Hope: Advent Day 6

 
Hope is our theme for the first week of advent-it seemed a good way of describing the work @Learners_Forum has been delivering and evaluating over the past few months. Having the chance to work with them on promoting hope has been fabulous. The group was keen to learn more about those who inspired a non-formal approach to adult education-we had a look first at Paulo Freire. 
 
We talked only about his 1998 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the revisited exploration Pedagogy of Hope. They had lots to say about his banking description and explored more of the ideas around the fact that the humanization and dehumanization of individuals is possible talking most about what the group felt was most important about their experiences of adult learning and education. 
 
Our chat reminded me that it is impossible to discuss Freire’s descriptive account of learning, in relation to hope and hopelessness, in his own words ‘without talking about respect for students, for the dignity …..without taking into consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them…’ .
 
With every new group of adult learners, we need to be mindful that their experiences of formal education are different and that for some the time just wasn’t right. 


Now we have a new hope for second and third chances in education, a hope that with a fair wind our soon to be new adult learning strategy sitting within a wholly connected lifelong learning system can provide opportunities for life-wide experiences too and bring the much talked about equality we seek.
 
“No one leaves his or her world without being transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self, soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in time and misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence, possibly now forgotten by the one who said it. A word for so long a time attempted and never spoken, always stifled in inhibition, in the fear of being rejected- which as it implies a lack of confidence in ourselves also means refusal to risk.”
 
Hope is so much more than a noun or a verb….