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RADICAL HOPE AND TEACHING: LEARNING POLITICAL AGENCY FROM THE POLITICALLY DISENFRANCHISED
Author(s) -
Edgoose Julian
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
educational theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.21
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1741-5446
pISSN - 0013-2004
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2009.00309.x
Subject(s) - politics , agency (philosophy) , sociology , critical reading , epistemology , reading (process) , aesthetics , critical theory , pedagogy , psychology , psychoanalysis , social science , political science , philosophy , law
A bstract If teaching is a political act, how can teachers hope to make a difference through their work? In this review essay, Julian Edgoose explores this question of hope in relation to three recent books: David Halpin’s Hope and Education , Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher, and Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope . Halpin describes how hope comes from our targeted efforts to connect our critical analysis of the present to a better, yet realistic, idea of the future. In contrast, Kozol (echoing Cornel West’s “tragicomic hope”) describes a hopefulness that sustains him despite and alongside his critical view of schools. Edgoose asks a further question: can one reasonably remain hopeful in the absence of that critical stance — in the absence of a sense that one can understand the situation one faces enough to know a way out? To Lear, this would be a case of “radical hope,” and Edgoose offers a second reading of Kozol through the lenses of Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt to show what such radical hope might look like for teachers.