools flatten children into data points, freeze them into labels, and mistake early conditions for final form. Our children are not what they already are; they are what they are becoming.

In this light, the pedagogy of hope must be seen not as a mood but as a method—indeed, a blueprint for what comes after abolition:

• New models of schooling designed around joy, justice, and dignity—not compliance.

• Teacher professional learning that centers reflection and possibility rather than fear and surveillance.

• Educational ecosystems that invest in children’s futures as if those futures matter—because they do.

• District transformation rooted not in performative metrics but in moral obligation.

• A renewed culture of public education grounded in belief rather than skepticism.

This is the philosophical center of the pedagogy of hope: to take seriously the compounding nature of human development; to understand children not as static containers of preexisting strengths but as bases of potential—not in a capitalist sense but in a moral one (see Kirkland, 2013, 2025). In this way, the pedagogy of hope takes a profit perspective, which envisions growth as a consequence of investment. Children grow with belief, with care, with opportunity, with dignity. They expand under the conditions of possibility. Their assets accumulate.

Hope is not a metaphor but an empirically established, measurable force. Psychologist C. R. Snyder demonstrated that hope predicts learning outcomes more strongly than socioeconomic status (Snyder, 2002). Research by David Yeager and Carol Dweck shows that students’ belief in their capacity to grow—as thinkers, as learners, as humans—significantly alters performance trajectories (Yeager & Dweck, 2020). Melissa Gallagher’s work on hope in education shows that high-hope students engage more deeply, persist longer, and navigate challenges more effectively, especially within marginalized communities (Gallagher et al., 2019). Hope is not accessory. It is infrastructure.

Buckminster Fuller argued that systems don’t change by critique alone. They change when new models render old ones irrelevant. Fuller rejected the incrementalism that dominates public discourse by recognizing that systems do not transform through argumentation but through replacement. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” he said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” The pedagogy of hope takes this seriously.

Education has spent the last fifty years fighting the existing model, measuring it, critiquing it, tinkering around its perimeters, and trying to reform the machine that was never meant to deliver justice in the first place. We keep adjusting the gears of a system designed for inequality, polishing its rust, arguing over which broken part to replace. But this machine cannot be redeemed because its outcomes are not errors—they are outputs. It performs exactly as designed.

By contrast, the pedagogy of hope does what Fuller taught: it stops wrestling with the old machine. It starts building a new one—a model rooted not in deficit but in dignity, not in scarcity but in possibility, not in compliance but in becoming.

A pedagogy of hope is not satisfied with naming what is wrong; it demands that we build what could be right. It is not content to declare what we are against; it challenges us to articulate—fully, boldly, unapologetically—what we are for: flourishing, belonging, freedom, intellectual audacity, joy, the capacity to surprise the world.

Fred Moten describes the undercommons as a fugitive space in which new ways of being take root—where possibility escapes the structures that seek to contain it. Children live in that space. A pedagogy of hope teaches toward that fugitive potential, not the cramped roles the system prescribes.

This labor of hope is, of course, risky because it demands imagination, and imagination is not safe. Imagination is disruptive. It calls things that are not yet into being. It exposes the poverty of political will. It refuses the narrowness of what institutions have already decided children should be. It breaks with despair. It breaks with convention. It breaks with the gravitational pull of what is. But this risk is necessary because despair is too expensive. It costs us the future.

You should know, too, that hope is not new to Black educational thought; it is our oldest inheritance.

After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people—people who had been legally, materially, and narratively denied their humanity—built more than five thousand schools across the South in less than a decade. Five thousand! This was hope in its most radical form: education as a declaration of freedom. Children who had been forbidden by law to read now gathered under trees, in church basements, in abandoned cabins illuminated by lantern light, learning the alphabet from teachers who taught by candle, conviction, and revolutionary belief. This was the hopework of Reconstruction—a breathtaking wager on a future that no policy, no president, no political party was prepared to guarantee.

Yet people built anyway. They built because hope was the only tool they possessed—and the only tool required.

A century later, in the rugged hills of Tennessee, Highlander Folk School carried this hope forward, training generations of movement architects, including Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, and scores of unnamed organizers who learned there how to transform communities by transforming belief. Highlander did not teach techniques of resistance alone but a pedagogy of possibility. It was a place where the oppressed rehearsed freedom, not merely demanded it. “We make the road by walking,” Myles Horton said—a reminder that futures are not found; they are forged.

And then there was Ella Baker, perhaps the greatest teacher the movement ever produced. Baker rejected charismatic-savior politics in favor of what she called “spadework”—the slow, intimate cultivation of ordinary people, especially young people, as agents of democratic imagination. “Give light,” she taught, “and the people will find the way.” Her pedagogy was a pedagogy of hope: She believed that power lived diffuse in communities, not concentrated in leaders; that liberation was a collective project; that the ordinary person held extraordinary possibility.

Hope is the labor of building the world that does not yet exist. It is the architecture of futures made from scratch. This is why the pedagogy of hope matters, because every era of transformation in this nation has been carried by people who refused the limits of the present. These are people who were willing to believe more than their conditions allowed, people who treated children—not as victims of the world they inherited—but as architects of the world they deserved. We stand, again, at such an era.

The pedagogy of hope does not wait for permission. It does not ask whether transformation is realistic. It understands that “realistic” has always been the vocabulary of the unimaginative. Hope moves anyway because the world our children need is not the world we have inherited. It is the world we must build—courageously, rigorously, deliberately, and without apology. If we dare to teach this way, if we dare to design this way, if we dare to believe this way, we may discover the most radical truth of all: Our children are not becoming the future. They are summoning it. And hope—disciplined, defiant, practiced hope—is how we help them bring it into being.

References

Bernstein, E., & Solway, J. (2021). Widening the lens on organizational innovation: The role of hope in adaptive change.Harvard Business School Press.

Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., & Saez, E. (2014). Where is the land of opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), 1553–1623. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju022

Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

Fuller, R. B. (1969). Operating manual for spaceship earth. Southern Illinois University Press.

Gallagher, M. W., Marques, S. C., & Lopez, S. J. (2019). Hope and education: A framework for student well-being and success. In M. W. Gallagher & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of hope (pp. 243–256). Oxford University Press.

Glen, J. M. (1988). Highlander: No ordinary school, 1932–1962. University Press of Kentucky.

Gutiérrez, G. (1973). A theology of liberation: History, politics, and salvation. Orbis Books.

Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change (B. Bell, J. Gaventa, & J. Peters, Eds.). Temple University Press.

hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.

Kirkland, D. E. (2013). A search past silence: The literacy of Black males. Teachers College Press.

Kirkland, D. E. (2025). The pedagogy of the Black child. Routledge.

Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and Black study. Minor Compositions.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2023). Digest of Education Statistics. U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/

Pier, L., Christian, M., Tymeson, H., & Meyer, R. H. (2021). COVID-19 impacts on student learning. CALDER. https://caldercenter.org/publications

Ransby, B. (2003). Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A radical democratic vision. University of North Carolina Press.

Snyder, C. R. (2002). Hope theory: Rainbows in the mind. Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), 249–275. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1304_01

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Toward the human, after Man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015

Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2020). What can be learned from growth mindset controversies? Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(6), 333–344. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0757-0

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Suggested citation

Kirkland, D.E. (2025). The pedagogy of hope. In forwardED Perspectives, https://www.forward-ed.com/post/the-pedagogy-of-hope.

About the Author

David E. Kirkland, PhD, is the founder and CEO of forwardED, a national organization reimagining education through equity, healing, and human possibility. He can be reached at david@forward-ed.com.