Goal

This line of inquiry seeks to respond to the following questions:
• What does it mean to hope or be hopeful without wishing/expecting something to transpire in the future?
• What does it mean to hope or be hopeful about that which is to arise in the future?
• In what ways can hope be cultivated within both contexts (present and future) using online adaptive learning technology and in a face-to-face setting?
• What assessment tools can be used to skillfully measure the successful cultivation of hope within both contexts (present and future) and within a multitude of modalities?
Through thoughtful investigation of these questions, this line of inquiry should result in:
• Applicable definitions of hope in both the present and future context that may useful to a variety of cultures and contexts.
• Meaningful and manageable strategies to cultivate hope using open source online adaptive learning technology and within face-to-face interaction.
• Useful ways to assess the cultivation of hope, so that its identification and meaning can be improved in a variety of contexts and cultures.

Opportunity

Today, those who once dreamed of a better life are no longer dreaming, and those who are surviving are finding survival increasingly difficult. As documented by VanderWheele (2017) and in agreement with van de Heuvel (2020), we posit that hope is a key missing facet of human flourishing and worthy of investigation. However, to understand hope in a global context, we must consider that hope can be future oriented or may also exist in the present state. This work will explore those variations, researching a mixture of strategies to cultivate hope and measure its presence.

Roadblocks

There are several roadblocks in exploring the cultivation of hope within a range of time contextualization as well as an assortment of face-to-face and online strategies. Below we list the most obvious challenges. There are/is:
• several definitions of hope (van de Heuvel, 2020) that could apply to various cultures and contexts.
• limited access to technology and internet connectivity.
• limited access to face-to-face learning opportunities during the pandemic.
• limited research on how varying definitions of hope can be successfully cultivated.
• challenges validating pre-existing inventories for assessing hope across cultures and within diverse contexts.

Breakthroughs Needed

It is unclear as to whether hope is a required characteristic for human beings to flourish. Scholars and spiritual leaders across the world, consider that, "When there is little else they [those who are surviving] can do, hope becomes essential" (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011, p. 60). As educators and researchers, we wake up every day fueled by hope. Every day we apply evidenced-based learning strategies with the hope that every single student we interact with will succeed. Hope, without being fully understood, defined, or measured may be essential to our survival or to successful innovation, but is it essential for our flourishing?
The breakthroughs we hope this line of inquiry will produce include:
• Expanding the definition of hope across present and future time orientations
• Developing a framework(s) for hope that is applicable across multiple cultures and contexts
• Developing ways to cultivate hope using open source adaptive learning technology for those who cannot access hope cultivation in a face-to-face context
• Developing ways to measure hope cultivation in diverse cultural settings
• Relating the expanded framework(s) for understanding hope to research on human flourishing

Key Indicators of Success

Year One:
• Agreed upon definition(s) of hope that apply to a variety of global cultures and context
Year Five:
• Strategies to implement hope cultivation using adaptive learning technology, as well as face-to-face
• Methodology to measure the impact of each strategy on hope cultivation, that privileges first-person, direct self-report experience of the one experiencing hope
Year Ten:
• Evidence based strategies to cultivate various definitions of hope, and their measurement tools are published; includes contextual and cultural frameworks for application as well as limitations
• Contextualization of human flourishing that integrates hope within various cultures

Additional Information

In van de Huevel's (2020) edited compilation of interdisciplinary research on hope, hope is characterized from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives. Hope can be a wishful hope outside one's own agency (Lybbert & Wydick 2018). Snyder, on the other hand defines hope as contingent on agency; a combination of three parts:1) goal-orientation, 2) visualization of pro-active pathways towards these goals, and 3) agency to act and progress on these pathways. Agency in the description of embodied hope differentiates hope from expectation and "endows hope with a degree of built-in resilience and frames the achievement of goals as a gain rather than as a potential loss that was avoided" (Lybbert &Wydick 2018, p. 10). In the context of inhabiting both the present without aspiration for the future, some scholars attest that in the present, love is our destiny. As such, they explain that our future hope lies in experiencing love in the now and doing so in all of its imperfect perfection. Wright call this the "epistemology of love" (Wright 2008, p. 72).
In this research, van de Huevel (2020) asserts that hope is a necessary component of human flourishing. However, it requires more research to understand what it is across cultures, how it can be developed, and how it can be assessed. It is possible that if hope is characterized as a present state, it could then be defined as the awareness of love's presence within the imperfect and the perfect. And in using this definition, cultivation strategies such as those leveraged to train attention regulation, openness, mindfulness, and consciousness (NAS, 2017; 2018) might develop a present state of hope. If so, then methodology employed to measure states of attention regulation, openness, mindfulness and conscientiousness might prove useful to human flourishing.
If hope resides in positive future goal orientation and the self-actualization to enact that positive future self, then strategies to cultivate positive goal-oriented behavior and measure it are plentiful (NAS, 2017: 2018). However, doing so in a way that can be contextualized to a variety of cultures requires exploration. Hope that is characterized as something more akin to belief, trust or faith in something that resides outside of one's agency also appears to be very contextually and culturally bound (van de Huevel, 2020).
In these definitions and methodologies, the strategies to cultivate them have largely been dependent on face-to-face interaction. Adaptive learning technology analyzes a student's performance in real time and modifies teaching methods based on that data. While many companies and researchers have explored the use of online adaptive learning technologies to cultivate crystallized intelligence or content specific knowledge such as math, limited research has explored whether adaptive online learning technology can be utilized to develop intrapersonal skills such as positive goal orientation, positive future self, reflective learning, or hope. Could online adaptive learning technologies, such as OnTask, cultivate various contextualization of hope?