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 welcome so long as it changes nothing too costly.

I did not come to teaching to tidy up capitalism's conscience. I came because, somewhere along the way, I realised it matters who you become in the classroom, in the corridor, and in the meeting where someone mutters, "That's not our remit." To teach otherwise is to let yourself be a small interruption in the flow of what is normal and acceptable. To make it expected, not exceptional, to pause the rush and ask: who is missing here? Who benefits if I look away?

This doesn't mean I have a blueprint. What I have is a daily practice of noticing small cracks. The unpredictable, fragile spaces where something different might take root. These are moments of interruption and possibility, the kind Anna Tsing writes of as life flourishing in the ruins. I try to cultivate them in the classroom. When the rhythm shifts. When a story lands differently. When a student looks up not with certainty, but with hope.

My preparation ritual has become a form of grounding. Before I teach anything that unsettles (sessions on inequality, power, discomfort) I sit with thinkers who remind me my students are not problems to be solved, but people to encounter. I return to bell hooks until I feel the difference between teaching for comfort and teaching for transformation. She reminds me that anger at systems that harm is not unprofessional. It is the appropriate, human response.

This shows up in how I design learning. Instead of modules that rehearse efficient people management, I build spaces where students ask what power does, who it serves, what it costs. Instead of presenting ethics as a separate topic, I offer it as the lens through which we examine every case, every assumption. In these small cracks, ethics stops being a checklist and becomes a way of being with others.

When students push back (as they should, and do) I've learned not to smooth discomfort away. I ask, "What is it about this that feels threatening?" I hold space for that feeling, not because I want to leave them in pain, but because this tension is where learning lives. Donna Haraway teaches us to stay with the trouble long enough to imagine something better. Speculative work doesn't mean fantasy. It means holding complexity without rushing to resolution.

Le Guin's "Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" reminds me that pedagogy isn't a heroic quest. It's a gathering. Of fragments, of stories, of partial knowings. I try to build modules that hold that shape: open enough for mess, structured enough for care. Assignments invite students to show the worlds they move through. The weight of family expectations, the wear of professional performance, the contradictions of care and ambition.

I've stopped pretending I can understand my students through CVs or metrics. I make space for the worlds they carry. Teaching otherwise means meeting them not with solutions, but with enough structure to hold complexity without flattening it.

hooks teaches me to root pedagogy in radical love. Not comfort. Not indulgence. But the kind of love that says: we will do this hard seeing together. Her work reminds me the classroom is never neutral, an insight that runs through Paulo Freire's understanding of education as either reproducing domination or challenging it. Every choice we make (what we include, how we respond, where we stay silent) either maintains the status quo or interrupts it. I try to choose interruption, even when it's difficult.

That interruption is not loud or grand. Often, it's quiet. A different question. A longer pause. A decision not to let something slide. Refusing business as usual means asking different things of our students and of ourselves. It means refusing to separate rigour from emotion, intellect from care, strategy from justice.

The contradictions are real. I name hooks with care, knowing my position as a white educator in a UK business school, held in place by uneven comfort and credibility. She did not write for me to cite as proof. She wrote to unsettle. To stay in tension with that is part of the work.

I won't perform guilt about the contradictions. I publish in journals that sustain hierarchies. I work in a system that names students as customers. I take a salary from institutions that benefit from the same extractive logics I critique. The question is not how to resolve this, but how to live it honestly. What matters is how I use my position, not for self-preservation, but for possibility.

So I've stopped waiting for permission. I centre care. I design assessments that ask students to sit with their own complicity. I stay present when that feels uncomfortable. I use the institutional credibility I have to amplify voices that are usually silenced. I ask questions others might prefer I didn't. I refuse the slow erosion that comes from too many small compromises.

My particular interruption is this: I refuse to let business education pretend to be neutral. Every framework, every theory, every model carries a worldview. I make that visible. I ask: what does this assume about what people are for? About what counts as success? About who is disposable?

I don't teach students to manage people better. I ask what gives anyone the right to manage others at all. We don't just analyse competition; we ask what it erases. In every module, I try to insist: business is not separate from ethics, efficiency is not separate from justice, professionalism is not separate from humanity.

Assessment becomes a site of practice. I don't want students to hide behind technical polish. I want them to feel where it lands in their own lives. I ask them to work with their values, their discomfort, their hopes. I structure collaboration to reward listening, not dominance. I ask them to imagine organisations that make care possible, not optional.

When colleagues call this soft, I ask: what's more rigorous than examining the assumptions that organise our lives? What's more intellectually honest than refusing to split thinking from feeling? When the stakes are this high, why should pedagogy be anything less than world-building?

Sometimes this shows up in big ways. Refusing compliance-led design. Resisting KPIs that turn care into a box-tick. But mostly, it shows up quietly: pausing longer, listening deeper, questioning throwaway comments about low-ranking journals or soft research. Staying behind when someone needs to talk. Rewriting something again, because it still centres me.

It's tiring. It's also necessary. Because business schools don't just teach content, they teach ways of seeing the world. If students leave with the same assumptions they came in with, I've failed not just them, but the people their decisions will go on to affect.

To teach otherwise is to create cracks in the logic. To insist that care isn't a soft skill but a survival strategy. That justice isn't a luxury but a foundation. That hope isn't naïve, it's the work.

This is not a method. It's a daily practice. A commitment to noticing the cracks and staying with them. To gathering, not conquering. To offering structure that holds rather than flattens. To teaching as if the future is something we practise, not just wait for.

Tsing reminds me to look for what grows in ruins. Le Guin insists imagination is not escape, but survival. hooks holds me accountable to love that disrupts rather than soothes. Haraway teaches that hope emerges from staying with trouble, not avoiding it. Freire grounds me in the understanding that education is never neutral. It either functions as the practice of freedom or as the practice of domination. I carry their words with me. Not as decoration. As compass.

This is the document I return to when I am tempted to take the easier path. It reminds me that the work is not to save the system from itself. It's to create something else, seed by seed, crack by crack.

Until that becomes daily. As ordinary as breathing. As necessary as hope.

This is my practice. This is the work that keeps me honest, keeps me awake, keeps me teaching otherwise.