College of Education Education Policy, Organization and Leadership http://education.illinois.edu/epol/frp/crh4

Faculty Research Profiles: Christopher Higgins

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Assistant Professor

Education Policy, Organization and Leadership
377 Education Building
1310 S. 6th St. MC 708
Champaign, IL 61820USA
business217 244-9191
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Research Biography

My scholarly interests fall into two main areas: philosophy of teaching and the aims of education. My work in the first area concerns teacher motivation and identity, transformative dialogue and the teacher-student relationship, teacher education and professional development. My book, The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), offers a eudaimonistic conception of professional ethics, examining how work contributes to the practitioner's own quest to lead a rich, meaningful, or excellent life. Working out the implications of this on the terrain of teaching, I challenge the rhetoric of service that rationalizes as noble sacrifices the many ways in which the classroom can be miseducative for educators themselves. My work in the second area deals with imagination and aesthetic education; humanism and liberal learning; and vocational education and the nature of work. I have written on integrity, natality, and open-mindedness as ideals of the educated person and on “What Makes a Public School Public?” My areas of philosophical interest and expertise include virtue ethics, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and neo-praxis philosophy (e.g., Hannah Arendt, John Dewey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Oakeshott). I have also published on the work of Jessica Benjamin, Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, Maxine Greene, Nel Noddings, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, and Plato. I am currently working on two book-length projects: Turnings: Philosophical Studies of the Teacher-Student Relationship and Humane Letters: Recovering a Humanistic Language for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship.

Degrees

  • Ph.D., Philosophy & Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1998
  • B.A., Philosophy, Yale University, 1989

Key Professional Appointments

  • Director, Illinois New Teacher Collaborative, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011--
  • Affiliate Faculty, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011--
  • Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Education, Education Policy, Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006--
  • Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Education, Department of Arts and Humanities, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1998-2005
  • Visiting Assistant Professor, M.A. Program in TESOL, Teachers College, Tokyo, Japan, 1999-2002

Activities & Honors

  • List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students, EPS 410 (Fall 2011); EPS 500 (Fall 2011); EPS 512 (Spr. 2011); EPS 510 (Fall 2010); EPS 528 (Spr. 2010); EPS 500 (Spr. 2010); EPS 500/CI 507 (Sum. 2009); EPS 514 (Spr. 2009); EPS 512, outstanding rating (Fall 2007), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007-2011
  • Associate Editor and Review Editor, Educational Theory, 2006- present
  • Program Chair, Philosophy of Education Society, 2003-2004
  • President, Middle Atlantic States Philosophy of Education Society, 2002-2004

Selected Publications

  • Higgins, C. (2011). The good life of teaching: An ethics of professional practice. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Higgins, C., and Knight Abowitz, K. (Eds.). (2011). How public are the public schools? (Special issue). Educational Theory 61(4).
  • Higgins, C. (2011). Educational aesthetics. In S. Tozer, B. Gallegos, & A. Henry (Eds.), Handbook of research on the sociocultural foundations of education. New York: Routledge.
  • Higgins, C. (Ed.). (2010). Education, Crisis, and the Human Condition: Arendt After 50 Years (Special Issue), Teachers College Record 112 (2), 375-575. More about this publication...
  • Higgins, C. (2010). Working with youth: In search of the natality of the teacher. Journal of Educational Controversy, 5 (1). More about this publication...

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