Don’t be surprised if you feel uneasy as you contemplate attending a workshop on hope. Considering a new approach that may not yet feel intuitive often elicits very normal feelings of skepticism or resistance. Those feelings are likely to be even more heightened because tackling urgent and important problems, like the massive injustice of climate change, from the perspective of hope is probably quite different from how you (and most of us) learned to think.
The kind of hope we'll be workshoping together is not wishful thinking or toxic positivity. We'll be working with evidence-based hope that supports well-informed change. Whenever we treat doomism as a taken-for-granted truth, we risk making ourselves complicit in creating the dead-end scenarios we most fear. When, on the other hand, we hold evidence-based hope, we demand full access to initiatives that are dismantling root causes of unjust systems. We demand up-to-date details of proven solutions and effective trends.
The practices of evidence-based hope we'll be exploring together are informed by climate emotions research. They will enable you to engage students not only with what is broken but also what is effective in stopping or repairing that brokenness.
The workshop is open to teachers or administrators working with middle and high school students in any subject focus.
