In recent years, there has been an increased emphasis on learning outside the classroom (LOtC) in places such as in museums and art galleries, in forests, and by natural water courses; this has bec...

This article offers a close reading of the novel Stoner by John Williams. Stoner, and not the countless reports and jeremiads on teaching, helps us find what we are searching for: a way to live – and talk about – teaching in a dignified and artful way. We need to seek out voices that remind, recall and reveal teaching for the beautifully lovingly difficult work that it is. We need more voices like the one Williams provides in Stoner as we (...) work at teaching, teacher education and educational reform. When we think about educational policy related to teaching, we must remember that philosophical readings of literature have much to offer our thinking. My hope is that this essay turns our attention back to Stoner while encouraging us to see the potential that literature holds for how we think about teaching. Though a more superficially uplifting book may initially feel like the right book to keep teachers excited to teach, I find that Stoner is the work that I keep returning to as a check against demoralization and a reminder of what living teaching means. (shrink)

Recent work at the confluence of Philosophy and Higher Education Studies has conceptualized the university as a place for belonging. The university, on this understanding, offers respite and refuge and familiarity; it is a place for insiders and outsiders to come together and to forge meaningful and lasting bonds. One of the interesting aspects about this body of scholarship is that its antithesis also exists. There is an equally compelling body of work in the philosophy of education that conceptualizes the (...) university as singularly alienating, troubling, and disorientating. But are these two ideas of what it means to experience a higher education at odds with each other? We would argue to the contrary, rather maintaining that they are ineluctably related through the idea of sanctuary. We propose the idea of the university as sanctuary to encapsulate both what it means for the university to be a site for safety and familiarity and, paradoxically, a place where such senses are importantly challenged. We are interested in the implications of this idea for scholars' experiences of belonging as well as their encounters with radical otherness. (shrink)