Currently reading Finnegan & d’Abreu (2024) on “The hope wheel: a model to enable hope-based pedagogy in Climate Change Education”

We are discussing more and more about the importance of hope when talking about climate change and general sustainability questions, and I wrote about different approaches before (for example, Webb (2013)’s five types of hope, which are patient, critical, sound, resolute, and transformative hope, and Macy & Johnstone (2022)’s Active Hope). And now here is a model that designed to bring the theory into practice! (Recommended yesterday by Robert in out shared “Teaching for Sustainability” course that brings together participants from Bergen and Lund!)

Finnegan & d’Abreu (2024)’s model offers

• handrails for teachers “to hold on to while constructively engaging with climate change” (Honesty when telling hard truths; awareness of oneself and others in a related, situated realities; spaceholding to create both safe and brave spaces; action that needs to come out of all the theoretical considerations)
• guardrails for teachers “to be sensitive to when implementing the handrails” (climate anxiety which needs to be dealt with with sensitivity and empathy; false hope which needs to be counteracted with honesty; mis-/disinformation needs to be counteracted both by proactively dealing with misconceptions and misinformation, and by building more general information literacy skills)
• lenses “to encourage educators to explore connections between complex societal and planetary challenges” (complexity requires systems-thinking; justice recognises power structures like colonialism; perspectives is about including many voices; creativity is about visioning the “what if?”; and empathy focusses on developing a culture of care)

I think this is a very nice and helpful approach!

In their model, the handrails are arranged on the spikes of a wheel, the guardrails on the rim, and the lenses are to the side of it. This made no sense to me, and since they wrote that they “welcome other researchers and practitioners to continue to refine and improve this model and metaphor“, I made my own visualisation (which you see in the featured image above):

Hope is held afloat by (the former handrails) honesty, spaceholding and action, and needs to avoid the icebergs climate anxiety, false hope, and mis-/disinformation. And hope needs to work with all five lenses: Empathy as a guiding lighthouse, binoculars that help take on different perspectives, creativity with a camera, justice where we might need help seeing things clearly, and complexity, where we need to consider all scales in a system. Now “hope wheel” isn’t really an appropriate name any more, but I still like it! :-)

Finnegan, W., & d’Abreu, C. (2024). The hope wheel: a model to enable hope-based pedagogy in Climate Change Education. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1347392.