The ecology of hope: Building rainbows in education systems

Abstract

Hope is frequently invoked in education, yet rarely theorised. Where it has been theorised, it has been understood in two largely separate ways: as an individual psychological capacity, in the positive‐psychology tradition and as a critical‐emancipatory stance, in the pedagogy of hope. This article proposes a third: a theory, the ecology of hope, that locates hope not in the individual alone but in the relationship between a person and the systems that surround them. Bringing the cognitive psychology of hope into dialogue with ecological systems theory, the social‐ecological account of resilience, and utopian methodology, in which a better society is something deliberately designed, it argues that hope is an emergent and designable property of educational ecologies: something a system can build, a learner can be helped to perceive and may in time learn to seek for themselves. For young people who have experienced adversity, and who often arrive with hesitant hope, or with little hope at all, this cultivation is especially consequential and involves the gradual development of learned hopefulness. The theory is organised around three interdependent dimensions: architectural, transformative and tangible, through which hope can be understood, deliberately built and studied as a property of educational ecologies.