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Hope, Wisdom and Courage

Teaching and Learning Practices in Today’s Schools and Beyond

by Susan Groundwater-Smith (Volume editor)
©2025 Textbook VI, 144 Pages
Series: Counterpoints, Volume 559

Summary

This book comprises a series of engaging and provocative essays directed towards an optimistic consideration of hope, informed by practices that can be nurtured in school education and other sites of learning and are associated with courage and wisdom. Written from a range of perspectives and experiences each essay brings to the reader a positive orientation; one that is too often lacking in today’s global era in which much attention is paid to simplified solutions, often unfit for purpose, and which engender a spirit of despondency and demoralization.
Attention has been directed to the essay form as a departure from the academic chapter or journal article, with an expectation that the book will be of value beyond the walls of academia. The genre seeks to stimulate the reader’s and scholar’s imagination and to create new mental models that can stimulate reflection and rumination. The essays are sensitive to the many global, economic, societal and environmental discourses so dominant in the public domain and so act as antidotes to the more pernicious influences that those discourses have on educational policy making and practice.
"In this volume, Groundwater-Smith brings together a diverse group of essayists willing to confront the future of education in what are globally, very difficult times. Taking their arguments seriously, Groundwater-Smith argues, demands both courage and hope on our behalf, but it also holds out the promise of greater wisdom. This is an important and challenging book; a must read for anyone concerned about the future of education in our troubling times."
—John Furlong, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Oxford
"This volume is a provocative intellectual tonic whose intent is to reshape and reframe education practice in universities, schools and their communities. As Stephen Kemmis argues "education happens everywhere", it is ubiquitous. Groundwater-Smith has indeed engaged in a thorough experiment, the contributions of which provide validation for change and the evidence of successful practice to achieve it. It is not an easy book, but certainly a powerful one to reinstate hope and courage in the broader education project."
—Judyth Sachs, Professor Emeritus, Macquarie University

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Learning from essays on hope, wisdom and courage in today’s schools and beyond (Susan Groundwater-Smith)
  • Resources of hope for education in the 21st century?(Ian Menter)
  • The hidden life of education(Stephen Kemmis)
  • Hope, education and the generation of fear: Matters of time and space (Catherine Burke)
  • Pedagogical possibilities in and beyond climate-changing classrooms (Eve Mayes, with Natasha Abhayawickrama and Emma Heyink)
  • Activists in rethinking hope, courage, and wisdom (Barry Down)
  • Education and democracy: Towards a curriculum for democratic hope (Alan Reid)
  • Leading a pedagogy of hope (Linda O’Brien)
  • The transformative power of truth-telling: Fostering hope, courage, and wisdom in students (Dr Cathie Burgess and Kylie Captain)
  • Hope and courage: A collective pedagogy to build sustainable gender equality and more (Jane Hunter and Jorge Knijnik)
  • Rokeya’s dream: Speculative writing and the making of an unreal education (Remy Low)
  • The incredible lightness of teacher professional being: Hope, courage and wisdom in the work of schools and teachers An Afterword (Bob Lingard)
  • Consolidated bios

Learning from essays on hope, wisdom and courage in today’s schools and beyond

Susan Groundwater-Smith

This introductory essay serves several purposes. Essentially, the essay argues that it is taking a constitutive approach in that the language form that is employed affects the ways in which particular phenomena and practices are understood and embraced. Its semantic structure both shapes, expands and limits the ways in which we can envisage the world of which we are all a part.

It is designed as a ‘thought experiment’ that requires of its readers, inclusive of a range of stakeholders in education, to change their expectations of what ordinarily constitutes an academic chapter. It asks them to engage with a somewhat different form of communication: a critical essay. It seeks the use of the imagination that will create new mental models that can link hope, courage and wisdom in our schools and beyond. This introduction foreshadows the essays that follow. All are sensitive to the many global, economic, societal and environmental discourses so dominant in the public domain. These act as antidotes to the more pernicious influences that those discourses have on educational policy making and practice.

Why the essay?

Apart from my early years spent in the Orkney Islands I lived through my childhood in a terrace house on Upper Addison Gardens in Kensington, London. The street ran off Addison Road and was named after Joseph Addison, a great essayist, who along with Richard Steele, established a new literary form. Many of their essays were published in their jointly produced journal, The Spectator, in the first decades of the 18th century. The writing, particularly that of Addison, was breezy, pithy and conversational in contrast to the rather stuffy epistles of the day. Written in an active and clear voice, pieces captured the essence of the age and the times, ranging from observations on love, theatre and even the making of gardens. Each acted to provoke, some even to enrage. Perhaps it is an exaggerated claim to suggest that living in this place engendered my own love of the essay.

For me the essay form re-shapes what chapters in academic texts ordinarily do. The essays in this collection, embrace a creative narrative style infused with the carefully considered illuminative perspective of each essayist. The result is idiosyncratic rather than academic, bound as the latter is by specific conventions regarding scholarly work. As Norman (2019: p. 1) notes:

This concern for the concrete, for realistic complexity rather than rationalistic reduction, is why an essay, like a poem, ultimately is its style – and why essayism is itself a style …

To read Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Street haunting: A London Adventure’, for example, is to enter into the cognisance of an extraordinary writer, free to use a language of nuance, ambiguity and uncertainty.

The scope of the essay gives the writer permission to explore: events and feelings; love and loss; the particular and the general; romance and satire; the ideal and the everyday. Whether Michel de Montaigne writing on cannibals or Jonathan Swift on consuming Irish babies, the essay is a compelling form. In this book its cultural vectors cross and re-cross the landscape of educational practices both within and beyond schools. Dillon (2018, p. 13, p. 97) writes of essays approaching their subjects ‘slantwise’ and being a ‘solid thing made fully present on the page and then dissolving in all else it implies’; in this way they allow the authors a range of possibilities and arguments to imagine, to repudiate and re-consider the subject matter.

Our subject matter, embracing as it does, hope, courage and wisdom, has undoubtedly been considered through numerous publications involving the many disciplines that make up the field of education, in particular that which applies to schooling, but also taking account of learning outside the classroom. However, it is our desire to engage with what Addison called the pleasures of the imagination that allows for the emergence of ideas. Ideas that have the capacity to surprise, to stimulate, to transform, even to antagonise. These writings should not be confused with opinion pieces designed to persuade, but rather reflections to be evaluated. They eschew nailing down those concrete matters that are demanded by the language of performativity, governed as it is only by that which is measurable.

The essays contained in this book take a constitutive approach: The essay form itself both shapes and limits the experience of the readers as they share in the construction of the text. They offer both a linguistic and philosophical tool with which to read the various texts. They eschew the endless lists of citations that may act to interrupt engagement with the many rich, divergent and illuminative ideas contained in them. As well, they decry the borrowing and adoption of an inappropriate language arising from business practices in a global world of neo-liberalism. Richard Pring, the British philosopher of education, draws upon the oft-cited Wittgenstein aphorism that we can be bewitched by the mis-use of language. He sees that there is an Orwellian flavour to much of the social policies, such as education, employed by governments and their agencies.

Typically, academic papers or chapters are written in a manner that may exclude and marginalise those who are not immersed in the specific specialised area. This is particularly problematic for many of the stakeholders in education who bear the consequences of the policies and practices in which they have little voice, such as many students, their teachers and their parents and/or caregivers who are, nonetheless burdened with them. Therefore, these essays do not seek either to supplement or supplant traditional academic work but rather to make possible a different dialogue between writers and readers. If the genre of the essay has the capacity to affect the ways in which we perceive and engage with the world then it has a remarkable power to address anew, matters that have been leached out of the education enterprise. Hope, courage and wisdom have been largely effaced by the neo-liberal language of globalisation, pragmatism, productivity and competition. These essays are an antidote.

Details

Pages
VI, 144
Publication Year
2025
ISBN (PDF)
9781636676883
ISBN (ePUB)
9781636676890
ISBN (Softcover)
9781636676906
DOI
10.3726/b22391
Language
English
Publication date
2025 (February)
Keywords
Teaching and Learning Practices in Today’s Schools and Beyond Susan Groundwater-Smith Hope, courage and wisdom in education Educational reform Activism and regeneration Reviving the essay form
Published
New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2025. VI, 144 pp.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Susan Groundwater-Smith (Volume editor)

Susan Groundwater-Smith is an Honorary Professor. She has held a number of professorial positions in Australia, UK and the Netherlands. Her work has been directed at teacher professional learning, particularly through the avenue of action research, as well as by engaging the voices of young people as the consequential stakeholders in education.

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