Hope, Rage & Love

I heard once that hope is equal parts rage and love. This phrase appears in my mind sometimes in the evenings, as my three-year-old daughter drifts between waking and sleeping, her little, strong body snuggled around me, her face nuzzled into my neck. Often, after long minutes of silence, and slow steady breathing, when I think that she has surely already fallen into the heavy sleep of night time, she will quite suddenly ask me a question:

"Mama, do pelicans dream about flowers?"

"Can rhinos be cheeky sometimes?"

"Are monsters kind to their babies?"

"What colour is my belly button?"

"What noise does a giraffe make when it is sad?"

"Is all the world made from colours?"

These poetic, moments-before-drifting-to-sleep questions have been surprising and delighting me ever since she started to talk. These little glimpses into the fluidity, complexity, humour, thoughtfulness of my young daughter's mind fill me with wonder and love. Her questions are so utterly unexpected they seem at times a surrealist painting come to life. And yet, to her, they are serious questions that are worth pondering, worth musing over, worth sharing earnestly into the silence before drifting into sleep.

And then sometimes, true to the saying, I feel the rage rising to meet this love within me. Rage at what my daughter might encounter when she starts primary school in less than two years' time. Rage at the thought of what could happen if her beautiful questions collide with dominant, linear, rigid, standardised approaches to pedagogy in the early years of primary school that focus so strongly on the already-known, the quantifiable, the predictable that to imagine otherwise might seem inconceivable, impossible. Rage that for so many children and for my teacher education students too, there seems to be so little room left in their classrooms for the wonder of trusting in the unexpected, or for complexity, or for connectedness, or for an openness to questions without answers, or for the joy and movement that might emerge from imagining and enacting multiple ways of making meaning from the world.

And, yes, where the love and rage collide, there is hope. And I agree with Silin that "hope is at the heart of the educational endeavour" (2017, p.91).

Pedagogy is lived. It is living. It is relational, unpredictable, contradictory, fluid, mutable, embodied. It is situated, it is contextual, it is particular. In the territorialised professional space of education, striations and sedimentations (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) currently dominated by globalisation and neoliberalism shape a context of increasing intolerance of difference in pedagogy, an increasing impossibility of the unexpected, an intensification of rigid, predetermined expectations and outcomes for teachers and children and schools at all levels of education. More than ever, there is a need for lived examples from pedagogical contexts (such as Collingwood College, the case school in my research) that are permeable, relational, connected, open, unexpected - where hopeful lines of flight are possible.

Through my thesis, I illuminated and argued for the generative possibilities offered when the pedagogical elements of place and space, knowledge and subjectivities are re-imagined and enacted through the refrains of movement, connectedness, openness, trust. Emily Dickinson wrote in 1861 that "Hope" is the thing with feathers. In writing my thesis, I indeed watched hope fly, following lines of flight. I offered potentially transformative hope that is grounded in lived experience, through showing how one school community actively disrupted and resisted the dominant territorialising discourses of education and opened up spaces for re-imagining and enacting pedagogy in the early years of primary school.

So here is an offering of hope: the hopeful lines of flight to new possibilities for pedagogy in the early years of primary school in Australia.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

(Dickinson, 1975, p.116)

(this is an excerpt from the final chapter of my PhD Thesis, Hopeful Lines of Flight: Possibilities for Reimagining Pedagogy in the Early Years of Primary School)