Abstract
When Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1946), she begins an adventure during which she tries to make sense of a context quite unlike the one with which she is familiar. In fact, when the hookah-smoking Caterpillar asks, “Who are you?” Alice first replies, “I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then” (pp. 49-50). Poor Alice does not know even who she is within her new context of Wonderland.
We recall Alice’s experience of “tumbling down the rabbit hole” because it reminds us of the disorientation that often occurs when we ignore context as an element of our teaching practice. Many of us can attest to the confusion we experience when a tried and true learning activity fails to accomplish our intended aims (or just falls flat), and we only then realize that the context in which we are using it has significant differences from those of previous iterations. We have expectations for what will happen during the activity based on multiple iterations of running it, but the context that informs what happens and why differs from prior experiences in important ways: our students are different, perhaps the classroom or physical environment is different, or cultural norms are different. We, too, are never precisely the same instructor stepping into the classroom each time. We have forgotten that context matters until such an experience reminds us that it does. This “contextual difference” is one of the reasons we ask authors of Instructional Innovations to provide a clear understanding of the context in which activities or approaches have been developed—so that readers can evaluate for themselves the usefulness and applicability of an innovation for their context, their skill set, and their students.
The importance of context is a key reason why we created the Instructional Change in Context (ICC) section of Journal of Management Education (JME), and we are delighted to share our first articles of that section in this issue. The description of the ICC mission helps distinguish its articles from other types of JME offerings: Instructional Change in Context (ICC) is a section in which authors have the opportunity to detail their experiences enacting instructional change toward more engaged and active pedagogy in places without that tradition. ICC articles may also describe how instructional innovations are being applied in contexts where experiential, immersive, and active learning pedagogies involve special challenges or have changed over time. Within ICC, authors relate instructional stories in a variety of student and institutional contexts and make context a key component of the article’s contribution. ICC articles take a broadly based understanding of “context” to mean curricular change within a particular country, institution, culture/climate, history, or other circumstances that make the change process challenging.
Thus, ICC articles are richly change-oriented, and they shine a light on the often invisible and arduous processes that are required to foster true pedagogical innovation within a larger system. Educators in a variety of fields increasingly recognize and appreciate context as a salient part of the learning process, and we know that context connects to teaching and learning in multiple ways. At a very basic level, cognitive development is embedded in the sociocultural context of learning (Gauvain, 2001; Rogoff, 1991, Vygotsky, 1978), and context is regarded as a necessary component for the development of skills such as language acquisition (Bruner, 1981). Supported by brain research, the contextual teaching and learning approach (Johnson, 2002) “is based on the premise that meaning emerges from the relationship between content and its context” (p. 3). As an instructional method, contextual teaching and learning involves students in a learning process that connects learning tasks with real-life issues or with contexts that guide them to seek meaning (Sung, Hwang, & Chang, 2015), thus potentially enhancing both learning outcomes and critical thinking skills. Yet, as Boud and Walker (1998) note in their work on reflection in professional education, “The context of learning is often taken to be non-problematic in educational institutions” (p. 4).
Contextual aspects may be difficult to define, recognize, or even name. Recently, Caza and Brower (2015) shone a light on the building blocks, if you will, of how the “informal curriculum” influences learning outcomes. Extending from the notion of the “informal economy,” the informal curriculum involves “all aspects of the learning environment that are not part of formal goals or performance criteria” (p. 96). They assert, and we concur, that informal systems have huge impacts on the lived experiences and outcomes of our students’ college career. In the same way, by making the unseen and unmeasured both evident and considered, articles in ICC celebrate those who engage with significant and important change in the service of enhancing student learning.
When activities, simulations, or even in-depth learning opportunities like community-based engagements do not work in the way they were designed, it is unsettling and may be disorienting in the same way that Alice did not know who she was. Sometimes there is no clear reason why a classroom learning activity fell flat, so we are left to consider what aspects of context may have been different for what we had planned. Engaged learning opportunities are not for the faint of heart—they require a resilience and a willingness to reflect on experience that is perhaps unmatched by adherence to less engaged ways of teaching. We share ICC articles in the hope that readers’ learning curves can be shortened up, helping us anticipate and actively manage potential pitfalls as we innovate our methods within systems that may or may not be inviting innovation. As always, we are a community of teacher-scholars, and we invite your feedback and reflection on the efforts articulated in the articles we publish.
In This Issue
Our first offerings in the new ICC section are a set of articles that describe the changes and challenges of a “classroom as organization” approach to an introduction to management course first introduced to JME readers in a 1991 article by John Miller. We are republishing Miller’s original article, “Experiencing Management: A Comprehensive, ‘Hands-On’ Model for the Introductory Undergraduate Management Course,” in this issue so that readers may understand the context of the innovation at that time. In the second article in the set, “Lessons From Management 101: Learning to Manage Ourselves,” Miller reflects back on the intervening 25 years since the first article was published. In particular, Miller describes the ways in which he and his colleagues continued their efforts to understand and manage critical relationships among people, pedagogical methods, and the essential contents of our discipline as the course changed over time. In the concluding article in the set, “Context and Pedagogy: A Quarter-Century of Change in an Introductory Management Course,” the four current faculty members who facilitate Management 101 provide their perspective on contextual and operational changes in the course. Jamie R. Hendry, Tammy Hiller, Eric Martin, and Neil Boyd describe nuts-and-bolts elements of the course that have remained consistent and those that have evolved, and the key elements that either have been affected by or have led to changes in the course.
Also in this issue, two articles challenge accepted norms in the way students take ownership (or, rather, might not take ownership) over their own learning. It is easy to assume that once students are in our classrooms, they are ready to learn. Is this not the way we approached our own college careers? The student experience has drastically changed, and in conjunction with the Management 101 set, we include two articles that take on specific aspects of course climate as it affects student learning. Eriksen and Cooper describe a process by which they make commitment to learning explicit in their courses—moving the “taken for granted” aspect of being in a course to learn to “crafted by all” as a way of maximizing relevance and retention. Eriksen and Cooper write about the details of their own teaching and learning journey and share the process by which they engage students in creating a shared purpose learning statement that is inclusive, comprehensive, and ultimately student-owned. Dachner, Miguel, and Patena describe their efforts to mitigate what they experienced as students’ unwillingness to take advantage of learning by being too risk-averse in their engagement. Those authors realized that the student social pressures of not appearing stupid by asking questions, and the messages students may hear about not making any mistakes, negatively affected their engagement with innovative ideas and lively dialogue. After an empirical analysis of variables connected to students’ intellectual risk-taking, they end the article with ways management educators might cultivate this important skill with their students.