Kari Grain
But what I think about critical hope, metaphorically, to some extent, which is as like a dance or a relationship, or like a wrestling match between these two lies that we’ve been sold, that have to be separate, and I’ve been really interested lately, and how many parts of ourselves coexist in the same space and how we hold space for those different parts to have a relationship with one another.

Keith Edwards
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW, I’m your host Keith Edwards. Today we’re discussing critical hope. This notion keeps coming up for student affairs professionals in equity work, countering toxic positivity, and helping us engage in the many challenges that we’re facing with agency. I’m so honored to have two scholars and practitioners here to help us explore critical hope today. I’m really excited about this conversation. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com. Today’s episode is sponsored by Symplicity. A true partner Symplicity supports all aspects of student life with technology platforms that empower institutions to make data driven decisions. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he him his. I’m a speaker, consultant and coach. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. I’m broadcasting from Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of the Dakota in the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to the conversation. And let’s meet our guests for today. Tell us a little bit about yourself. And Kari, we’re gonna start with you.

Kari Grain
Okay, great to be here. Thank you for having me. My name is Dr. Kari Grain and I am here on the traditional ancestral and unseeded territories. Yeah, and I feel grateful to be here for a number of reasons. But I just want to put it up front, that Jeffrey, who is the other person we’re chatting with today, he was actually my first entry point, reading his work was my first entry point, when I was a master’s student, to thinking about the role of hope in education and to thinking more deeply about it. So I’m slightly intimidated. But I’m also really excited about about being here. But as for what I do, I am now a faculty member at UBC, the University of British Columbia. And I run the Master’s in adult learning and global change. And I also am a research associate in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with the Simon Fraser University community engaged research initiative. So I have I wear a few hats here in Vancouver. And yeah, happy to be here.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, I’m really glad you’re here. And, and like you. Jeff’s article. Was was my entry point. And well, so we’re both delighted to have you here. Jeff. tell folks a little bit more about you.

Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade
Greetings, everybody. Thank you for inviting me to participate in this discussion. I am currently in my home in East Oakland, California, which is a lonely land. I’m professor of Latino and Latina studies at San Francisco State University in the College of Ethnic Studies, which is the original College of Ethnic Studies in in the United States. I’m a father of two twin boys. Who will not bust in on this podcast because they’re at school. And yeah, I mean, I started thinking about and talking about hope, I think intuitively as a longtime high school teacher in East Oakland. And as I got more and more disappointed in the research that was coming out of the field of education, that really turned me toward other fields like social epidemiology, public health, neuroscience, physiology, and, and it was there that I found Charles Snyder’s work on the children’s hope scale. And, and so, you know, here we are, and it’s so amazing to think that that piece that I wrote several years ago, has had such an important impact on so many people. And so I love to come and hear how people have advanced the work. And so I really appreciate Kari that you’ve, that you’ve moved it forward and taking it past that, you know, some of the initial things that I was thinking about, and I’m excited to be in a conversation with with both of you about how hope is made you more hopeful.

Keith Edwards
Right? Well, let’s define critical hope because I think that can be kind of a fancy word or for folks who just think about hope. What does that mean? So I’d love to hear from both of you For a little bit about what critical hope is and what it isn’t. So Jeff, maybe you can start us off?

Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade
Sure. Well, when I was writing that, the article note to educators hope required and growing roses in concrete. I started to, because I, that term, I think that the concept of hope is slippery, particularly in the context where, where I’ve done a lot of my work, because I think that, you know, you call that toxic positivity, I think there’s a way in which a lot of adults that are working in communities that where there’s a lot of vulnerable and wounded children, or young people, you know, generally, that there’s a tendency to dodge and deny the reality of the material conditions of of their lives. And so they, they want to be hopeful about the project of working with our communities. And in In so doing, they often promote and, and produce the things that I talked about in the article as forms of false hope. And those, those are also toxic, right. And they undermine the prospect of, of the core elements that actually lead to hope. And I was most interested in, in hope, as distinguished this distinction that Cornel West makes between hope and optimism, right, and Cornel West says that, as a black man in the United States, I’ve I’ve never had an optimistic day in my life. But I am imminently hopeful. And the distinction that he draws is he says optimism is when you look at the existing conditions and circumstances. And based on your evaluation of those things, you believe that things will get better. And But hope is when you look at the existing material conditions, and you believe that things will get better any way. And, and so for me, like, that’s critical hope, right? That there’s, you’re not ducking dodging or denying what’s true and what’s real, that you’re, you’re staring it in the face. And you’re using what sociologists refer to as the critical lens, right, which is that you’re, you’re directly analyzing and confronting and aware about relationships of power particularly get inequitable relationships with power that are being used to oppress and manipulate and, and you use that critical sensibility and awareness, to craft a path forward for yourself, for your community. That that is responsive to those inequities and injustices rather than trying to avoid them, deny them or dodge them. Right. And for me, that’s why why why? disentangled? Right the those two forms of hope to illuminate a kind of, of hope that is more critical? Because I think that that is what students that are vulnerable, that are wounded are the most responsive to Yeah,

Keith Edwards
you’re reminding me of Howard Brock, who’s a psychologist and a meditation teacher talks about not arguing with reality, right, we have to see what’s real. In order to engage in change. We can’t just pretending it’s not there leads to disengagement and I love that you brought up Cornel West. I heard Cornel West say that at Hamlin University as a junior in college in 1996. And I still and every talk I get around sexual violence prevention with explaining what he described as optimism versus hope and hoping the spiritual leap of faith that we can we can make things better in spite of the evidence. I think it’s just it’s so important. Kari, try and add on to that.

Kari Grain
I’m madly taking note as well, while he was talking because there’s so many things I want to build on. But actually, Jeffrey, the you made me think of Tallahassee Coates concept of the beautiful struggle. And someone I interviewed in my book critical hope brought this up because he said, You know, sometimes I he said as a black Man, sometimes I don’t identify with a concept of Hope period. And he brought up the beautiful struggle because it means that you’re not attached to a specific outcome. Instead, you recognize that, you know, systemically and societally, often the outcome will not be what you want it to be. So you can’t be attached to that outcome. And sometimes he thinks about hope as as that. And by the way, this person I’m talking about who I interviewed as Cory Wendell McClelland, and he’s a fantastic musician, and Black Liberation activist. And in any case, this idea of, of, of working out together in solidarity, and recognizing that the process in itself is important, I really resonated with that concept of the beautiful struggle. And another thing I wanted to bring up, you mentioned, facing it. And I think that’s a really, like facing that which is difficult. I think that’s a key point of critical hope. And sometimes, for me, the reason I think that your article helped me start to think about this concept of hope and education was because I was being sold this, I think this this lie or this false dichotomy between, okay, so you’re either need to be like the hopeful, naive person who doesn’t have, you know, isn’t very educated to the actual realities that are going around on around us and systemic racism and climate crisis, etc. So if you’re hopeful it is equated with being naive, or you can be cynical, and you can recognize that these crises we’re facing, are truly insurmountable. And, and if often, if you know the depth of the difficulties we’re facing, there’s a lot of things that do seem insurmountable. And it’s like, how are we going to overcome these. But what I think about critical hope, metaphorically, to some extent, which is as like a dance or a relationship, or like a wrestling match between these two lies that we’ve been sold, that have to be separate, and I’ve been really interested lately, and how many parts of ourselves coexist in the same space and how we hold space for those different parts to have a relationship with one another. And, and so that brings me to another idea about critical hope, which I think it’s like a relational practice of community. Shawn Wilson is an indigenous scholar who talks about relational accountability. And he wrote about it in the context of indigenous methodologies, research methodologies, but I think it can be applied here. And he asked the question, How am I being accountable to the relationships in my life, and that’s not just relationships with people, it’s relationships with the land, its relationships with the topics that we’re that we’re looking at. Right? So. And then and also with community with the people that we’re working together with, to face the brokenness to face the things that are haunting us that are that are difficult. So those are a few things that I think about with critical hope. And I just want to say when the word grappling, when I was writing the book, I kept the word grappling came up over and over and over. It’s like, why is Why is what is it about this word, and I looked into the edamame, sorry, I looked into the etymology of this word. And it was first used in 13th century English as like a hook in naval battle. So it was like a hook that you would attach to a rope and it would link you to another ship, and it would help you to link up to that, or to the shore or to the dock, etc. And then in 15th century, it turned into this verb, which is to struggle in close relationship with. And I really think about critical hope as an always changing relationship. That is not necessarily always hopeful, or, or optimistic, but that really engages deeply with and I would say, even hospitably with things like grief and anger at the myriad and justices before us. So yeah, I really think of this word of grappling with hope as being central to the idea of critical hope.

Keith Edwards
I love the both and that you’re really bringing right it’s this and this and we don’t have to choose. And situating critical Hope is the sort of path keeping me away from toxic positivity on one hand, oh, things aren’t that bad things are gonna be great, right, that sort of thing. And on the other hand, cynicism, and both of those just justified disengagement. Everything’s fine. I’m out. Everything’s terrible. I’m right. And I love it. Critical hole really brings us to agency. You might not be able to do everything, but you can do something you can you can wrestle with this. And I’ve been sort of playing with sort of the equation of critical hope equals an equity lens, being able to see possibilities and taking some responsibility. And so I’ve been playing with that from both of your work and, who’s in South Africa, which I probably didn’t say that right, but I’m doing.

Kari Grain
Do you know, he’s actually doing a visiting? He’s a visiting scholar at UBC right now. Oh, university? Yeah,

Keith Edwards
I had no idea I just did.

Kari Grain
He just did a talk a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t make it. But apparently, it’s really interesting.

Keith Edwards
So Kari you use the metaphor of the sort of two parts of your meeting in a meadow? In your book, which I think is a beautiful metaphor in a lot of nature. And then Jeff, you’re talking about roses going in concrete? Pulling from Tupac song. I wonder if you could adjust to say a little bit. I’d love to hear how that came to be. And then how your thinking about critical hope has evolved, changed deepen since then? Because I think it came out in 2014. Which, is that right? And you probably wrote it a few years before that. So how did that come to be? And how is your thinking evolved?

Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade
So I know, when I was teaching, there’s a lot of stories about POC, that I tell he, you know, POC had a major influence on my own life as a kid who grew up in the hip hop era. And, and was always really drawn to POC, because of the, the way in which that metaphor that, you know, was originally a poem. Come. So he reads that poem on the end, at the end of a few different tracks, but the one that I am the most fond of and most familiar with is a song called Dear Mama. And, and then ultimately, that song becomes our excuse me, that that that poem becomes a book of poetry. And the the, the title of that poem is the title of the book. And one of the stories I tell about when I was teaching high school is that I used to say that I can leave a crisp, $100 bill, inside of any Shakespearean text, anywhere in my classroom, and it was completely safe. But if I left that book of poetry out, it would disappear. Which is, to me is great, like, I want students to steal books. Because it’s not like it’s not stealing, right? It’s like I trick it’s, you know, it’s reverse psychology. Right. And, and, and it was often snatched up by the very same students that the system was convinced we’re not interested in literacy. And so I started saying, you know, that it’s not that young people aren’t interested in literacy. It’s that they’re not interested in the literacy we’re giving them. They’re highly literate. And the more wounded, the more vulnerable, the more literate, because that those the most vulnerable, young people have to be able to read situations that are literally life and death all the time, right, from the streets, to institutions of power, right to navigating school, et cetera. And so, you know, Paulo Freire II talks about, he has a, the first book I ever got my hands on, from him, is a book called literacy reading the word in the world. And understanding that the ability of somebody to read the world is a really sophisticated kind of literacy, that school has really never accounted for. So so that that the other puck story that I tell is, is that about 20 years ago now, I was invited to New Zealand to do some work in in collaboration with the Maori people, and specifically their educators. And my first so, you know, like, I’m in East Oakland. And if you look at a map of the world, Bogota, which is just outside of Auckland, New Zealand, which is where I went to, to spend time with with this Maori community. It is literally the other side of the world. Right? So I’m not being hyperbolic here when I say I was on the other side of the world. And my first meeting was with a group of high school Maori youth. And they were sitting in a circle, and I walked into the room. And this one young brother jumps up and he runs up to me says, You’re from Oakland. And I was like, yeah. And he says, Did you know Tupac? And I was like, damn, like, I’m literally all the way across the world. And the first question out of a young person’s mouth is about POC. And, and so I wanted to acknowledge that and, you know, and I think people dismiss Tupac as a thinker. And, and, and oftentimes it’s an artist, right, conveniently. But what is it? What is it what it’s not hip hop, that has given pac’s message, the lasting power, because if it was hip hop, then young people would still be listening to Biggie and Wu Tang and Karis one. And, and they’re not. I mean, the hip hop heads are right, but like every day, young people, and I’m talking about like cross cutting, like you could go to the lily white suburbs. And kids, my sons are 10 and 10 year olds know who to Puck is. And so as a as a scholar, as an intellectual, like I was really interested in trying to understand at a deeper level, what is it about pac’s message that has been so transcendent. And if you really study Pac’s work as literature, what what you see emerge it from his voice, is this conversation, to the Rose, going and concrete right to the end saying to that, that young person that I see you, for your damaged pedals, like I get it, I know what it means to try to grow in concrete. But what I also see you for is your tenacity and your will to reach the sun. And I, when we’re talking about hope, like that’s, that’s what makes me so perpetually and imminently hopeful about our ability to move through and beyond the things that are oppressing us right now, as individuals as communities as a society, because because I’m around young people and I’m around young people who have every reason to not believe and and yet they do right they show up with it’s incredible vitality, this incredible air for one another. That is so you transcendent of the the kind of adult energy that is constantly getting put on them, particularly in schools, particularly by power. And, and I think that that’s why pac’s message resonates with them so much, right? Because he doesn’t, he doesn’t deny their damaged petals, but he doesn’t start with their damaged petals. And I guess to put a bow on this that, you know, my mom, who’s 94 and was just texting me before I got on to this zoom. Right. That’s how I dealt my mom is right, like 94 year old just pounded out texts with emojis. Anyway, she she used there’s a few like lessons that she, I feel like has been teaching me for as far back as I can remember. And one of them is and I remember this one really distinctive time when she was teaching me. I was I was coming in after basketball practice. I was like 15 or 16 years old. And I was in one of my kind of like, you know, teenage fits of disgust with the world. Right? And I come in and I like throw my bag down. And my mom. You know, she’s like, Oh, 411 right. 90 pounds and just like so powerful. And she she points at the kitchen table and she says Sit down. She goes in the kitchen and she takes a glass and she fills it halfway with water. And she comes back and she sits down she puts the glass down between us. And she points out she says half full or half empty. And my mom’s was good for those, like trick questions where there is no right answer. And so whatever answer you give, that’s the lesson, right? She’s setting you up for play, just look back at her, I didn’t take the bait. And she says, Son, how you choose to the answer that question is how you will live your life, because your life will always be both half full and half empty. And if you choose to see your life as half empty, if you choose to see your life, for all the things you don’t have, you’ll never fill your cup. But if you can see your life is half full. If you can see your life and the things that you do have, you will fill your cup, it will overflow, and you can share that with others. And I think that’s precisely poc’s message in that poem, right? That so many

Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade
educators and adults in positions of power, look at young people as glasses half empty, right? They see them for their deficits. And none of us wants to be around people like that. We all have people like that in our lives, right? Who are constantly harping on and focused on the things that we’re not doing, as well as they think we should be. And we, like the human species naturally avoids that interaction, right. But then we have people in our lives, that they’re not letting us off the hook. Right? Like they, they they know, there’s things we need to get better at. But that’s not where they start. Right? They start with the glass half full, they make us feel like we want to be around them. And with those people, we spend extra time we’re not clock watching, we’re not punching the clock, right, because they know that not that they believe in us, right? They see our capacity. And they’re, they’re not blind to the fact that we still need to grow. And so for me, POC one was a way to open that, that kind of conversation with my students in a way that, that that really said, I see you, right. And we’re going to deal with both parts of the glass half full and a half empty. But we’re always going to start with the half full. Because as POC says, like I see you for your tenacity and your will to reach the sun.

Keith Edwards
I love the public scholarship to your mom’s ninety old wisdom avoiding deficit mindset. That’s, that’s all a lot. Oh, yeah, they

Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade
had that documentary coming out on Netflix or somebody’s producing like a five part documentary mini series on POC, and his mom.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, we’ll get that in the show notes too. Kari, you’ve been building on, as you mentioned in the beginning, beautifully, just work and fairy and others on critical hope. And you’ve offered your book, which I’m listening to and love, recommend the listen. But you outlined seven principles of critical hope in that book. I’d love it if you could tell us a little bit about your journey with critical hope.

Kari Grain
Sure, I mean, as I kind of mentioned, it began with feeling like there were I was being forced to choose between two parts of myself that felt quite real. And then all of the I mean, it’s more of a spectrum than two parts of yourself. It’s like It’s like moving between them constantly. And I think when I found critical hope or the concept of it and started digging in, so we haven’t mentioned this, but Paulo Frary, coined it coined the term critical hope. And he talked about, you know, from his perspective, there were several ideas of critical hope that that he didn’t necessarily expand on it throughout his whole career because he was busy doing a lot of a lot of things. But he talked about how it’s anchored in practice and historical concreteness. So like the material realities we’re facing now have have a history to them. And he also talked about and Jeff has brought this up a few times, he talked about politics Hope, which is like the characteristic of being political. So hope is highly political. And I think I think I was drawn to critical hope because it allowed space for that criticality. And one of the things I haven’t been able to deny in myself is some kind of a motivation, a deep motivation, in education that comes from moments of great beauty and great poignance when I’m in a classroom with students and a certain moment happens or even just outside of work when we’re When we’re with people we love, or we’re watching a sunset and a beautiful place, and how that which inspires, aw, can actually motivate us to work for it to continue the hard work of social justice. And so I’ve always seen it. And I think Adrian Marie Brown, does a beautiful job of explaining how the work of social justice can also be really beautiful and pleasurable. And they’re not two things that are opposite one another. So that’s kind of why it has been appealing to me, because of that connection. And I also wanted to mention that, when I was like, I was asked to write this book by North Atlantic books, because they had found an article I’d written in 2016, on critical hope and education. And they said, This could be this should be a whole book. And I said no, like a couple of times first, because I thought it was a scam, I was I had just finished, I had just finished my PhD. And I was like, this doesn’t happen to people. I don’t know who these people are. But I just ignored their email. And I feel so foolish now, because, you know, it’s such an amazing opportunity. But I also didn’t think that I didn’t think I knew how to write a book, I knew, I know that I didn’t know how to write a book, because you don’t know how to do things until you do them, right. But I also felt very uncomfortable with the idea of with my positionality in relation to the context of hope so because I believe that hope is highly political and linked with systems of oppression, I thought, I don’t think we need another white person talking about hopefulness, I feel like a privileged white person talking about hope is is kind of like old news to some extent, and, and, you know, in my book, I get into more depth on how systems that privilege some and oppress others. And, you know, we’re built by a certain group of people in order to benefit a certain group of people, how those systems actually, you know, our brains, Jeff was talking about getting into neuroscience, and that I have a whole chapter in my book on neuroscience of critical hope. But our brains are creating from a young age, they’re creating predictive models of the world, and what to expect from the world based on our experiences. So the more experiences we have, that will determine how we build our sense of hopefulness around us. And if if kids are in a neighborhood or a school, in which they are taught that they don’t belong, or they are not safe, or they are not valued. Those Those kids are like their actual brains are changing to create predictive models and pathways that expect things to not turn out. And as we know, like, what we what we can imagine, for possibility is super linked to whether we think it’s whether we put the effort into doing that thing. And yet, I’m still fascinated by the fact that neuroscience can’t quite explain why and how some of the most hopeful people are actually those who have faced tremendous adversity and poverty. And I think it’s really interesting, like we have, we have understandings of certain things, but but there’s a lot, that’s still a mystery about it. Yeah, so those are just a few reflections.

Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade
Right? And I think, can I just pick up on that a little bit, at least really glad that you brought up the neuroscience, because that, like, massively impacted and affirmed, it’s interesting, one of my students now colleagues, Tiffany Marie, she, she commented to me that she’s a black woman. And she said, You know, it’s, it’s so interesting to me, like she’s, she’s, like steeped in the neuroscience of, you know, well being and, and her research is like, man, it’s amazing. But, you know, she says, so interesting to me that the things that my grandmother, and my elders and my ancestors have been saying about what it means for children to be well in our community that were have been ignored by institutions for you know, forever. Now is suddenly true, because Western science says it’s true. And and I think that’s, it’s that’s so right on right that like, once you say neuroscience, and everybody’s like, Oh, Right. But but so much of what schools and educators are struggling with, you know, if you don’t have access to a neuroscientist, go talk to the grandmas. Right. You know, my abuleta, when I walk in the house, like she knew instantly like that I didn’t need like, go to your homework, I didn’t write I needed some, you know, free hornless book. So, right, or, like, who know what I saw that and and how did she know that? Right? There’s a wisdom there in, in communities that have had to take really concentrate on protecting and taking care of our own, and particularly our most vulnerable, which is our children and our elders. Right, that now we have, because now we can scan the brain while you’re alive. Right. And we can actually see, right, biochemically what’s happening inside of your body and your neural pathways. And I think that that is that is a massive breakthrough for for our field. Right, but it’s not new. I want to talk about it is new, right? It’s been known, but it is still a massive breakthrough for our field, that I think education is way behind the learning curve. All the breakthroughs in neuroscience are, I had a neuroscientist, I did a keynote in New Zealand several years ago for all of their middle school leaders, the whole national right, middle school leaders. And the other keynote was one of the their country’s best on neuroscientists. And we were like talking before the talks began. He said to me that he said only one field has had more breakthroughs than neuroscience in the last 20 years. And this was 10 years ago. And, and he held up his phone. He’s like this. So think about this 10 years ago. Right? And neuroscience is like on pace with that kind of like accelerated knowings. But schools barely are barely touching. Right? All that we’re learning about this stuff that you just said Korean how we’re either contributing to those pathways, right? Those What did you call them predictive models, or we’re creating space for them, to disrupt them and start to create the kind of predictive models that the research on hope talks about

Keith Edwards
possibilities. I love the 30 years of neuroscience is really validating firmed decades of critical pedagogy really affirmed a lot of what Ferry and hooks and others were talking about and 3000 year old spiritual traditions as well, going back had that wisdom. And and I believe those two I want to hear from both of you, because we’ve talked about critical hope, as neuroscience as a practice is critical pedagogy is theory. But it’s both of you talk about it as a as a practice, and you’ve talked about it here as a practice. So Kari, maybe we’ll begin with you, how do you how do you put this into practice? In your life as a as an educator, as a human?

Kari Grain
Yeah, I think the first thing I’ll say about that is that positionality matters. When it when we talk about putting it into practice, who you are, you know everything from race and gender and socioeconomic status and, and just like the the spaces in which you find yourself matter to how you practice it, I think, because it’s so intertwined with with our identity. But I would, you know, one of the things I talk about in the section of my book is is that you practice, there’s kind of like three levels of practicing critical hope. The first is practicing your part. So those are just like the small every everyday things that we do in order to participate in society, the things we’re responsible to our fellow community members for, so things like voting or just not being a jerk or, like not walking through the world being a jerk, right. But then there’s practicing our art, and I had a music teacher in high school and he said, he said to me. He, by the way, I had this memory just flashed into my head. He walked the first time. We had class with him. He walked into the room. He was a real rocker, and he sang Bohemian Rhapsody. He played the piano on sang Bohemian Rhapsody at the top of his lungs, to a roomful of just reluctant high schoolers and nobody’s cynical teenagers. Yes, cynical. Teenagers and very few people clapped. But I was thinking in my head like this, I think this is going to be good. But anyway, he said to me, Kari, When you, you’ll know that you’re that you have found your art form, when you can’t help but do that thing, whatever that thing is, it may not be anything that’s happening in this music class. But whatever it is that you that feels like breathing to you, it won’t feel like practice, it won’t feel like you’re making yourself do it, it will feel like, like, like, as important as as, as the essential the essentials of life. And that really stuck with me. And, and again, I think it speaks to the impact that teachers can have. Because, you know, if you hold on to things like that, your whole life to the extent that I’ve, you know, written about him in my book, like, it’s amazing how he helped create, for me a predictive model about practicing hopefulness, you know, in my in my career, and in my work life. So practicing your part, practicing your art, the thing that you’re just really gifted at, and what you bring to your communities, or your your work world or your families, and then practicing asking questions of the system, I think sometimes we are prone to, you know, considering what a specific individual needs to change about what they’re doing, if something is going wrong if, if their situation is is full of despair. But how can we step back and continue asking questions or start asking questions about how is this how might systems be creating this situation of despair? And it’s not always an easy thing to do? Because we often attach people’s circumstances to their individual to their individuality. And I think again, Jeff, I was rereading your article yesterday, and, you know, talking about the different types of hope, I think you really got into some of that, like how, how it really is entrenched, it’s related to the individual, but it’s also related to in huge ways to the systems in which kids are growing up in and adults are working and living in.

Keith Edwards
And I loved how you talked about Kari about what a wonderful teacher discomfort is, especially to those of us with a lot of privileged identities. Right? If you’re uncomfortable, now is where the learning happens. What is that telling you? What is that? And I think so many of us avoid discomfort, or feel like it’s bad, or I failed. And I love you’re reframing that discomfort as this is the juice. This is the real stuff, if you can pay attention.

Kari Grain
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Keith Edwards
Jeff, how do you put this into practice? I know you’re, you’re you were a teacher. And now you’re a faculty member, but you’re still in schools, you’re still out there in the community still doing things? You’ve got her father of twins, your son? How do you put this in critical hope into practice?

Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade
Well, I think I’ll pick up on that last point about your, I think a big part of the project of this nation is we see play out in school every day, which is this idea to sanitize things, right? That we, you know, we want it to be clean. And, and the darker the skin of the young person, the more commitment is made to controlling the body, right to sanitizing. And, and, and what I often say, to educators, and what has has been true throughout my life, is that the meaning is in the mess. And so if you if you avoid the mess, you’re you’re not going to find the meaning. And I think that teachers, one of my greatest teachers, Master Jay Oh, who’s the founder of the national compilers network, who does, you know, hope, better than anybody that I’ve been around? He says that wounded children speak the most truth, and we resent them for it. Right. And so the Wounded Child is they’re not they’re not putting the varnish on it anymore. Right there. And, and schools are afraid of that. They’re afraid of wounded parents. And, and so we get rid of them. And, and what we’re seeing now and haven’t seen is that we don’t get rid of them. Right. They’re coming back. I mean, it’s so deep to me that so many of these shootings are happening at schools. Like why are they going to school? And and for me, it’s because there’s a There’s a truth telling there that about where the woundedness is most exemplified in their own memories, right. And we’re not learning the lesson because we’re, we’re, you know, again, quoting Cornel West, we’re ducking dodging and denying the mess. So for me, you know, critical hope is about staying like I don’t want to be messy all the time, right? Of course, right? But, but never resenting it never resenting when, and I still, I struggle with it, like, you know, like, when my son’s get frustrated, or like annoyed with each other, or whatever, like, I want it to stop, you know, like, I just want them to be the ace homies best friends all the time. I want them to be happy all the time. And I have to keep reminding myself know that the the fullness of their humanity is when they’re like, it’s not about not being mad, it’s about learning how to actually make sense of that, right? And process that, because that’s all and human. Right. But we keep telling kids that that’s bad, right? That when they’re angry, we want to stop being angry, right? Instead of actions. Absolutely. And again, the darker the skin, right, the more policing, and the more confrontational the policing is, right? The more that it’s bad behavior, right? And, and so, for me, critical hope is about understanding that, you know, that like that one of the most influential pieces of research that I read, in trying to understand how I wanted to talk about hope, was from Charles Schneider, who recently passed away, but he was a, you know, a psychologist, who is one of the first people he developed the children’s hope scale. And he actually did it in he was studying hospitals, and specifically, he was looking at Children’s sections of children’s hospitals, for kids that were had a terminal diagnosis. And he was really interested in why why is it that some kids with the same diagnosis will outlive their diagnosis, and some kids will, will pass away before they’re even supposed to right what what is the biggest, it’s the same hospital to same doctors, it’s the same meds, right. And what he what he stumbled upon, in researching this was that the kids who were outliving their diagnosis consistently had more adult visitors. And so out of, you know, all this research, one of his conclusions was, is that there is an end study after study has kind of reproduced this write that there is a direct correlation between the number of caring adults that a young person can name and their life and their measurable hope levels. And it’s, it’s like a one to one ratio. So the kid with one caring adult, right has half the hope level of a kid with two. And what I say to teachers is like, that’s why you’re so important. Because I don’t remember, I literally don’t remember how I learned how to read, right? I don’t remember any of the mechanics of school, but I can name to this day at 51, the teachers, the very few number of teachers that I knew authentically cared about me. That’s right. And I can name all the teachers that I know did it and we now have the research science to show that that literally saves lives. Right so when I think about my responsibility to young people, when it gets messy like that’s where I really testing myself, right? It’s not when it’s easy now when the apple of my eye right, but when it gets funky, right, I really try to stay conscious about this is your moment. This is when Yeah, really going to find out if you could teach her that. Right exactly.

Keith Edwards
So helpful for our audience were student affairs professionals who spend their whole lives dealing with the mess right with with the conduct violation with the title nine investigation with a student who’s struggling with mental health or students behind in class. And we feel like these are failures when in reality, we can reframe them as just incredible learning opportunities. How do we help these students grow and be in that mess? And so many of the challenges that we’re facing which just seem to get added on and added on, but we are almost out time so I just want to move to our last question real quickly and just ask each of you this is Student Affairs NOW. So I always like to end with what’s on your mind. Now, it might be something that’s really on your mind as we conclude this conversation, or maybe something else that you’re just really deeply troubled by. And and then also, if you want to share where people can connect with you, feel free to do that. But Jeff, what’s what’s troubling you now?

Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade
Oh, I think what’s what’s really troubling me is the the missed opportunity that we had in schools coming back from COVID. I felt like there was a real opportunity for our education system writ large, including universities, and colleges, to fundamentally repurpose themselves like to remake themselves, and to have what I would prefer an ex exclusive, but certainly an explicit commitment as a part of our mission vision to ensure that every young person that comes to us at the end of the day that they are more well for having spent time with us than when they walked away. And and I feel like what I see in schools and in my university, is that we missed that opportunity we blew right past that window. And, and schools and universities, you know, classrooms look very much the same right now, as they did pre pandemic. And so I’m part of a collective project that is working directly with schools to repurpose themselves. And to use something that we developed called the Youth Wellness index, to make that the primary metric of, of their rigor and of their curriculum and other pedagogy is that because we know, again, back to the neuroscience, that that the students that struggle, the most in school are often the students that are the least well, and we know, we know what makes people well. And if those became metrics and commitments from our education system, that that because you come here, you will be more well, like we can design a reading curriculum around that we can design math, we can design all of those things that we know we want to teach. But if we don’t reorient ourselves, and the purpose of why we are having young people go to school, then will will stay in this this place where I mean like the CDC report about one in three teenage girls is having suicide one in three is having suicidal ideations. And that’s just who’s reporting. So you know, it’s higher than right. It’s, we’re, we got to tell the truth about what’s happening to our young people. And schools are the place where I really feel like we have the most opportunity to fundamentally shift and pivot that and I think young people and families would be so excited to see that move. And so that’s really where my energy is at right now.

Keith Edwards
As a father of 11 and 13 year old girls, I would love to see more of that. I would just love to see more of that. Yeah. Kari. How about you what are you troubling now?

Kari Grain
I’m gonna add on to this question, what’s troubling me and what’s giving me you know, what’s helping me with as a self to that traveling? But you know, as someone who teaches you know, Jeff’s been talking a lot about youth and children and as someone that teaches primarily in adult education and in higher education I think a lot of the problems are the same and and what we’re dealing with as people who are, were wounded as as children and as youth and are now trying to make sense of it somehow and and move their lives forward. And I just finished a class I right before this interview, I was talking with several of my masters students who are just finishing up their program and they were reflecting on how some of the learnings from the past two years map on to their professional lives and what I’m what comes next. But, you know, the the problem of isolation and tremendous mental health struggles right now. I think a lot of us maybe thought it would end when maybe not end but like, decreased when the pandemic started to calm down a little bit. And I feel that if anything, I have the folks that I know who are in higher education and, and really in community development and working at the interface As with some of our society’s most important issues are our are feeling more despair and hopelessness, especially this past winter, I can speak locally here than I’ve ever heard, like, it seems to be so many people and and I’ll also add the folks that I know who have gone through PhD programs, this doesn’t get talked about it, but either most folks that I know who have gone through PhD programs have struggled, struggled with suicidal ideation at some point, because the pressure is so big, and you’re expected to hold it all together and be a leader. And I think that, you know, a lot of these issues, they present differently to different age groups, but they are pervasive and you know, shifting to what makes me hopeful, because I think that’s an important part of critical hope, right, the second part of it, and that is, you know, seeing some of the people who are becoming teachers right now, I had the I had, I was invited to teach a course, on New Hawk territory up in Bella Coola, a fairly remote community here in British Columbia, with our nitec program, which is our Indigenous teacher education program. And these students are all indigenous, and they are all becoming teachers. And they are going through their bachelor of education work. And I had a student in that class, say to me that it wasn’t until grade nine when she when she first had any material from any indigenous author, or any representation from an indigenous person in her curriculum or school content. And several of those students also said they never had even one teacher who looked like them, or that they could relate to. And so something that really gives me hope is seeing the incredible resiliency and diversity of some of the people who are coming up through the Bachelor of Education Programs and going into education, because it’s so important that the representation is there. And yeah, I wanted to end on that, because I feel like that’s something that I’m really sitting with right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Keith Edwards
Wonderful. Well, thank you both so much. This has been terrific. I realized this work, including, I’ve been smiling ear to ear the whole time and not on purpose. I just am so delighted. We’ve named dropped so many wonderful people will we’re going to have a massive show notes, linking to so many of the great works and Youth Wellness index and a ton of these coats and so many more. So thank you both for helping me cultivate my hope and my energy here today. I so appreciate it. Thank you to our sponsor today. Symplicity. Symplicity is the global leader in student services technology platforms, with state of the art technology that empowers institutions to make data driven decisions specific to their goals are to partner to institutions Symplicity sports all aspects of student life, including but not limited to Career Services and Development, Student Conduct and wellbeing, student success and accessibility services to learn more visit Symplicity, or connect with them on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And a huge shout out to our producer Nat Ambrosey who does all the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good. And if you’re listening today and not already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at Student Affairs now.com. Scroll to the bottom of the homepage to add your email to our MailChimp list. While you’re there, check out our archives and Keith Edwards. Thanks to our fabulous guests today, Jeff and Kari thank you both so much. And to everyone who’s watching and listening. Please make it a great week. Thank you.

Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete,

https://www.sjsu.edu/people/marcos.pizarro/courses/185/s1/DuncanAndradeHOPE.pdf

Critical Hope: How to Grapple with Complexity, Lead with Purpose, and Cultivate Transformative Social Change

Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade’s new book

Ta-Nehi Coates – The Beautiful Struggle and Muscular Empathy

Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni & Tupac Shakur | Official Trailer | FX

Affective and biopolitical dimensions of hope: From critical hope to anti-colonial hope in pedagogy

Michalinos Zembylas

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15505170.2020.1832004

Shawn Wilson: Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods

Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of the Oppressed: https://www.amazon.com/Pedagogy-Oppressed-Anniversary-Paulo-Freire/dp/1501314130/

Literacy: Reading the Word and the World

adrienne maree brown

Pleasure Activism: https://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Activism-Politics-Emergent-Strategy/dp/B08HR148LK/

Emergent Strategy: https://www.amazon.com/Emergent-Strategy-Shaping-Change-Changing/dp/1849352607/

Charles Snyder https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/28153/chapter/212928489

Youth Wellness Index

http://eoschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/On-Becoming-Community-Responsive-Centering-Wellness-in-the-Educational-Paradigm-Community-Responsive-Education.pdf