Casting Hope as the Lead in Higher Ed With Dr. Jessica Riddell

Full Transcript

Dr. Emma Zone:
Do you think that higher ed institutions are in the business of hope? And if so, how are they doing? I’m Dr. Emma Zone. And today, I’m joined by the founder of Hope Circuits Institute, professor and author, Dr. Jessica Riddell, who is on a mission to help institutional leaders infuse elements of hope in higher ed. In this episode, we learn how hope can profoundly impact teaching and learning and beyond.

Speaker 2:
Welcome to Teach and Learn, a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L. Each week we’ll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K to 20 space. Sharpen your pencils. Class is about to begin.

Dr. Emma Zone:
So, hi, Jessica. I am so thrilled to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s my favorite topic to talk about.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Well, I know when we chatted just a few weeks ago, I was just completely enthralled by your work. I know we will talk about all sorts of things here in our time together. But I have to ask just getting a bit about your background and learning more about you and digging in. You are an award-winning English professor and you teach early modern literature at Bishop’s University in the province of Quebec in Canada.

And so, these seem too related, but in some ways not so related concepts, this idea of early modern literature and then also this notion of this hope work. So, I have to ask, how did the concept of hope really come into take center stage in your work?

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
I love that center stage. As a Shakespearean, I love that and all the world is a stage. And Shakespeare really believed that, that the theater was a place where we could work out some of the big sticky, wicked problems of our day by just stepping to the side a little bit, by looking from the side eye, by looking at it from a world that has created over three hours in real-time, in real bodies with the spectators and actors creating this world.

So, in many ways, all the world’s a stage. So, we are all actors who play our parts, which he reminds us of all of the time. Even the theater itself is called The Globe, which is a microcosm for our larger society. And so, I think it’s funny, I’ve never been asked what my origin story though of hope is. And I was thinking about it today as I was coming into this conversation and I think that I’m late to the hope game.

I think I started with a kind of earnestness and wonder and curiosity, especially through theater. And then I got to hope because I needed more than just virtues or values. I needed a mindset. And so, it seems counterintuitive, but I came to hope the more I encountered despair. And so, I had to figure out how to sit in this world to figure out where my agency was, where my communities were, how to move in this world to make it better, to challenge it, and to center justice and equity and inclusion and all sorts of things like joy and pleasure that Shakespeare teaches us, but we don’t often hear about in the esteemed halls of the academy.

Dr. Emma Zone:
I love that. And that notion of being an antidote to despair as well as we will explore in this conversation. And after reading your book, it’s not just a concept, but hope, it also is action-oriented. And I think that’s the part that I really found to be empowering as I have begun to lean into the work that you’ve been doing and certainly excited to hear more.
So, as our listeners are tuning in and thinking of their own concepts around hope, can you talk about how you define it, how you define hope and this notion of a hope circuit and what that actually means?

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
Thank you. Hope is for me a verb. As you said, it’s something that you anchor and practice, to just hope without putting it into the world in your everyday encounters is to hope in vain. One of my favorite philosophers, Ira Shor, wrote a book called When Students Have Power. And he defines hope as challenging the actual in the name of the possible.

So, there are many different ways to come at hope. But when I started to ask people what they thought about hope in their own context, in their own worlds, that’s how I started to write this book is I just started to reach out on Zoom and rumble on this concept of hope. It was so funny about how hope triggers different kinds of responses in people, even the most positive change agents were suspicious or at least reticent to call themselves hopeful, because hope is often dismissed. It’s dismissed as Pollyanna-ish. It’s dismissed as idealistic. It’s dismissed, it’s feminized and infantilized.

And so, lots of folks that I would really see as hope warriors, as agents of hope, we’re alienated from the very word, from the very concept that they were enacting in their everyday practice. And so, part of this book and part of this project is to rehabilitate hope. To say actually hope is not airy-fairy. It’s not made of whispers and spiderwebs. It is badass. It’s unruly. It’s dynamic. It is hard hope work. It requires a robustness and a muscularity that we can develop intentionally, deliberately, and in conversation with one another.

So, that notion of hope has to be robust enough to stand up against the cynics, the realists, the people who say, “Well, that’s nice over there, but we’re doing the real work of rationality and reason.” And I don’t think that’s working for us anymore. I don’t think that bludgeoning hope with cynicism is serving any of us, and it’s certainly not getting us to a place where we are centering some of those qualities of joy, pleasure, despair, grief, that are all part of a larger and expansive definition of hope for me.

And I think that’s where Hope Circuits came in. That Hope Circuits has to be large enough to encompass the grief and the rage and the anger and disorientation that many of us are experiencing working in broken systems. And it is not the opposite of hope, but is in fact, part of a circuit. It’s iterative. So, as I said, when I encountered hope, the more I developed hope was in direct relationship to the more I encountered despair.

So, every time I howled into the abyss and wrote my friend a text saying, “This is why we can’t have nice things or ran into brick walls in our efforts to create more hospitable and humane systems, that despair has to be part of the feedback loop. It has to be part of the circuit.” And so, that gave me a language and it also gave me a blueprint to do this work in the everyday. And that change work, that earnestness, that curiosity requires a robustness to underpin it or else we will all burn out, disengage and hide under the covers.

And for anyone listening, I have to tell you that I schedule hide under the cover time in my week, and I guard that time and I create that space, because I know that in any meaningful change work, we also need the howling, the despairing and the rest in order to get back up and to the hard hope work that is in front of us.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yes. I think that’s so true. And the notion too, when I hear circuit, I think of the cyclical nature of that and just how it, in my mind, gives me a visual of an ecosystem around hope as well. But I think to your point, when people maybe first hear the word, they do think of it as being weak, feminine, powerless, a Pollyanna kind of nice to have, but certainly isn’t pushing us to anything greater or bigger.

But in reality, true hope, at least what I’m seeing, especially as I’ve been reading your work, takes so much courage and persistence and grit and a lot of hard emotions. And so, it can be a “both and.” And I think for some people that might be a little bit of a different way to think about the word and even the concept of creating a system around hope, whether it’s a higher education institution or any other organization.

So, you have said that hope in higher education go hand in hand. But I also just heard you say we’re at a point where maybe there’s a lot of really hard things happening. So, can you say a little bit about that?

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
Yes. And I love your “both and,” because that is where we need to sit. We need to sit in acknowledging that the systems are broken and the systems are working exactly the way they’re designed. That we were called to this work in education because we are hopeful, because we are committed to the belief that something different is possible, that we can transform into a better version of ourselves and a better version of our communities and society. So, that is hopeful.
Hopeful is future-facing. Hope lives as a cognitive behavior in future-facing spaces that something different is possible. And that together and on our own, we can figure that out. And we are working within these systems, inheriting broken systems that were made, built on mystification and exclusion that are purposely opaque, that we find difficult to navigate and therefore to change.

And our systems are really built to be resilient rather than to center human and ecological flourishing. So, we sit in these spaces where resilience, if you go back to the etymology of resilience, the Latin root is to recoil. So, if you think about something springing back, if you pull it from its status quo or its dominant form and you try to move it in different kinds of spaces, a resilient system is one that snaps back to status quo.

So, we are living and working within resilient systems that are designed to recoil, and lots of people who are trying to make the systems better and more humane, more just, more inclusive, are getting caught in that recoiling. And it’s a “yes and.” We come to this work and we get up every morning and get out of bed because we believe that something different is possible, because we believe in transformation, because we believe that we can learn together in better ways.

And we also have to get out of bed in the morning to confront systems. And our exhaustion is a sign that those systems are working. Our exhaustion is a sign that those systems are resilient. And it is really hard to hold those to both ends without breaking apart. But we need to introduce them into language. We need to think about them. We need to use them as a decision-making tree in every meeting, every decision, every encounter that we have, and sit in the grace and messiness of what feels like a paradox, but is in fact the world and the ecosystem that we’re operating and trying to flourish within.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yes. Well, and I think when you talk about the systems being broken, I mean you have lots of different examples throughout your work. Obviously, marginalized people who haven’t had a voice or had a seat at the table, what that means, I think even more so in terms of the exhaustion, huge part of the conversation. Even I think about my own role as a woman who’s been in technology-led experiences for the better part of her career, and that has some interesting dynamics as well.

Even just technology integration within the education system overall, that is a system that is often hard to make any change through because the system as you’re describing has been, first and foremost, created to be strong and resilient and not always something that we can penetrate. We know that there are ways, but it can be really exhausting. So, I think even validating that there’s a reason you feel this way. So, I think that’s so important.

So, talking about this idea of the urgent times that we are in, because I think, gosh, whether we look at this as this permacrisis an urgent time, we’re always going through something. But I do think we’re at a really interesting inflection point in terms of people even talking about the value of education, of post-secondary learning, what that means, and this is happening globally, not just in the US or in Canada. It really is something that I think people are questioning what is the value of education and where are we going with this?

There was a talk that you recently did at the University of Prince Edward Island, and you had a quote by a Nigerian poet who I will probably mispronounce the name, so I’ll leave that to you. But I’d love for you to speak on this quote, which is the times are urgent, we must slow down. Because I think that just completely struck me, just obviously, it’s language-based, I’m an English major by trade, so it’s like, “Oh, my gosh. This is such an awesome juxtaposition.” But say more about this quote and what you spoke to in that particular talk.

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
I love that it rewired your brain, because it did when I first encountered it. I say that it changed or rearranged the furniture in my brain. And literally, I came across that phrase and thought, “Oh, my goodness.” I understand that first part of the phrase. The times are urgent. As you said, we’re living in times of permacrisis. We’re living in times where we’re lurching from one thing to the next. Senior administrators are constantly talking about their roles as running from one fire to another. They’re constantly in emergency mode.

But we still treat crisis as a flaw rather than a feature. We don’t treat it as something that’s inevitable. We treat it as, “Oh, no. Here’s another thing. Let’s all run over here and try to fix it.” And I’m very guilty of that. If there is a crisis, I will work harder, work longer, strike taskforces, build coalitions, and that is my default response. And I think that’s a default response for many of us working in broken systems with fewer and fewer resources living within narratives of scarcity and crisis and lack and loss.

So, that second part of this sentence, let us slow down, is asking us to do the opposite of what our default is, and just pausing for one minute to say, “Is my default response still serving me the work, the community, or is something different possible?” Now, sometimes the default response is exactly the response because we’ve been trained, we have lived experience, we understand complexity, we’ve been there before and we can do this meaningfully and quickly.

And sometimes the default response is something that we have built in survival mode that is not centering different kinds of qualities that are needed right now. And so, that slow down, pause, just wait for a minute, surface the systems, see what is within your sphere of control and influence. And ask yourself, “What would your opposite response be?” And I do that all the time, and sometimes it leads to such meaningful new ways of being in the world that I get to rewire those default responses in authentic, thoughtful, reflective ways.

And it doesn’t have to be paralyzed in a moment, not act for a month and hide under the covers, although I understand the impulse for that in times of crisis. But it is pausing in the busyness of business just for a moment, just to surface your response, to be attentive to it, to invite it in to your conversation and then ask, “Is something different possible?”

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yes. I think that’s so great. I see so many connections to leadership in this in terms of decision-making and response. And you saying reflection is exactly where my mind went, reflective leadership, reflective teaching. This notion around we have to be taking action in order to be improving, where in reality there may be and probably is value in also stepping back and asking some reflective questions that may be, as you’ve just said, the opposite or even saying to oneself, “If I had more time, what would I do instead? Or what would I consider that I might feel that I don’t have the time to consider right now?”

Just to at least put the menu of options on the table. Because I do think there’s a culture around decision-making where, “Oh, you’re a definitive decision-maker.” That’s also a very masculine concept in a lot of ways that we could go down that rabbit hole, too. But I mean, it’s interesting how we’re thinking about these different concepts being related to hope as well.
And so, I love that, this notion of we do have to have the opportunity to slow down. And I think it is a systems issue, having been in a higher ed administration role in my own career, there is this interesting push and pull with the notion of time and reflection. But I think back to great moments that I’ve seen that educators have had, that other leaders have had. And it often is when there is enough time for that reflection and collection of information and data and evidence. And then, okay, now let’s make a change based on XYZ. So, super, super interesting.

Let’s talk a little bit about the work that you did prior to the pandemic with your colleague, Dr. Lisa Dickson and Dr. Shannon Murray, wrote this wonderful book called Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning. Again, love that as former high school English teacher here. And so, I think the opening of this episode is so spot on because it’s completely related to this work as well.
But how did you come to that particular concept? I mean, obviously, there’s so many different elements we could explore with Shakespeare, as you said, especially how modern it is even now. But why hope, life, and learning? And tell us a little bit about that book and really what you wanted readers to get out of it.

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
Thank you. So, I often introduce myself even in spaces where I’m working with boards and senate, senior leadership teams in systems rewiring. I introduced myself as a Shakespearean both in training and in disposition. So, I see the world through the lens of Shakespeare. And I’ll often be in a conversation about something as precise as the provincial funding model that is broken or a systems rewire at a policy or statutes level and say, “Do you know there’s a Shakespeare for this? There is a moment. There is an encounter. There’s a character. There’s a soliloquy. There is a pool play about this moment or about this complex issue.”

And so, the three of us writing together was actually very accidental, but very Shakespearean as well where we had been writing as Shakespeare scholars. And I don’t know if you’ve picked up a peer-reviewed journal article about a Shakespeare play recently. I recommend it for anybody who is suffering from insomnia. I should not say that. There are some beautiful, beautiful contributions. But often the jokes, the messiness, the bawdiness of Shakespeare is excised from the scholarship.
You sound rigorous and scholarly. This is across the board. This is not just related to Shakespeare studies. But we dismember ourselves often from the very thing that called us to this work.
Shakespeare is funny and wickedly complex and resists one answer or one interpretation, and yet our scholarship doesn’t mirror that kind of earnestness wonder and curiosity.

So, I had gotten to a point in my career where I had stopped loving the scholarship, stopped loving the research, was really committed to the classroom, and the classroom is a space of collective sense-making of co-creation. But I wasn’t really sounding like myself in my research. And I ended up at a conference with these two other wonderful Shakespeareans who were also feeling some despair about their relationship to their research.
And we found ourselves on a bus going to a museum in Vancouver, and we started to say the quiet things out loud that the thing that we loved that we were called to in the first place was where we were feeling so alienated from the work. And we decided in that moment to start saying things out loud that sounded like us.
And so, it took us five years to write this book, Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning. But the first prompt was what do we do where we sound like ourselves and what do we do when we sound like ourselves in conversation with Shakespeare, the classroom, the theater, and a civil society, a creative democracy? So, what does the ecosystem of a classroom and a theater and a creative democracy have in common?

And they all have very, very important things in common. They give us an opportunity to co-create. They ask us to create in real-time that the theater is not something that happens to you. It happens with you and through you the same way as a classroom does. And the same way as a creative democracy. We all have to show up. We all have to participate. We all have to engage. We all have to do meaning making, not in isolation, but together.

And so, that book is really giving those design principles to exercise the muscles of critical hope, critical empathy, and critical love that we have to show up and we have to engage and we have to make meaning together.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yes. In our community. I love that. And your community might shift. But how interesting that the concepts transcend particular definitions around those different communities. I think that’s really just insightful. So, then not long after you began writing Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Organizations for Human Flourishing.

And this summer I was at our Fusion conference headed to a session and somebody just thrust the book into my hands and said, “Emma, you have to read this book.” So, let’s talk a little bit about this work. I have a few different questions. You described this book as a love letter to universities and as a thought leadership manifesto. So, say more. How is this a love letter to universities?

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
The Shakespeare book talks about critical love and talks about the fact that we … Critical love means that we love somebody not despite their imperfections, but because of them. And we see that in Lear where Cordelia knows that her father only ever slenderly knew himself, was probably a bad dad and not a great king, but still shows up and is absolutely devoted to him not gaslighting herself or others. Recognizing the imperfection is also a way to access deeper love.

That is my relationship to higher education, candid, clear-eyed, real and loving this institution, this public purpose, social mission-driven institution, because of its imperfections, because of its messiness, because of its inconsistencies, and because I believe that we can challenge the actual and the name of the possible.

And so, this love letter, I’ve read hundreds of books about higher education and almost all of them are damning indictments that with forensic precision show us everything is wrong with higher education. Our funding models are broken, our classrooms are broken, our pedagogy is old, our public purpose is diluted. We can’t get out of our own ways. So, the love letter is a response to something different as possible, a different quality of engagement is possible, and we must be able to invite rather than to indict.

And this book is an invitation for people to see themselves not in a negative light, not in a critical light, although I’m spicy in my love letter. It is a very candid overview of things that are really problematic, and yet it is asking a “yes and” question rather than a “no but” question. And that for me is an essential part of that love letter that we are all part of this beautiful, flawed, imperfect enterprise, and we’re all part of its solution.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yeah. 100%. You talk a lot in the book and you unpack the notion of critical hope. And there’s a few pieces that stand out that I want to dig in on. You note that critical hope understands complexity and discomfort as a necessary transformation process and hold space for candid and uncomfortable conversations as a way forward.

So, can you say more about this relationship between hope and transformation? And I think that was particularly important as I have been reading and was reading this because I see so much around these conversations as we’re thinking about, again, innovation and pushing people as they’re thinking about whether it’s teaching practice or evidence-based instruction using a new pedagogical approach, andragogical approach, technology solution, you name it.

I mean, in the conversations that I’m having around teaching and learning, it can be lots of different things. Program models, it’s all different things. I see so much relationship to this. But I think there is often a lot of discomfort around transformation. And maybe part of it is we’re not slowing down enough, as we talked about just a minute ago with that other quote, to give people the space to be able to work through what can be painful about transformation.

So, would love a little bit more insight into that, in particular. And I think the other piece that you make a point of right after that quote is that we also can’t forget that this is also heightened for our marginalized populations. And this is me fully sitting in my own privilege saying that. So, would love how you’ve been navigating some of those conversations in the thought process around this relationship between hope and transformation.

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
Thank you. It is informed by some of the work that I did starting in pedagogy. So, systems change for me, and this is a bit audacious, is grounded in pedagogical principles. So, I come from a teaching and learning space into systems thinking and design thinking at an institutional and sector-wide level.

And that means that I’m informed by theories like transformative learning. So, Meyer and Land talk about threshold concepts, and they talk about an individual who starts at one point and then goes through transformation through an interstitial space, an in-between space where they have to experience disorientation, they reconstitute themselves not just at a knowledge level, but at an identity level that a feature of crossing a threshold is cognitive dissonance and discomfort.
And that when you get to the other side, you don’t know what the other side looks like until you get there and reflect back. And sometimes you are the less likely to recognize your own transformation that you’ve just gone through, which is why you need mentors and other guides to help you work through what just happened, to tease it out, to understand what that cognitive dissonance did, how you metabolized it.

And then we know that people, when they’ve transformed, actually the best way to identify that is through their language, their relationship to language, their discursive relationship to the world changes. So, we talk about that in transformative learning as individuals on these learning journeys.
And I think about it in my own early modern perspective of an errant knight or a virago who is given a quest and then has to go on this messy journey that is nonlinear and mess up a bunch of times and end up in the cave of error and gets tricked by a bunch of people and needs to be saved by a fairy queen or a wise hermit before coming back, fulfilling the quest and then telling the story about the fulfillment of this quest at a feast back in communal spaces.

So, we talk about that. We know that that happens with our individual learners. We know that happens in students’ journeys. But it also happens to us in community. It also happens to us as organizations, and it’s also happening to us as organizations. And yet we erase the very points of our transformation when we pass over the discomfort and move into narratives of toxic positivity where everything’s going to be fine. We’re just going to get through this. This is a rough patch. We’re going to build back better. We’re just going to get gritty. We’re just going to try hard enough.

All of these narratives are so, so predominant and the change that is happening to us in communities, departments, divisions, curriculums, programs, all the way out, those cascading and ever-expanding circles in our ecosystems. And what I challenge folks to do, whether we’re sitting at boards, whether we’re doing strategic planning, whether we’re working with senior leadership teams, is to understand that discomfort is a feature, not a flaw.

To sit with that, to stay with the trouble, as you said, to pause long enough for that to surface the systems and then to ask, “What do we need to do next? What are the interventions that we can do within our sphere?” Which means that every single one of us, when we do this work, we can do it individually, but we also have to do it in conversation and in encounters.

So, when I was, I’m almost finished Hope Circuits 2.0, and of course, I only realized what this project was in reflection, in hindsight, myself going through the interstitial space of transformation. And what I realized is that we have so many individual self-help books. We have almost no collective help books. And so, the Hope Circuit series are collective hope books.

What do we do, sense-making, that is in community with one another, understanding well-being as relational well-being, understanding that we need to figure this out and have conversations so that we can move in the same direction while still preserving our own individual and differentiated thinking and lived experience.

Dr. Emma Zone:
So true. And it’s funny thinking about the toxic positivity and thinking through the connections around transformation, and I’m going back to the notion of innovation as well. And also, what you said that it’s a spicy love letter. I think those words, this notion of innovation and transformation and pushing the envelope in terms of our teaching and learning technology and all these things, those in a lot of ways have become buzzwords that are very marketing-focused versus when people actually have to sit down and make those things happen, the system makes it very difficult for those changes to occur.

And you make note of that in the book as well, that oftentimes transformation and delight that those things are happening in spite of the systems that we’re in. And so, I think it’s a call. We’ll talk about calls to action toward the end. But for me, I’m thinking it’s such a call to action for leaders and those who do have some opportunity to think through how they’re making this work come to life at their own organization to recognize that we can’t say on one hand we’re focusing on innovation and we’re willing to take risks and try new things and try the new technology or try the new pedagogical approach or try the new program that might be a little bit different than what we’ve done in the past.

But then at the same time, not be willing to have tough conversations about where those things sit in the system on a daily basis. Because I don’t know, you probably know better than I do, but even in my own experience, I don’t think you can have both. You have to be willing to have those hard, difficult conversations, and also be willing to put it out there a little bit, to put it on the line a little bit and work through some of that.

And I recognize it’s not just one person, but that’s really hard. I just heard you allude to some of those conceptual tools. And in the book, you really do have this beautiful framing. And I think that’s what’s really unique about this book as well, that once you get through the introductory elements where you talk about the concepts and where the ideas came from, you then introduce these 10 conceptual tools that can also be taken as a menu as needed.

So, you allow, I think, a level of consumability around this work depending on what a person or institution or leader or educator, whoever’s reading it, particular situation is, and taking as needed. So, these conceptual tools become just in time for us versus sit down, read the book and then do something with it. It becomes much more organic than ever living and ever present, because of the way that the work was organized.

So, I know we don’t have a ton of time, but maybe just give a couple of examples of these conceptual tools and how that’s organized so people who are listening can get an idea of what to expect.

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
Thank you. Then that’s such a generous reading of those conceptual tools, which were built in conversation with over 300 folks. And I was really interested. I was writing a different book until I got into conversation and into community. And I was asking these incredible people, what gets them out of bed in the morning, what keeps them up at night and what gets them out of bed in the morning and how are they metabolizing this moment, which is full of disruption and uncertainty and horror and heartbreak.

Despair feels really monolithic right now. So, I wanted to know how they got out of bed and put one foot in front of the other. And from those conversations emerged these 10 conceptual tools. The first one is the time’s urgent, we need to slow down. So, that spoke to you from Bayo Akomolafe’s work, and it spoke to me. And that allows you then another conceptual tool is when you slow down long enough, you can surface the systems, so you can see around you what is otherwise invisible.

When we’re rushing from thing to thing or we’re navigating within systems that are designed for us, they’re invisible. Those statutes, structures, policies, procedures and practice are things that we are immersed in like we’re immersed in water. We don’t see them. And the importance is to surface those systems, to see them, to see them candidly and clear-eyed in order to then practice divergent thinking.

Another conceptual tool is we often run at the same problem straight on all the time. We run into these brick walls, we keep doing it, we keep thinking maybe it’ll be different next time. And the divergent thinking is to step to the side, is to think about a different disciplinary lens or even a metaphor or a different way of being in the world that takes us to the side and looks at a complex problem, holds it up to the light, turns it around, sees it from a different perspective, and then allows you to intervene, to take action.

So, divergent thinking, for me as a Shakespearean, is to use metaphor, is to use play, is to use storytelling. Another one of the conceptual tools is change your language, change the world. We unintentionally or intentionally tell stories all the time. We tell stories about how our day’s going. We tell stories about change. We tell stories about resistance. We tell stories about ourselves, our projects, our vision.

And what kinds of stories we’re telling shapes our reality. And so, if you change your language, you can change the world from as small as being attentive to the words that we use in idioms. So, my friend Susie Andrews in conversation one day said, we were talking about alignment of different projects, and she said, “Oh, Jessica, you’re feeding two birds with one seed.” Rewired my brain.
Because I thought, “Oh, wow. That changes the quality of killing two birds with one stone is violent and awful and toxic.” And it’s what we’re immersed in every day. So, what does it look like to change your language and then to tackle the dominant narratives of our time, which are built on lack and crisis and scarcity and a different story as possible. We can tell stories about abundance and joy and pleasure and is as intentional as changing your language.

So, those are a couple of the conceptual tools that I use every single day. And I had to write the book I needed to read because I’m not good at any of these things. It’s not intuitive for me. It’s not part of my default mode. And so, that circuit is what do you do to learn a second new response? And those conceptual tools, for me, I have to go back to almost every day and relearn them in an iterative process in order to get to a place that, for me, is focused on flourishing rather than resilience. So, how do you thrive instead of survive within broken systems?

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yes. And is that turning to the Hope Circuits Institute, as the founder of the Hope Circuits Institute, which we’ll leave more info for our listeners about that as well, is that then an extension of this work, these 10 conceptual principles? Is that where the action is also happening?

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
That is where this whole concept is mobilized. So, I wrote the book not to be the experts or the authority. I started this project because I wanted to start conversations. I wanted the book to be able to be put in the middle of a table and rumbled on, pulled apart, played with, adopted, and adapted to various ecosystems.

I needed us to start with some shared principles or at least shared vocabulary in order to go into universities and organizations and to see which conceptual tools are resonating. And how, when they’re confronting, whether it’s quality assurance, strategic visioning, governance, whether these messy problems can be unlocked through collective sense-making.

So, it is, I think, my purpose in life was not to write the book, but to take the book into communities, into ecosystems, to engage in collective sense-making, to allow for folks to sit around a table in circle and to have these big conversations that they might not otherwise have and certainly can’t facilitate on their own. And to bring me in and to do this work.

And I light up thinking about it because it is the greatest privilege to go in and hold space and to facilitate how people want to make sense of this moment and how we go from moment to mindset, not just as individuals, but as organizations. And then how do we build social movement?

So, if we agree that we should be centering, flourishing and purpose and justice and love, then what do we do? How do we get people to come along with us? And so, Hope Circuits 2.0 and 3.0 are about social movement building. But it really is when I go into senior leadership team retreats or I take boards and senates on joint retreats, or I go in and work with teaching and learning centers or faculty members or student representative councils, it’s sitting attentively, listening with an intention to transform, and then getting folks to co-create the blueprints that empower them as individuals and as a movement, as a group in order to make their institutions better, more humane, more human-centered.

So, that is my joy. And the Hope Circuits Institute, I’m traveling all over this fall. I’m at 13 universities and 7 organizations. But it is, there’s an urgency and an appetite to have these conversations, and it is such a pleasure to be in those spaces with these humans.
Dr. Emma Zone:
Well, and that’s the verb. You talked about hope being a verb. That’s the verb. There’s the action, because the book is the book and the words on a page, or however you’re reading it or listening to it. But that’s the action, that’s the community piece. So, I love that. We’re almost out of time. So, I would love to wrap up by asking you, what would you like our listeners to take away from this conversation, and is there a call to action that you want them to embrace?

Dr. Jessica Riddell:
So, I love collective sense-making. I think that we can’t figure this out on our own. We can’t figure this out in our own silos, in our own spaces. We need to gather folks around intentionally, safely, and bravely. I love the word that you used, courage. That courage, the heart in courage, courage is from that old French, that we have to have our hearts open. We have to sit in these spaces. We have to be willing to transform together.

And that the answers that we find have to be lived into together, that we have to gather people around, build shared vocabulary, live into some shared questions, think about what this means in our own ecosystems, and then mobilize it. So, whether that is a book club where we read communally. We often read individually. The book is meant to be read in community.

So, it’s meant to be read on your own and then to bring it into spaces. Adopt it as a book club, build collective sense-making, bring in folks who are going to ask you to think differently and then sit in that messy, emergent space where the answers that we have, the solutions that we need, we already have in our own communities. We have the brain trust and the bench strength to do this work. We just have to get into a room, gather with intention, rumble on some big beautiful ideas, show up as our full three-dimensional, imperfect, messy selves, and be willing to imagine what is possible together.

Dr. Emma Zone:
That’s amazing. What a great way to end. Thank you so much for being here. Please visit jessicariddell.com and order your copies of Shakespeare’s Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning, and Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Systems for Human Flourishing. And as she already mentioned, keep an eye out for some upcoming books, Hope Circuits 2.0: Blueprints for Human and Ecological Flourishing, and Unlocking Your Superhero Powers: Metaphors, Mentorship in the Marvel Universe.

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Resources Discussed in the Episode

• Hope Circuits Institute
• Publications