For teachers working near an unresolved conflict or a shifting political climate, hope is rarely a simple thing to offer. In collaboration with Euroclio (European Association of History Educators) we recently explored how history educators from 12 European countries perceive the role of hope in history education in relation to sensitive topics, peace and justice. When the future itself becomes unstable, does hope become harder to teach, or more necessary?
Some of the teachers came from countries such as Estonia and Poland, which have been engulfed in tensions with Russia ever since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Other teachers we spoke to hailed from Georgia, which also continues to experience tensions with Russia following the Russo-Georgian War in 2008 over the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions. These teachers must contemplate on a daily basis how to teach hope in the midst of these tensions.
Teaching in the Shadow of an Unstable Future
For teachers working in a context of polarization, ongoing conflict, and uncertainty, teaching active hope is a necessity, but difficult for many reasons. Elene, a history teacher from Georgia who we interviewed, described how it is hard to teach hope when your country is in constant struggle and tension with another country, in this case Russia. Still, she tries to give her students something to hold onto. “I talk a bit about hope, I want to share positive perspectives,” she said, “but sometimes it’s difficult to talk to them about hope and show positive perspectives. It’s difficult.”
Vasil, a university teacher also from Georgia, described a different instinct: to avoid naming hope directly at all, out of concern it might backfire. “Sometimes it seems that when we are talking about hope separately, it means that we are hopeless,” he said. Instead, he weaves hope into his lessons quietly, trusting students to notice the openings themselves without being told to.
This kind of quiet, careful navigation of sharing hope is not unique to Georgia. The teachers we studied from Estonia to Serbia to France, described similar instincts: hope offered too directly can feel hollow, or worse, can draw attention to despair rather than easing it.
How Teachers Actually Share Hope
So how do teachers share and discuss hope? Across the interviews, one pattern stood out: they rarely lecture students about hope. Instead, they tell stories. Some reach for well-known historical figures. An Italian teacher brings in Eleanor Roosevelt as someone who “made their life at stake… for a hope of liberty, of freedom.” Others prefer the stories of ordinary people as students can easily identify with them. Leida, from Estonia, favors accounts of people who, even in the grimmest circumstances, “find ways to survive, not becoming monsters.” And some turn to stories of resilience that feel almost impossible: Juliana, a Latvian teacher and museum educator, shares accounts of prisoners in Soviet-era KGB cells who, against the odds, “tried to maintain hope in a situation that was pretty desperate.”
The idea connecting these stories is simple: If people found ways to act, resist, and rebuild in the past, today’s students might recognise that same agency in themselves, even when their own future feels uncertain. As Hugo, a Dutch teacher educator, put it, teaching is “about making a change for the better in this world. And that they [students] can be that change.”
None of this comes without tension. Nearly every teacher we spoke to also pushed back against the idea that hope should be handed out freely. History isn’t always hopeful, and several worried that leaning too hard on uplifting stories risks distorting the truth of what happened.
“Hope cannot be just beautiful words without anything to support them,” said Aika, an 85-year-old Finnish teacher with over six decades of experience. Maria, a Polish teacher educator, put it even more plainly: when the facts and a hopeful theory don’t line up, “we change the theory, not the selected facts.”
This is the balancing act teachers described again and again: As historians, they owe students an honest account of the past, while as pedagogues, they want students to leave the classroom still believing a peaceful and just future is possible. The two roles don’t always sit comfortably together, and most teachers told us they’d received no training on how to navigate the tension. Hope, it turns out, isn’t really part of teacher education anywhere.
Teaching and sharing hope was never about promising students a good outcome. It was about giving them evidence, through stories of people who resisted, endured, and rebuilt before them, that the future is not already written, and that they still have a part to play in it. Hope is not passive, but active and we all share the responsibility to act and strive for peace.
Keywords: peace, future, hope, teaching, future, uncertain, lessons, Estonia, Georgia, Russia, Poland, conflict, Ukraine, invasion, conflict resolution, peace education, education, teachers, history, classroom
Bjorn Wansink is an associate professor at educational science at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His research interests center on civics and history education, multicultural education, critical thinking, sensitive topics and peace education. He has worked as researcher and teacher trainer in different post-conflict societies.
Agata Kowalak is a recent master’s graduate from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She’s especially interested in educational sciences, especially focused on supporting educators and teachers. Her main areas of interest are peace education, education in (post)conflict regions, and the concept of hope. She is currently looking to continue her academic journey.