Learning Through Disruptions: Equipping Students to Cope With Challenging Contexts Through a Field-Based Course in Africa

IF 2.5 Q1 EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
M. Blasco, Thilde Langevang, Søren Jeppesen
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Students wishing to pursue careers in international business, notably in the developing world, must be prepared for complex, unpredictable, uncomfortable, and messy realities, and to collaborate with others very different from themselves. Mainstream business school learning environments are generally highly structured, cognitively oriented, predictable and hence not particularly conducive to orchestrating the disruptive experiences that can develop such abilities. In this article, we show how a field-based course in an East African country can support such learning. Based on data gathered from students over several iterations of the field course, we draw on experiential learning theory (ELT) in showing how the top-down orchestration of the course constituted a learning space that produced three main types of disruption to students’ taken-for-granted habits and assumptions, namely: intense sensory impressions and sensations, loss of predictability and control, and learning interdependency on others. Students had to “bottom-up” manage these disruptions while conducting a group assignment with local students, to a tight deadline, producing “dissonances”—feelings of discomfort—that triggered the ELT cycle. Our findings show that such disruptions can foster learning of the abovementioned abilities; and we suggest ways in which such learning spaces might be created closer to home than East Africa.
在中断中学习:通过非洲实地课程装备学生应对具有挑战性的环境
希望从事国际商业(尤其是发展中国家)职业的学生,必须准备好面对复杂、不可预测、令人不安和混乱的现实,并与与自己截然不同的人合作。主流商学院的学习环境通常是高度结构化的、以认知为导向的、可预测的,因此并不特别有利于组织能够培养这种能力的破坏性经历。在本文中,我们将展示东非国家的实地课程如何支持这种学习。基于从学生在实地课程的几次迭代中收集的数据,我们利用体验式学习理论(ELT)来展示自上而下的课程编排如何构成一个学习空间,对学生想当然的习惯和假设产生三种主要类型的破坏,即:强烈的感官印象和感觉,可预测性和控制力的丧失,以及对他人的学习相互依赖。学生在与当地学生进行小组作业时,必须“自下而上”地管理这些干扰,在紧迫的期限内,产生“不和谐”——不舒服的感觉——从而触发了英语教学循环。我们的研究结果表明,这种干扰可以促进上述能力的学习;我们建议在离家更近的地方创建这样的学习空间,而不是东非。
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来源期刊
Journal of Management Education
Journal of Management Education EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH-
CiteScore
4.10
自引率
14.30%
发文量
23
期刊介绍: The Journal of Management Education (JME) encourages contributions that respond to important issues in management education. The overriding question that guides the journal’s double-blind peer review process is: Will this contribution have a significant impact on thinking and/or practice in management education? Contributions may be either conceptual or empirical in nature, and are welcomed from any topic area and any country so long as their primary focus is on learning and/or teaching issues in management or organization studies. Although our core areas of interest are organizational behavior and management, we are also interested in teaching and learning developments in related domains such as human resource management & labor relations, social issues in management, critical management studies, diversity, ethics, organizational development, production and operations, sustainability, etc. We are open to all approaches to scholarly inquiry that form the basis for high quality knowledge creation and dissemination within management teaching and learning.
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