Teach Youth Radio
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Hope Out of the Box
By Orlando Campbell

In this story, Youth Radio’s Orlando Campbell uses Barack Obama’s Presidential win as a point of departure for an exploration of hope—one of the strongest themes running through Obama’s campaign. Orlando doesn’t dwell so much on political rhetoric. Through interviews with other young people and scholars, he considers the complicated ways that hope can function in a whole range of contexts: family dynamics, teacher-student relationships, ancient Greek myths, social change efforts, and even the treatment of terminal disease. The story raises a poignant question: When can hope hurt?

Orlando: “Strong hopeful leaders can be huge inspirations and help us improve our lives.  But the hope that adults push onto us isn’t always realistic. Like when people have told me and my friends that getting a job would keep us out of trouble…When some of us got turned down time after time, we lost hope in the possibility of getting a legal job and in the people who preached to us it was possible.”

After finishing this story, which aired on NPR's Morning Edition, Orlando helped develop the lesson ideas you’ll find here. Please use these ideas as points of departure for learning in your own classrooms. You can also check out the story as it originally appeared on our website, where you'll find three additional interviews with hope experts, in case your students want to go further with this theme (scroll down to the "web extras"). Let us know what you come up with!

Standards Alignment

Subject: English
Reading for perspective
Evaluation strategies
Communication skills
Communication strategies
Applying knowledge
Evaluating data
Developing research skills
Participating in society
Applying language skills
Multicultural understanding

Subject: Social Sciences and Civics
Principles of democracy
Roles of a citizen
Civic life, politics, and government

Subject: Health and Science (with a little Math for good measure!)
Health promotion and disease prevention
Using communication skills to promote health
Science as inquiry
Personal and social perspectives

Lesson Ideas

Pre-Listening Activity
Before you play this story for your students, have them free-write on the subject of hope. Ask them to respond to the following prompts: What does hope mean to you? Describe one positive experience you’ve had with hope, and one negative experience. How have those experiences affected you in a lasting way?

Post-Listening Activity
After Orlando’s opening image of Pandora’s box, the first voices you hear in this story come from a series of young people defining what hope means to them. Have your students compare what they heard in the story with the first-person narratives of hope they wrote down before listening to the Youth Radio piece.

Language Arts

Pandora’s Box: Orlando begins his story with the myth of Pandora’s Box. Have your students do some research to learn more about this story and explore the questions it raises: Should Pandora be blamed for opening the box, when she was told not to, under any circumstances? Is curiosity a gift or curse? How does gender figure in this story, to the extent that Pandora—the first woman on earth—emerges as a symbol of desire, temptation and violation, but also the guardian of hope? After examining the “official” story with questions like these, invite your students to play with the narrative. Re-tell the Pandora story in a modern context, casting Pandora as a young person the same age as your students. What are the present-day forces of evil and suffering that would escape from the vessel she carries? What would the vessel be? What is Pandora like? Why does she open the box? What happens next? 

Images that Stick: The story has lots of powerful moments. When Rynesha chokes up while talking about her grandmother. When Quincy talks about putting his hand on the refrigerator and praying for food to come. When Dr. Spiegel talks about his cancer patient, being admonished by her husband for crying and making the cancer worse. Have your students closely examine these moments. What makes them powerful? It’s not always easy to draw out these kinds of images from interviewees. After reviewing Youth Radio’s interview tips (and also these from a writer who led a workshop in our newsroom), have your students pair off and interview each other on the subject of hope. Coach them on ways to draw out concrete, detailed images and stories from their interviewees, and then share those moments with the class.

Social Sciences and Civics

Track Records on Hope: President-elect Barack Obama staked his campaign on the intertwined concepts of hope and change. Now that he’s preparing to enter office, the US and world public will be watching closely, to see whether his administration can deliver on its promise. Have your students break into small groups and assign each a past US President from a key point in American history (e.g., the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement). Ask them to research what their assigned President promised the American people while running for office, and to what extent he was able to come through on those campaign commitments. How did those Presidents strive to maintain hope—in their leadership, in the future—in trying times? What strategies were successful, and which ones failed? What are the dangers of a President who does not follow through on his or her promises and plans for the nation?

Hope and Disappointment: Orlando shares his own contradictory experiences with hope. Sure, it can inspire people and help them improve their lives. “But the hope that adults push onto us isn’t always realistic,” Orlando says. Like when adults have told him and his friends that they can turn their lives around by getting a job, and then no one’s hiring. It can make young people lose hope in their own circumstances and in “the people who preached to us it was possible.” It’s striking that Orlando chooses the subject of employment in his discussion of hope and its counterpoints—disappointment and cynicism—given the current economic crisis and alarming rates of unemployment. Have your students examine media coverage of the current crisis, and look at the ways in which government officials, economists, policy-makers, and citizens are trying to keep Americans hopeful but also realistic about employment prospects in the present and future. What would your students say to their constituents, if they were in those leadership roles?

Health and Science

Hope Deferred: Orlando is interested in the long-term psychological effects for young people who are repeatedly promised hope, with no follow through. It’s something the social service sector in the United States is often criticized for: building up young people’s hopes through a short-term program or temporary relationship with a caring adult, but failing to sustain those resources for long enough, or deeply enough, to make a real difference in the life of a child. Have your students identify five youth service organizations in their community. Break the students into five groups, each assigned to one organization. Work together as a whole class to develop a brief list of questions through which the students can get a sense of how the organizations both inspire and sustain the hopes of young people they serve. After practicing in class, have one student from each group interview a spokesperson from their assigned organization. Share results.

Hope and Health: Orlando’s story hints at a relationship between the feeling of hope and the science of disease. Reflecting on the interview with Dr. Spiegel, now Orlando wants to know, “What parts of the brain does the feeling of hope stimulate?” Have your students see if they can find an answer to that question. To discover more about how hope affects health and human biology, have them listen to this interview with Dr. Jerome Groopman about his research on the anatomy of hope. Then revisit the scene Dr. Spiegel describes in the Youth Radio story—where one of his patients starts to cry, and her husband tells her to stop, or “you’ll make the cancer spread.” In light of the insights your students have discovered through their research and listening, how might the doctor in this scene respond to the patient’s tears, and the husband’s response?

Calculations: Is it possible to quantify how hope works in a person’s life? Does 1 hope – 1 hope = no hope? What other forces can multiply hope? What divides hope? What makes one hope greater than another hope? What does it take to prove hope? Is there such a thing as negative hope? Have your students propose a mathematical equation where hope is one variable, write it up on the board, have their peers try to “solve” it, and then explain what their equations mean.

Critical Media Literacy

Complicating Hope: As we’ve said, Obama ran on a campaign of hope. But what’s interesting is that if you listen closely to his speeches, he was always careful to contextualize his promise. Have your students watch and listen to his victory speech at the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008. Ask them to write down key phrases and passages where Obama makes reference to hope. As a full class, do a close textual analysis of how Obama modulates and complicates his message of hope. How does he respond to the people who’ve derided him for talking about hope? How does he distinguish hope from “blind optimism?” How does he characterize the relationship between hope, action, and responsibility?

Media Effects: At Youth Radio, we always hope that our stories will inspire audience responses, and this one certainly did, in comment streams from listeners who heard Orlando’s story on NPR and our own site. But there was one comment that especially stood out: “Dear Orlando,” someone wrote, “Thank you so much for the hope that you have given to me by your voice and your words in the commentary you did in 'Hope Out of the Box.' I have watched you grow all these years and have been hoping that you would become as incredible a person as I now see you becoming. You are truly an inspiration and I am so very sure that the weight you now help carry will become lighter with each step…” It was a message from one of Orlando’s relatives, revealing how youth media producers can touch not only distant audiences, but also their own families and communities, by sharing their stories. We highlight this comment not so much as a lesson idea, but to encourage you to have your students submit their stories to Youth Radio, so they, too, can reach audiences both far away and up close.

Meet the Commentator

Orlando Campbell AKA Roach Gigz is a hip-hop artist from the Bay Area. Born and raised in San Francisco, he currently resides in Oakland, CA. His group, B.I.G. (Roach Gigz and Lil 4Tay), has had their songs played on 106 KMEL and WILD 949 in a number of mix shows. The group produced their hit song “I Get It” at the old Youth Radio in Berkeley where Orlando used to take classes. He now splits his time touring with Atlantic artist Mistah Fab, preparing for his upcoming album, and working at the new Youth Radio building in Oakland. His commentaries have been featured on NPR’s Day To Day and Morning Edition, and on KQED and KALW.

Media Production Techniques

Check out these tips and guidelines for youth making media.   

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