Our education system has seen a nervous breakdown overnight with the call of the lockdown. It churned the reasoning capacities of dynamic learners in curbing their capacities and perspectives. Since Indian schooling has been governed by stringent structured academic grading patterns there is a need to now unlearn, learn and renovate newer pedagogies. Factual resources are available throughout, but life-skills awareness is something that stays unknown and unheard by many. There is thus a need in blending hopeful teaching and learning mechanisms so that they can enhance divergent solution-based outcomes for life.
Charles Richard Snyder, a well-known American psychologist came up with the theory of Hope in 1994 and believed that this small word had greater meaning in initiating individualistic capacity building within the classrooms. Now that the world has moved to a virtual platform there is an urgency to work as educators and authority figures in reinforcing sensory-based learning and connectedness.
Individual uniqueness is innate in each child and identifying the same by guiding them to embrace both strengths and weaknesses will ensure the development of hope in combatting personal and social conflicts. Hope theoretical dimensions need to be absorbed practically to academics in orienting well-being dimensions. This would form a more positive outlook towards life. The emergence of hope as a perceived ability can motivate learners to journey towards their aspired direction.
Snyder (1994) understood hope with its constructive elements of cognition and affect that united goals, perceived outcomes, and autonomy in creating strategies to reach the same. He gave three componential aspects of hope where there is the need to have focussed reasoning or thinking patterns, create methods that would guide in the accomplishment of goals, and learning of motivational skills in reaching towards the desired outcomes. Thus, the increase in self-beliefs and personal capacities greater would be the development of hope. Though goals are abstract concepts, it has the power to handhold individual actions.
Since an individual’s actions are more goal-oriented, it then becomes the moral responsibility of educators in guiding learners to recognize goals. This would increase their subjective happiness if described as valuable that has its uncertain functions. Enabling students in knowing goals as both anchors and barriers would empower them to create a difference.
The current pandemic has blocked the young’s ability to think, feel and act. Thus, if educators inspire student’s pathway thinking that when strengthened would initiate newer alternative pathways of agency thinking. Holistic mental health is an outcome of pathway and agency thinking. The individual ability to form varied pathways from the moment to the aspired future. The pathway processes reflect the perceived capacity to form varied routes. The mental ability to craft pathway thoughts accustoms the child to move towards constructive goals and thoughts. Similarly, with pathways thoughts agency thinking needs to be incorporated. This refers to the personal intentions, confidence, and the personal capacity to follow varied pathways to aspired goals. Favourable motivation, self-beliefs build emotional capacities.
Every goal comes with its challenges that are termed as barriers which need to be reiterated to students that these cannot be roadblocks. Thus, the skills to create new routes with pathway and agency thinking through hope principles need to be taught to students. These further form a cyclical association that also leads to these two kinds of thinking. Snyder’s hope theory encompasses three reference questions that students should be taught the practice that is, ‘What is going on? Where do I want to go? What is stopping me?’ is known as the pathway thinking questions. It’s time we as educators, policymakers, academicians, and those from the learning systems to observe the current scenario as a wake-up call in uplifting the young in becoming self-sufficient hopeful humans.
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