Welcome to the 2019 Atlantic Universities’ Teaching Showcase! This year’s theme is “Critical Hope and Other Academic Virtues”

In considering hope critically, I believe that we will be able to think more deeply about pedagogy, about our lives as educators, and about the relationships that form our communities. In its radical openness and possibility, hope is our vehicle for reclaiming agency in the face of despair. If we let it, hope can be a collaborative and imaginative process by which we overcome despair and reclaim agency in our pedagogy, pushing us forward to collectively reimagine the future and its possibilities (Dale Jacobs, “What’s Hope Got to Do With It?: Theorizing Hope in Education,” 2005)

 

In a time that might tend our students either to apathy or to despair, this conference suggests that we might look beyond the knowledge and skills that tend to dominate discussions of higher education: to ways to cultivate hope, empathy, and other virtues that can support students and instructors in making real change in their own lives, in education, in their communities, and in the world. More than merely wishful thinking, critical hope combines a critical understanding of the past and the present with a resilient belief that things can be different than they are.