Outside the Box is a reader that introduces students to significant ideas that have shaped our way of looking at the world and to the way those ideas were shaped through argumentation, skills writers learn to use in their own writing.

Each chapter illustrates the birth and development of an important idea through classic essays, then focuses on contemporary challenges to the concept from academics, experts, popular culture, and the general public. For example, Chapter Eight introduce the idea of the unconscious through essays from the founders of psychology, Freud and Jung, along with subsequent developments and critiques of their ideas by contemporary psychologists, then focuses on the current debate about how to treat depression. The final chapters explore how science and technology might shape our future, then turn to an examinations of how concepts in the book have been applied in popular culture, specifically Star Trek and The X-Files.

Outside the Box offers a wide variety of readings that serve as models for student writing, texts for analytical class discussion, and prompts for in-class or journal writings. Students become a part of the production of knowledge, not visitors to a museum of great ideas.