"Hope is not just a passive optimism," asserted Roxana DellaVecchia, a professor at Towson State University (Md.). When people can hope, she explained, they can imagine a better reality and can take steps to make what they imagine "more real."
Students today are losing that ability to dream of a better world, DellaVecchia warned. Too many young people "just feel helpless." So teachers, she said, have to create curriculums of hope, curriculums designed to help students feel connected, committed, involved, and future-oriented.
"Many of our students are fearful of the future and haven't been taught to look forward," DellaVecchia stated. Students need to develop goal-setting and problem-solving skills so they will realize a "sense of control" and have confidence that they can achieve their goals.
One activity, designed to show how events of the past and present can suggest a path for the future, requires students to create lifelines from different colored index cards. Pink cards, for example, can represent past events and can include milestones or profiles of people who have influenced their lives. On yellow cards that symbolize the present, students can write about current events and describe "who they are." Students can use purple cards to illustrate their futures and predict the possible, probable, and preferable events that will occur.
"Children who are the most despairing, whose lives currently seem overwhelming, initially have fewer purple cards," observed Tara Labinka, a student teacher at Towson State. This is critical information for teachers, who can then develop strategies for helping students who seem defeated, she noted.
One such strategy builds on the lifeline activity by asking students to create a "future wheel" for one of the events described on their purple cards. To complete this graphic organizer, students place the identified event, or goal, in a center circle. They then think of four action steps they can take to reach that goal—each of the four spokes of the future wheel represents an action step. Students are then required to identify the challenges they will face in taking those action steps, and to brainstorm ways to overcome those challenges.
Through this activity, students begin to see "which of their goals is unrealistic" and which is actually achievable, said DellaVecchia. They also begin to realize that life is not "just a wish." Students learn that they can indeed "step in and take control" of their lives and of their futures, she stated. Students learn that they can hope.