About

I'm Sarah Williams. I'm a Senior Lecturer in HRM and Programme Manager for the MA in Strategic People Management and Practice at Liverpool John Moores University. I've been teaching in business schools for long enough to understand how they work, and long enough to be troubled by it.

Teaching Otherwise started because I needed somewhere to think out loud about what it means to teach differently inside institutions that weren't designed for it. Not a manifesto handed down from above, but a working document. A field notebook. Something honest about what actually happens in rooms when you refuse to separate care from rigour, or humanity from professionalism, or the future from the present.

My research sits across futures literacy, arts-based pedagogy, sustainable HRM, and the question of what joy and discomfort can tell us about learning when we pay attention to them. I lead Relational Futuring work with colleagues across institutions, co-lead on Athena Swan and PRME at LJMU, and I'm completing a DBA focused on sustainable HRM in UK business schools. Most of what appears on this site emerges from that work, tested in actual classrooms with actual students.

I'm interested in the cracks. The small interruptions in what passes for normal. The longer pause, the uncomfortable question left in the room, the assessment that asks something real rather than something safe. None of it is revolutionary on its own. But it accumulates.

About this site

Teaching Otherwise is organised around four themes, each one a different angle on the same question: what would management education look like if it took people, learning, and the world seriously?

Creative and Arts-Based Pedagogy — methods that ask students to make things rather than just analyse them, and why that distinction matters.

Futures Literacy and Radical Imagination — helping students engage with uncertainty rather than just prepare for it.

(Dis)comfort and Joy — what the feelings in the room can tell us, and what it costs to teach in a way that pays attention to them.

Taking the World Seriously — on the difference between teaching about sustainability and actually reckoning with it.

You'll also find Teaching Practices: step-by-step methods you can adapt and use, and Writing: essays, field notes, and work in progress.

Who this is for

Educators working in management, HR, business, and adjacent fields who feel the gap between what they're asked to do and what they believe education should be. People who are already experimenting and want language for it, or who want to start and don't know where. Practitioners who care about what they teach and how. Researchers working at the edges of responsible management education.

You don't need to share every conviction here to find something useful. You just need to be asking real questions.

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Teaching Otherwise is an independent publication. Subscriptions help keep it that way.