Waiting before hoping: an educational approach to the experience of waiting

Abstract

Waiting has traditionally been defined as the interval of time between the anticipation of an event and its occurrence. From an educational perspective, we usually believe that it is not the wait that is important, but the attitude of the individual who is waiting. It is for this reason that, while we can barely find any educational research that addresses waiting, there is a prolific production relating to hope; that is, relating to one of the possible attitudes that someone may have while waiting. This paper, contrary to this trend, aims to highlight, on the one hand, the educational importance that waiting has in itself and, on the other hand, the need to take it into account before addressing any attitude that an individual may show in relation to it. To do this, we will first distinguish between two different ways of waiting, one in which the individual is aware of the objective of the wait and another in which they are not aware of any objective. Secondly, we will analyze each of them separately and point out to what extent our world today is trying to force us to reduce our experience to just one of them. Finally, we will conclude that there is an educational need to experience both if we want to educate open minds capable of dealing with hope-inspiring attitudes in different ways.