Radical Hope Quotes

“When we talk about online learning as increasing access to higher education for more and more learners, that’s only a good thing if our online courses do more than just digitally replicate the worst and most unimaginative aspects of face-to-face pedagogy.”
― Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

“When figures identified as thought leaders suggest the real value of higher education rests in its ability to teach new skills to the rising generation (as well as current job seekers who’ve been left behind, outsourced, or downsized), they cast knowledge and knowledge creation in purely instrumental terms, rendering the work of higher education almost completely transactional in nature. Sure, there are platitudes about “deep learning” and “meaningful connections” thrown into the mix, but that instrumental logic remains the dominant trope. This creates a real problem for those of us engaged in articulating and defending the larger value— the intrinsic public good— of higher education. Challenged by the abstract nature of arguments about social contracts and civic connections, we shift to a language we think will be taken more seriously by administrators, politicians, and cost-conscious parents: the language of marketable skills for the “new economy” and of terms like “nimble” and “agile” and “multiple competencies.” But in doing this, we cede the terrain of the debate; we’ve implicitly declared higher education’s real value is transactional and market oriented when we use that language. We’ve sacrificed our larger vision in favor of short-term relevance. While it might be an eminently understandable move, it’s certainly a dangerous one.”
― Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

“I needed to reflect on what I really wanted my pedagogy to be about: would teaching be a way for me to perform my expertise, or would it be about connecting students with what I knew history could do for their own intellectual growth and agency?”
― Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

“The need for a fundamental sense of compassion has never been more visible than in our current higher educational context, where institutional resources and morale decline as the diversity and needs of our student population increase. To reverse what’s become decades’ worth of starvation budgets and an increasingly hostile political-cultural environment for higher education, we need to build a future radically different from our present. The work we do with and among our students— teaching and learning, creating and collaborating, building knowledge and burnishing confidence— is also the work of building that future. But that future can only come to pass if we involve as many students as possible in its creation. A future that’s shaped by processes that push significant numbers of students to the margins is one that will end up depressingly similar to our present. To militate against this outcome, we ought to begin dismantling the systems that marginalize our students. That’s a practice that starts in our own classrooms, in the routine choices we make every day about how we engage with our students and their stories— about what we say to them. An approach that embraces empathy and compassion as its default orientation is foundational to a pedagogy of radical hope.”
― Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

“Teaching is a radical act of hope. It is an assertion of faith in a better future in an increasingly uncertain and fraught present. It is a commitment to that future even if we can’t clearly discern its shape. It is a continuing pedagogical practice rather than a set of static characteristics. Simply put, we teach because we believe it matters. That may be hard to remember when we’re driving dozens of miles from one adjunct gig to another, or when we’re buried beneath a pile of papers to grade, or when we get the dean’s email about further cuts to our department’s operating budget. Yet that’s when it’s most evident, if we really think about it. Our most quotidian practices— even and especially in environments of adversity— are a constant assertion that through our work with and among our students we are creating a better future. The very acts of trying to teach well, of adopting a critically reflective practice to improve our teaching and our students’ learning, are radical , in that word’s literal sense: they are endeavors aimed at fundamental, root-level transformation. And they are acts of hope because they imagine that process of transformation as one in which a better future takes shape out of our students’ critical refusal to abide the limitations of the present.”
― Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

“This litany of problems and obstacles both faculty and students face on a daily basis seems designed to instill despair, not hope. Indeed, a weary cynicism is both an eminently understandable and frequent response to these conditions. But jaded detachment, tempting as it may be for no other reason than self-defense, is ultimately a trap— one into which we’ll drag students along with us if we fall.”
― Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

“Neutrality is a luxury of the comfortable; in these uncomfortable times, our students and our academic communities need more from us.”
― Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto