Higher Education & Formation with Chris Higgins
As part of the Virtues & Vocations series Education for Flourishing: Conversations on Character & the Common Good, we are pleased to welcome Chris Higgins, the Chair of the Department of Formative Education at Boston College. Join us for a conversation about the purpose of education and how universities can educate for flourishing.
View the Live Event
Monday, August 26, 2024 12:00 pm
As part of the Virtues & Vocations series Education for Flourishing: Conversations on Character & the Common Good, we are pleased to welcome Chris Higgins, the Chair of the Department of Formative Education at Boston College. He recently published Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education with MIT Press. Join us for a conversation about the purpose of education and how universities can educate for flourishing. Learn more at the Virtues & Vocations website. This event was recorded on Monday, August 26, 2024.
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MoreMeet 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.
Book: Undeclared - A Philosophy of Formative Education
An imaginative tour of the contemporary university as it could be: a place to discover self-knowledge, meaning, and purpose.
What if college were not just a means of acquiring credentials, but a place to pursue our formation as whole persons striving to lead lives of meaning and purpose? In Undeclared, Chris Higgins confronts the contemporary university in a bid to reclaim a formative mission for higher education. In a series of searching essays and pointed interludes, Higgins challenges us to acknowledge how far our practices have drifted from our ideals, asking: What would it look like to build a college from the ground up to support self-discovery and personal integration? What does it mean to be a public university, and are there any left? How can the humanities help the job-ified university begin to take vocation seriously?Cutting through the underbrush of received ideas, Higgins follows the insight where it leads, clearing a path from the corporate multiversity to the renaissance in higher education that was Black Mountain College and back again. Along the way, we tour a campus bent on becoming a shopping mall, accompany John Dewey through a midlife crisis, and witness the first “happening.” Through diverse and grounded philosophical engagements, Undeclared assembles the resources to expand the contemporary educational imagination.
To Advocate for Vocational Education is Really to Argue for the Humanities
Is the contemporary university too detached from the working world or already too vocationalised? The champions of the bottom line stress “transferable skills” and marketable degrees. The humanities stalwarts point out that life, as Wordsworth saw, is about more than “getting and spending”. And indeed it is, but so is vocation. Both sides assume that vocational education is nothing more than training and credentialing. By my count, this omits no fewer than four necessary tasks of vocational formation.
Read the full article here.
Transformative Educational Studies Panel
This Transformative Educational Studies Panel features four Boston College students in discussion with Associate Professor Chris Higgins. They answer core questions that the major considers, and discuss what TES classes have done for them.
View the recording of the panel here.