Reflexive Practices: Making Business Schools More ‘Critical’ by Teaching Modern Slavery. Practical Workshop

Abstract

This article invites breaking the traditional pattern in business schools and encouraging management educators to engage critically with their subjects. Conventional methods give a trusting standard of learning; but, they are significantly better at producing followers than leaders or that they do not cultivate leaders at all. This article proposes taking a step further, by making modern slavery the focus of students’ reflection. Globalisation and the global population explosion lead to the free movement of people. Through their economic migration or economic transformation, people travelled from developing countries and work when prospects for earning decent wages were limited. However, worldwide, circa 40 million people are now victims of modern slavery, mostly trafficked while searching for better jobs, detained in debt bondage, and confined by poverty and discrimination. While presenting concepts from educational philosophies applied to modern slavery, this article creates an affirmative connection between practice and critical thinking. Critical pedagogy translates in opening the learning space, which links a critical outlook to content and to critical methodology. It contains awareness of self and of the world on top of the conventional classrooms knowledge. It equips students with greater sensitivity to the emancipatory and transformational future perspectives. Teaching reflexivity implies no formula; it only involves awareness on how reflexive practice happens while assisting and being open to the process. Its proposed activities where students are required to write reflective notes stimulate reflection and encourage them to create their own meanings.



Author Information
Lidia Gheorghiu, Aston University, United Kingdom

Paper Information
Conference: ACE2019
Stream: Educational policy

This paper is part of the ACE2019 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon