Exploring accounting academics’ views on sustainability: A Freirean dialogical pedagogic perspective

Abstract

The emancipatory power of accounting is crucial for enabling sustainable living, placing a responsibility on accounting educators to unlock this potential. As sustainability remains an evolving global discussion, teaching it requires a shift from traditional, didactic approaches to accounting education. Paulo Freire's dialogical approach offers a valuable framework, assuming educators have the critical consciousness and pedagogical skills to co-create knowledge with learners. However, there is limited insight into educators' views on sustainability in accounting—an essential perspective for fostering critical consciousness—and their readiness for a dialogical teaching approach. These gaps present challenges to promoting sustainability through accounting education. This exploratory study adopts a phenomenographic approach to gain insights through semi-structured interviews with UK accounting academics, applying Freire's theoretical lens to deepen the analysis. The results reveal qualitatively different ways in which educators perceive sustainability in accounting, offering novel insights into accounting education and making an initial step toward fostering critical consciousness. Findings indicate that educators may lack the pedagogical skills necessary for a dialogical approach, often assuming roles as knowledge distributors rather than co-creators. This highlights the need to strengthen pedagogical capacity in order to move beyond traditional didactic teaching methods.