Space for Students’ Existential Questions in Higher Education

This paper explores how to cultivate space for students’ existential questions in higher education. Through a heuristic inquiry, combining with expert dialogue and a hermeneutic literature review, we aim to assist educators in opening up conversations about what needs to be addressed when seeking to create spaces for existential questions in higher education. In this study we report and reflect on the three heuristic models that also reflected the development of our horizon of understanding about the topic.

Creating such space is critical for education because educational questions are in the end existential questions about being and becoming. We argue that providing such a space will give students some necessary anchoring for dealing with the existential crises many are facing in today’s world.

The first iteration of the heuristic model was labeled “learning ecology,” which emphasizes student agency and reflection. The second iteration was labeled “ecology for learning and practice,” which sees the student as the center of her questioning, using reflexivity as intersubjective capacity. The third iteration, “educational ecology,” sees students and teachers as anchored in Rollo May’s three-dimensional world: own world, world of interrelationships, and world around. What characterizes this third model is existential questions opening themselves up and coming to participants with the result of creating active forms of questioning and answering. The thesis of the article is that it is useful for educators to identify the heuristic models in their own orientation while dealing with questions faced by students and educators in this time of local/global crises.