About

Otherwise is a hopeful word. It assumes things could be different from how they are: that the way business schools teach people about work, and about each other, is made of choices, and choices can be made again. This site is where I try to make some of them differently. Plenty of educators are already doing the same in their own classrooms, often in small ways that never get written up, and I'd like this to be one place where that work feels less solitary.

I'm Sarah Williams, Senior Lecturer and Programme Manager for the MA HRM at Liverpool John Moores University, and I teach across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. My students will spend their working lives shaping how other people are treated at work. I'd like them to leave knowing what it feels like to be cared for while they learn, because care you've felt is easier to pass on than care you've only read about. That shapes how I teach as much as what I teach. It means making space for students' own experience and working alongside them as co-creators wherever I can, so the classroom becomes somewhere to practise the kind of people practice they'll later be responsible for.

Most of what I write about comes back to relationship. Students learn with and through each other, alongside educators who are still learning too. When that goes well, joy tends to show up, and so does discomfort, and I've come to think both deserve attention. Joy usually means something is working. Discomfort can mean something matters, and it's often worth staying with long enough to find out what. Educators shape each other too, through conversation and through the work we make together, and I'm hopeful about what that makes possible, even in institutions that weren't designed with it in mind.

I keep this as a field notebook, and most of what's here is small and practical. Nearly all of it has been tried with students before it gets written down, and I try to be honest about what didn't work as well as what did. Some pieces are finished and ready to use. Others are still in progress, shared before they're tidy. I write it down so other people can pick it up, change it and make it their own, which is how care and joy actually spread through teaching.

About this site

Four themes run through the writing here, and any of them is a good place to start teaching otherwise.

Creative and Arts-Based Pedagogy: making things together, and what students come to understand through making that they wouldn't reach through analysis alone.

Futures Literacy and Radical Imagination: imagining futures with other people, and giving that imagining the seriousness usually reserved for forecasts.

(Dis)comfort and Joy: what the feelings in the room can tell us, and what it asks of educators to notice them.

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

You'll also find Teaching Practices, methods set out step by step so you can adapt them, and Writing, which gathers essays, field notes and work in progress. The Open Calls directory is updated every week with funding, special issues, book chapters and conferences for anyone working in and around responsible management education, wherever you're based.

Who this is for

This is for anyone who cares about pedagogy and suspects teaching could be done otherwise, whether you're already experimenting or haven't found a way in yet. Most of my examples come from management and HR education, because that's where I teach, but the questions travel well beyond business schools. You don't need to agree with all of it to find something you can use.

Subscribers get an email every Monday morning with new writing from the site and a selection of open calls, including the ones about to close. Teaching Otherwise is an independent publication, and subscriptions help keep it that way.