Note to educators - University of Colorado Denver

Note to educators:
Hope required when growing
roses in concrete
Jeff Duncan-Andrade
Assistant Professor
Raza Studies and Education
San Francisco State University
jandrade@sfsu.edu
Asked to write an article for HER that responded to the question: What will the Obama
presidency mean for education? Decided to approach the question by playing with his
use of the idea of hope, something that is ever present in the historical movements of our
communities, but an idea that has been assaulted and eroded since the 1960s. So, I took
up Obama!s use of the term and incorporated my understanding of the term. For Obama!s
use, I researched its origins in his work to find out that he gets his book title “Audacity of
Hope” from a sermon delivered by Reverend Jeremiah Wright in 1990 called “the audacity
to hope”. I combined these ideas with another kind of sermon. An urban sermon if you
will, a poem from Tupac Shakur called “The Rose that Grew from Concrete”

The rose that grew
from concrete
To You ask see us you why wouldn’t Don’t ask
we turn from ask my why why.
On the contrary. We bad the would to worse
rose
We And that would is these grew to all ignore Well, This are from love we Thank my is from its the the are damaged will which concrete. God. the to reach roses. we pedals. had came. the sun.
all celebrate its tenacity.
damaged Ask me, petalss. how?
You see you
wouldn’t ask why
the rose that grew
from the concrete
had damaged pedals.
After: As I see it, this is exactly what we are trying to do in our work.
We are trying to grow roses in the concrete, in spite of the fact that
concrete offers perhaps the worst possible conditions in which to grow.
It is devoid of light, water, and other key nutrients. It is toxic.

“This is the concrete...”
• Physical violence/PTSD (Carrion, 2009)
•
1/3 of urban youth display symptoms of PTSD,
twice that of soldiers returning from Iraq
(Tucker, 2007)
• Racism (Jones, 2000; Williams, 1995)
• Patriarchy (Geronimus, 2006)
•
• Institutional violence (Akom, 2008)
•
•
Gentrification/root shock (Fullilove, 2004)
Poverty in the face of great wealth (CNR, 2008)
Educational & eco-apartheid (Akom, 2009)
Let me say a little more about this metaphor of concrete b/c I don’t
want you to get twisted up on some Ruby Payne “framework of poverty”
thinking that I am describing some kind of social deviance on the part
of our communities. One of the major gaps in our field is that teachers
are rarely given all of the information that they need to be successful.
This does not mean it isn’t out there, you’ve just got to go and find it
b/c they aint gonna bring it to you. Well, today I’m gonna give you a
piece. A HUGE piece. At least it was for me. Nothing has impacted my
teaching more than...

...and these are my damaged pedals”--Tupac Shakur

The impact of “damaged pedals”
on health and well-being
• Increases “allostatic load” (McEwen &
Seeman, 1999)
• Accumulation of multiple negative
stressors without the resources to cope
(CNR, 2004)
• Induces the process of
“weathering” (Geronimus, 2006)
McEwen & Seeman, 1999
Allostatic load refers to the “cumulative negative effects, or the price the
body pays for being forced to adapt to various psychosocial challenges and
adverse environments”

WTF?!?
We’re screwed!
We cannot end these things so we’re screwed! Not true. This same
research indicates that in outlier cases, there were key agents of HOPE
that intervened to create greater sense of control over the social
stressors. We ARE the solution. What we do IS literally life & death. We
CANNOT get it wrong. All our data indicates that how we respond, en
masse, as educators has the greatest impact on life trajectory.

• In the dictionary
•
Hope is our hope:
What is hope?
defined as both a noun and a verb--“a feeling of
expectation and desire for a certain thing to
happen”
• In the research
•
•
•
Psychology: Hope theory (Snyder, 2002)
Social epidemiology: sense of “control of
destiny” (Wilson, 2008; Syme, 2004)
In mythology
• the last thing to emerge from Pandora’s box

All ‘hope’ aint good hope:
Pandora’s Box & optimism vs. hope
• Beware the false hopes of unfounded
optimism
• Hokey hope
• Mythical hope
• Hope deferred

False Hope
Hokey hope
Mythical hope
Hope deferred
Critical Hope
Material hope
Socratic hope
Audacious hope
Hokey hope
• “The tranquilizing drug of gradualism”
• Individualistic up-by-your-bootstraps
hyperbole
• Valenzuela’s (1999) “aesthetic care”
• Delegitimizes the pain that urban youth
experience
• Rooted in the optimism of the spectator who
needs not suffer
• Fundamental incomprehension of suffering

Mythical hope
False Hope
Hokey hope
Mythical hope
Hope deferred
Critical Hope
Material hope
Socratic hope
Audacious hope
• Obama’s election--“hope on a
tightrope”? (West, 2008)
• A-historical and depoliticized denial
In reference to Teddy Roosevelt’s 1901 White
House dinner invitation to Booker T.
Washington: “America today is a world away
from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time.
There is no better evidence of this than the
of suffering
• Depends on luck and the law of
averages to produce individual
exceptions to the tyranny of injustice
election of an African American to the
presidency of the United States. Let there be no
reason now for any American to fail to cherish
their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on
Earth”.--McCain’s concession speech

False Hope
Hokey hope
Mythical hope
Deferred hope
Critical Hope
Material hope
Socratic hope
Audacious hope
Hope deferred
• Based on a progressive politics of
despair
• Avoids “blaming the victim” and turns instead to blaming
“the system”
•
Critique of social inequality never manifests in
transformative pedagogical project (Solórzano &
Delgado-Bernal, 2001)
• “Hope” for change in its most deferred
forms
• Some distant future reformed society
•
Individual student’s future ascent to the middle class

False Hope
Hokey hope
Mythical hope
Hope deferred
Critical Hope
Material hope
Socratic hope
Audacious hope
...still deferring
• Individualistic in nature, requiring
level of sacrifice most teachers are
of Needs
loath to make
Self
• Ignores the gap actualization b/w students’ most
pressing needs and the education
we
Esteem
we offer offer them them
Love & belonging
• Unwillingness and/or inability to
close gap = Physiological/Safety hope deferredneeds:
Food, clothing, shelter, safety
• Hope too long deferred is hope
Maslow, denied
A. A. (1970). Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper & and Row. Row.
Maslow’s Hierarchy

Moving from coping to hoping
• Coping as resiliency
• Building capacity to cope with social
trauma
• Hope as healing
• Building capacity to respond to
social trauma

Critical hope:
The enemy of hopelessness
• Three types of critical hope
• Material hope
• Socratic hope
• Audacious hope

False Hope
Hokey hope
Mythical hope
Deferred hope
Critical Hope
Material hope
Socratic hope
Audacious hope
Material hope
• Good teaching as material resource
•
Rigorous pedagogy busting false binary b/w
academic rigor and social justice (Duncan-
Andrade & Morrell, 2008)
•
Show and prove! Transformational pedagogical
project delivered (Hidalgo, 2009)
• Material resources
•
$, food, rides, laptops, school supplies, housing,
tutoring, links to medical and legal services

False Hope
Hokey hope
Mythical hope
Deferred hope
Critical Hope
Material hope
Socratic hope
Audacious hope
Socratic hope
• West’s “Socratic sensibility” (Duncan-Andrade, 2007)
•
Show the sermon, rather than preach it--are we on
the painful path with them?
• Do we make the self-sacrifices in our own lives that we are
asking them to make?
• Do we have the capacity and commitment to support
students when they struggle to apply that framework in
their lives?
•
Moving from empathy to solidarity earns the right to
demand
• Liked OR loved? Love aint cheap! (Darder, 2002a/b)
• All great undertakings are risky...-Socrates in The Republic

False Hope
Hokey hope
Mythical hope
Deferred hope
Critical Hope
Material hope
Socratic hope
Audacious hope
Audacious hope
• Embraces “legitimate suffering” (Jung, 1970)
•
Not “other people’s children” (Delpit, 1995); their pain
is our pain
• Classroom as micro-ecosystem
• A pedagogy that confronts (Akom, 2008) and “radically
heals” (Ginwright, 2009) the suffering of our children
• “Gardener’s Tale” (Jones, 2000)
• “There are no weeds” (Yang, 2009)
• Stares down the painful path and despite the
cost makes the journey again and again

Critical hope is “radical healing”

We might not change the world...
but we can spark the mind that does.
Boudhanath Stupa (shrine)--one of the largest
Buddhist
shrines in the world-- near Kathmandu. Boudhananth is
a spiritual
center for Tibetan Buddhists in Nepal.

When roses stay in the
concrete...
they become rose gardens

To be or not to be?
That is our question
The question is not whether or not we can grow rose gardens in
concrete, it is whether or not we will. Indeed, some 40+ years ago
during a debate at Oxford, Malcolm drew from Shakespeare’s Hamlet
to frame this very same challenge to us. A challenge to develop a
movement for justice and freedom that would defy false borders of
nation-states, age, race, gender, and class. I am clear, that in this
moment, he was speaking to all of us. So, since he says it better than
me, I’ll let him close us out.

TO BE!
There can be no
other choice