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Educational Policy Studies

College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

College of Education Educational Policy Studies http://education.illinois.edu/eps/eps/frp/crh4

Faculty Research Profiles: Christopher Higgins

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Assistant Professor

Educational Policy Studies
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, as well as teacher education and professional development. My book, The Good Life of Teaching: Toward a Virtue Ethics for Teachers (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming), 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. My areas of philosophical interest and expertise include virtue ethics, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and neo-praxis philosophy (i.e. Aristotle via Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, et al.). I have published on the work of Hannah Arendt, Jessica Benjamin, Martin Buber, John Dewey, Sigmund Freud, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Oakeshott, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Plato.

Degrees

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

Key Professional Appointments

  • Assistant Professor, Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006--
  • Asst. Prof. of Philosophy & 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, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009
  • List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007
  • 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. (2009). Humane letters: Notes on the concept of integrity and the meanings of humanism. Philosophical Studies in Education 40, 25-32.
  • Higgins, C. (2009). Modest beginnings of a radical revision of the concept of imagination. In S. Blenkinsop (Ed.), The imagination in education: Extending the boundaries of theory and practice (pp. 2-18). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.
  • Higgins, C. (Ed.). (2009). Education, Crisis, and the Human Condition: Arendt After 50 Years (Special Issue), Teachers College Record 112, no. 10 (2010). Published online: August 12, 2009.
  • Higgins, C. (forthcoming). The good life of teaching: Toward a virtue ethics for teachers. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Higgins, C. (2008). Instrumentalism and the clichés of aesthetic education: A Deweyan corrective. Education and Culture, 24(1), 7-20.