Meet the Speaker: Chris Higgins

Chris Higgins coordinates the program in Transformative Educational Studies and co-directs the Formative Leadership Education Project at Boston College. A philosopher of education, Higgins seeks to articulate the existential dimensions of teaching and learning, defend the idea of education as a public good, and recall education to its humane roots. He has written on: the dynamics of the teacher-student relationship; action research and the philosophy of inquiry; ignorance and openmindedness; humanism and liberal learning; imagination and aesthetic education; practice and vocational formation, and the experimental tradition in higher education. He recently published Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education with MIT Press. His book, The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) offers one of the first systematic extensions of virtue ethics to questions concerning work and professional identity. His current book project, entitled Humane Learning: Formative Essays on Educational Integrity, is an inquiry into the problems and possibilities of formative higher education.