Teaching Otherwise: A Manifesto
Business schools have a whole vocabulary for how students should feel. They survey satisfaction every year, and wellbeing gets its own week, usually with a talk about resilience. Joy isn't in that vocabulary. It can't be promised in a module descriptor or ranked in a league table, which makes it one of the few things a business school can't sell. I want it at the centre of how I teach.
The neoliberal business school has a narrow idea of what learning is for. Students arrive as customers and leave with something meant to show up in a graduate salary. Joy is surplus to that. It doesn't make anyone more employable by Thursday. It happens when people lose track of time over an idea, and time nobody can account for is the thing the system tolerates least. Making room for joy is two fingers up to all of it.
The joy I'm talking about is intellectual, and a lot of it is playful. Play lets people try an idea on before they have to defend it, and get it wrong without paying for it. A gamified quiz that has a room of tired people arguing over an answer is thinking, done lightly enough that people dare to risk it. Universities have never fully trusted excitement in a classroom, because it looks like a lapse in seriousness. Play and joy are serious. People who have felt an idea land are much harder to reduce to outcomes.
Joy can't be compulsory. Institutions are very good at turning feelings into duties, and a business school would happily absorb joy as another wellbeing indicator. Joy that resists is allowed to be awkward, and it won't always look happy.
It comes with discomfort. The joy worth having rarely arrives cleanly. It comes after an assumption has gone, or after a long stretch of not understanding something and staying with it anyway. That applies to teachers too. Teaching for joy means exposing yourself to an idea you love falling flat in front of a room. Strip the discomfort out and what's left is the compulsory cheerfulness of a wellbeing week.
And none of it happens without kin. Making kin is foundational, the work of building care and obligation with people you aren't already tied to. Business schools sort students by grade and staff by output, and making kin refuses that sorting. Most of it is unglamorous, a lot of writing together and treating students as people you think with. It's what makes the discomfort survivable. I'll risk not knowing in front of people I trust. I won't in front of people I'm being ranked against.
