You will not find hope in the headlines. A daily reader of the news and a parent of children ages four, six, and nine, I confronted this paralyzing fact when I read this headline in early September—“Minneapolis Catholic school shooting leaves 2 children dead, 21 people injured.” As I began drafting my concluding post to this series on the theme of hope, I wondered: How do I write about hope in this context? I faced an especially steep challenge, one that had already felt formidable months ago. As I mourned the tragic shooting, I came to see more clearly: hope is, in and of itself, a chosen vocation. It requires practice, strength, and imagination—a wholehearted willingness to keep envisioning new possibilities, even when the odds feel long. Truth be told, it is the harder choice.
But what happens when we feel weary, and summoning the sheer will to hope feels harder than simply curling up into a ball and hiding from the world? As tempting as resignation may be, the very nature of vocation resists hopelessness. As Paul J. Wadell reminds us, “Vocation implies a teleology (from the Greek telos, ‘purpose’ or ‘goal’),” and that purpose “may shape the overall trajectory of our lives.” To embrace hope is not a sentimental matter but one of fidelity to our calling. Like it or not, hope is central to the work itself; as educators (and even parents) every day we show up, as tired as we may be, we are bound to the promise of possibility.
This obligation reflects the invisible contract that many of us as educators enter, with one generation supporting the next and fostering its hope. As James Baldwin so powerfully said in an interview with Mavis Nicholson in 1987, “I can’t afford despair. I can’t tell my nephew, my niece—you can’t tell the children there’s no hope.” Baldwin’s words live within me; indeed, they have shaped the trajectory of my life. Baldwin’s steady insistence reframes hope as something far more than a private feeling, and it expands into the future and becomes a generational responsibility. In this sense, hope is pedagogical: it ripples outward, shaping not only what we ourselves believe is possible, but also what the next generation dares to imagine.
Practicing Hope and Imagining Futures
Recently, I listened to the audiobook Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. While the book itself invites debate, its opening vision has stayed with me. Klein sketches a utopian vision for 2050—a future of literal abundance, possibility, and transformation, one that, quite candidly, I had never allowed myself to imagine within my own lifetime.
What struck me most was not the specifics of that imagined world, but the very act of imagining itself. To envision a future so radically different from the present is, in its own way, an act of resistance against despair. It insists that the limitations of our current systems are not immutable, and that the audacity to picture something better can ignite and sustain hope. In my teaching and curricular work, I want to invite students into this same practice: to see sustainability not simply as crisis management, but as the creative work of imagining new ways of living, relating, and thriving together.
At Dominican we are proudly creating space for such sustainable inspiration. Last year, my colleague Dr. Allyson West and I worked to register our campus greenhouse as a site for service-learning, an opportunity we desperately needed, as our students don’t always have reliable transportation for off-campus opportunities, despite an eagerness to volunteer. In the coming year, we hope to welcome more volunteers, classes, and student groups into our greenhouse to shape the Earth, quite literally. In offering these on-campus experiences, I hope students find moments of restoration for the work ahead.
Teaching as Social Action
To prepare for my own curricular development work, I traveled to Notre Dame last month to participate in the Teaching as Social Action Institute. To date, more than 350 faculty from 238 institutions have applied and taken part in this initiative. Most importantly, the participating faculty members have agreed to empower their students to imagine, design, and ultimately claim ownership of their change campaigns. In contrast, while I have written here about my own curricular work in social action, I must acknowledge this territory is new for me. In past semesters, I’ve worked from the bottom-up, first reaching for the “lowest hanging fruit.” Truth be told, while I am looking forward to a larger transformation of our curriculum, I still find genuine pedagogical value in modest wins.
These smaller-scale social action curriculum projects chip away at the pervasive cynicism students are now bringing with them to the classroom. Each small victory carries with it a powerful reminder: Please, don’t give up yet. Systems can change. And in a moment when national indicators show declining trust in institutions (a metric that has fallen steadily since 2019) this kind of hope, grounded in lived experience, is not simply encouraging but essential—for the students, and frankly, for me.
Help from Others
So no, we will not find hope in the headlines. But I know we can find it in our hallways, in our classrooms, and most especially in the hearts of our students. They, like us, are weary and exhausted, but they keep showing up.
Later this fall, our annual Caritas Veritas Symposium at Dominican will feature undergraduate students sharing their sustainability experiences from their alternative break immersions, their use of En-ROADS climate simulation software, and internships that offer a front-seat view of global climate crisis in our own backyard. Every panel will be grounded in our students’ real-world experiences of envisioning new possibilities and choosing hope.
As Wadell reminds us, “Perhaps surprisingly, we become most fully ourselves when we focus, not on ourselves (through lives of careful calculation and strategic self-promotion), but on something greater than ourselves.” In this light, hope swells and uplifts those who bravely and relentlessly turn outward toward each other and toward our future. It’s here, in community, that we become the best version of ourselves and the world we dare to imagine.
Christine Wilson is currently a visiting instructor at Dominican University in River Forest, IL, where she teaches in the core curriculum and the English department. Her classroom work was recently published in Dynamic Activities for First-Year Composition (NCTE, 2023). In addition to her teaching roles, she also serves as the transitions faculty co-director and volunteers as chair of the sustainability committee. In this capacity, she spearheaded the university’s partnership with the Chicago Transit Authority, expanding access to affordable public transportation for hundreds of students. Her many vocations include parenting three young children and serving as a school volunteer and sustainability advocate. For other posts by Christine, click here.