Teaching Otherwise

Teaching Otherwise

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Futuring as Inquiry: What It Means to Treat the Future as a Question

Essays & Reflections

Futuring as Inquiry: What It Means to Treat the Future as a Question

As a mode of inquiry, a way of engaging with uncertainty that is rigorous, ethical, and genuinely transformative. We're calling it futuring as inquiry, and it's been reshaping how I think about what futures literacy actually demands of us as educators.

Room in the Bag of Stars: The Carrier Bag Theory of Management Education

Room in the Bag of Stars: The Carrier Bag Theory of Management Education

What's In Your Bag? I'm carrying two bags today. A Rough Trade tote with my planner, journal, pens, washi tape, stickers, headphones, a book, water bottle. And a large black leather tote with my laptop, keys, purse, clicker, and an embarrassing number of forgotten receipts, browning

Playing Our Way to Different Futures: Climate Play and the Pedagogy of Building

Playing Our Way to Different Futures: Climate Play and the Pedagogy of Building

I've just spent two days building with Lego. Climate Play uses LEGO Serious Play methodology, a facilitated process where you think with your hands, build metaphorical models, and tell the story of what you've made.

Mapping Joy: A Cross-Institutional Experiment in What Makes Learning Come Alive

Work in Progress

Mapping Joy: A Cross-Institutional Experiment in What Makes Learning Come Alive

LJMU's Curriculum Enhancement Internships scheme is funding four student interns to spend six months mapping joy in teaching.

When HR Education Becomes World-Making: Introducing Relational Futuring

When HR Education Becomes World-Making: Introducing Relational Futuring

Because HR education shouldn't just prepare people for the future of work — it should help them imagine the work of the future.

Nothing Makes Itself: Thinking with Haraway's Challenge to "One"

Essays & Reflections

Nothing Makes Itself: Thinking with Haraway's Challenge to "One"

A reflection on sympoiesis and what it means to think without bounded individuals "Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing." This simple statement from Donna Haraway's chapter on sympoiesis carries a radical challenge that keeps unfolding the more I sit with it. It'

When Media Meets Ethics: Designing Assessment That Lives in the Real World

When Media Meets Ethics: Designing Assessment That Lives in the Real World

A field note on building a portfolio approach that asks students to develop ethical analysis through cultural engagement—not just case studies I'm launching a new assessment this term for Ethical Practice and Behaviours with my second year HRM students, and it builds directly on my earlier thinking

Zines, Podcasts, and Pedagogies of Possibility

Essays & Reflections

Zines, Podcasts, and Pedagogies of Possibility

Explore media-making as sense-making pedagogy: how students creating podcasts, zines, and videos develops collaborative knowledge creation.

Teaching Otherwise in the Business School: Trends That Need Disruption

Essays & Reflections

Teaching Otherwise in the Business School: Trends That Need Disruption

UK business schools optimise for metrics, not imagination. Teaching Otherwise calls for disruption: creative pedagogy, futures literacy, and ethical learning.

Exploring Workplace Diversity on Screen: Tracing Representation Through Media

Teaching Materials

Exploring Workplace Diversity on Screen: Tracing Representation Through Media

A teaching practice using film and TV to explore how workplace diversity is represented across time.

From The Office to The Circle: Reading Workplace Culture Through Popular Media

Essays & Reflections

From The Office to The Circle: Reading Workplace Culture Through Popular Media

Analyse workplace culture through popular media. From The Office to The Circle, learn how films and TV reveal changing workplace ideologies and what alternatives might be possible.

When Management Education Gets Its Hands Dirty: Reading Dallyn et al on Compost, Critique and Care

Essays & Reflections

When Management Education Gets Its Hands Dirty: Reading Dallyn et al on Compost, Critique and Care

Most sustainability teaching in business schools operates within "corporate sustainability solutionism"—we tick boxes about the SDGs while the house burns. Dallyn et al offer something different: literal compost bins as curriculum, connecting students with soil and the slow work of decomposition.

Field Note: Summer Expansions

Field Note: Summer Expansions

The term is over. Now comes this different time - not exactly rest, but expansion. I've been carrying fragments all year - ideas that sparked during workshops, questions from conversations, provocations from reading. Summer lets me spread these fragments out, see what connects.

Values Discovery Session: From Objects to Action

Teaching Materials

Values Discovery Session: From Objects to Action

Students discover priorities through physical objects, then use assessment tools and group work to build ethical decision-making skills.

Field Note: Sustainability Mindset Indicator Reflections

Field Note: Sustainability Mindset Indicator Reflections

Understanding the Sustainability Mindset The Sustainability Mindset Indicator (SMI) assesses how we think, feel, and act in relation to our planetary moment. Rather than measuring knowledge about environmental issues, it explores the deeper patterns of consciousness that shape how we engage with complexity, uncertainty, and our interconnected challenges. At its

Nature Walk for Environmental Connection

Teaching Materials

Nature Walk for Environmental Connection

Spend the entire session outdoors helping students develop genuine connection to the environment. This practice grounds students in place to understand why sustainability matters through felt experience rather than abstract concepts.

Visual Collaging for Complex Thinking

Teaching Materials

Visual Collaging for Complex Thinking

Using magazine images and collaborative collaging to explore complex concepts through visual thinking. Reveals insights that analytical writing might miss, allowing students to hold complexity without immediate resolution. Works for any subject.

Authority Redistribution

Teaching Materials

Authority Redistribution

Deliberately shift classroom power by giving students real authority over learning. Four methods for redistributing traditional teaching authority while maintaining goals. Students experience having their knowledge valued as legitimate.

Story From an Image

Teaching Materials

Story From an Image

Simple creative practice for any classroom: students choose an image, create a story, share insights. Surfaces existing knowledge through collaborative storytelling. No wrong answers, any subject.

Small Stands, Big Questions

Essays & Reflections

Small Stands, Big Questions

I've stopped waiting for permission to teach differently. Working in the cracks means finding small spaces within institutional constraints where different relationships to learning become possible.

The Opening Question

Teaching Materials

The Opening Question

Replace your usual session opening with a "what if" question tied to your topic. This is a fundamental reframing of the learning relationship. You're positioning students as capable of imagining alternatives rather than passive recipients of existing knowledge.

Teaching Otherwise: A Manifesto

Essays & Reflections Featured

Teaching Otherwise: A Manifesto

Business schools speak responsibility fluently enough to pass any audit. We polish our mission statements in the language of sustainability and inclusion. We run workshops on values, ethics, and wellbeing. Yet trace these promises backwards and the same old logic hums beneath: growth is good, care is compliance, critique is