Abstract
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.
One element of our co-editorship that we value highly is the opportunity to think about interesting topics that come up when we are apart, muse collaboratively about them when we are together (or text about them when we MUST share right away), and then develop and write these editorials. We view the Editors’ Corner as our forum for teasing out insights and beginning or extending conversations about some of the most pressing issues within the scholarship of teaching and learning in management education practice. To date, we have been thrilled at the discussions our editorials have engendered as we interact with our domain’s community around the world.
We come to our subject for this editorial by dint of our new and wide-reaching campus roles. Recently, Jeanie became president of her institution’s faculty senate and Kathy took on co-director responsibilities for her institution’s study abroad/multilingual learner office. Our individual decisions to take on these additional responsibilities resulted from a combination of institutional need, personal interest, and a fair amount of administrative lobbying. However, before either of us said “yes,” we talked together about the potential impact of these new roles as significant distractions to our commitment to Journal of Management Education and everyone involved with it. With the combination of roles and responsibilities that for many faculty are the “new normal,” we wanted to discuss how we should think about the additional suite of “to do” tasks for which we would have responsibility. An initial question for us was, “How can we avoid ‘distraction’ that diverts energy from checking things off our multiple to-do lists?”
As we continued to talk, we considered the broader issue of how all of the nonoverlapping work we do fits together in our heads: How does the administrative and managerial attention we spend in a senate meeting dovetail into the attention we spend on course preparation? How does engaging with the campus safety committee to ascertain the risks of sending students to Hong Kong connect with marking students’ presentation performances? It is a lot to take in and, like so many others we know, juggling different roles and responsibilities requires much mental energy. Regardless of what the popular literature may say about multitasking, we now know that our brains are not set up to do multiple tasks simultaneously, even when they are conceptually related. Ours is a linear and sequential brain, and distractions come all too easily. The opportunities for distraction away from our core tasks as academics are persistent, multimodal, and powerful.
As our opening quote from Emerson suggests, distraction has been getting a bad rap for some time. These days, popular notions indicate that it always degrades our performance, our engagement, or our completion of multiple tasks in multiple spheres. All manner of admonitions, advice, and strategies concerning distraction exist: anti-distracted driving campaigns; learning strategies that reduce students’ distractions when studying; techniques that help us avoid lengthy but tangential conversations with colleagues; medications that support focus in attention. Some of this advice is not only warranted but required, such as legislation and public service announcements that share the very real dangers of distracted driving. But our experience with distraction is that at certain times this diverted attention actually has had helpful results in a number of areas, including stress reduction and creativity. Distraction involved in attending to an unrelated task may reduce stress about planning or acting in another arena that is complicated or requires waiting for others to complete their tasks before anything further can be done. Curbing distraction may do a disservice to the gift of creative potential that distraction can offer, particularly as it relates to generative writing, research plans, and a refreshed sense of empirical exploration that all contribute to excellent scholarship. The story of distraction, we have found, is more complicated than simply or always being something we should work to avoid.
Managing multiple and disparate cognitive functions requires a combination of selective attention, which is when we direct attention toward some stimuli and not others, and attention switching, which is when we adjust our attention to respond to changing tasks (e.g., Hanania & Smith, 2010). Both of those constructs have attracted much empirical interest and researchers have shown that intentionally switching attention from one task to another, or, simply allowing attention to wander, can significantly improve creativity, problem-solving, and mental refreshment. Mental “incubation” periods, where selective attention and attention switching are deliberately employed to allow our brains to engage differently with an issue or problem, have been shown to greatly increase our facility for generating creative solutions and ideas for those issues or problems. For example, Madjar and Shalley (2008) found that when we attach meaningful goals to “distracting” activities and have discretion about when we engage with them (attention switching discretion), we perform much more creatively in our core tasks than if we do not mindfully choose both how and when to work on distracting, noncore activities. Those authors found that was true even when the “distraction” was a complex or important task. Distraction by daydreaming can also be helpful: Again using an incubation model, Baird et al. (2012) noted that allowing our minds to wander without directed attention captures creative benefits when our attention is returned to the core task at hand.
In our newly expanded roles, involving work not obviously related to our teaching or research activities, we have found serendipitous moments of inspiration where our minds make connections among our disparate academic spaces. The work one of was doing to assess learning outcomes against learning objectives inspired her to craft creative course designs that enabled a sports team to travel abroad when that opportunity had been met with resistance before. Discussion with students in a “Leading Change” course that one of us was teaching helped her develop an effective approach to facilitating change in her faculty’s governance structure. And, a chance encounter with a colleague at a conference reception led to hearing about a theoretical model that proved essential in revising a manuscript we were co-authoring but were struggling with, ultimately resulting in its publication. What seems to be true for each of these instances is that, whether we planned our distractions or simply allowed ourselves some time for mental wandering, we have had on these occasions the opportunity to experience “a-ha!” moments for unrelated activities in unexpected and interesting ways.
We’ve written before about the negative consequences of an increasingly “fast” pace of academic life (Lund Dean & Forray, 2018) where, “the advent of chronically stressed academics, in jobs that now have no boundaries, within a culture of crisis in higher education that makes every day seem like a battle” (p. 316) can take lasting tolls on our joy and creativity with respect to our scholarship. While we wrote in that editorial about the benefits of sabbatical leave in overcoming some of these drawbacks to our scholarship, we return here to the notion that distraction allows us “time to think about things in unstructured and generative ways, harnessing our imagination, creativity, and vision” (Lund Dean & Forray, 2018, p. 316). Just as we have heard that “thinking about something else” helps when we cannot recall a name or fact we know we know (and then remember it shortly thereafter), reconsidering “distraction” as a tool by which to allow our minds an attentional rest can be an underutilized strategy for invigorating a tired research project, a repetitive class activity, or a stale course marking scheme with fresh eyes and energy. We invite you to give it a try!
In This Issue
The articles included in this issue offer synergistic teaching opportunities that leverage attention, energy, and creativity in multimodal ways. Matthew Eriksen builds on prior work (Eriksen, Cooper, & Miccolis, 2019) that engages students as peers that are charged with facilitating each other’s learning in demonstrable and transferable ways. In his current article, Matthew, Sarah Collins, Bailey Finocchio, and Julian Oakley share outcomes from a peer coaching intervention they use throughout an entire semester. Those authors write that while “Increasingly, managers are being asked to coach employees to facilitate their development” the skills needed to effectively develop employees and peers are often not considered special and needing specific attention in curricular learning. As such, peer coaching represents a critically important skill set for our students and represents another facet of how active listening and engaged attention (Spataro & Bloch, 2018) contribute deliberately to student learning outcomes.
Problematizing the reputation that “high-impact practices” enjoys (e.g., Carini, Kuh, & Klein, 2006) for increasing student retention and contributing to longer lasting learning, Malu Roldan, Tanvi Kothari, and Linda Dunn-Jensen assessed whether HIPs were similarly positive for student learning outcomes in a population not typically associated with HIPs: business majors in large, public, diverse, and commuter-based institutions that include historically underrepresented minority students. Using direct assessment measures, the researchers found that benefits to underrepresented minority students fell short of their hypothesized expectations. An extremely timely article that has implications for significant resource deployment, curriculum development, and administrative focus, Roldan, Kothari, and Dunn-Jensen discuss their counterintuitive results and offer practical recommendations for readers who face similar pressures to engage diverse students in lasting learning opportunities.
We share a large-scale curriculum redesign effort that sought to change a business school’s focus toward a signature experiential learning event, a process that included a wide stakeholder group and often competing viewpoints. Mariana Lebrón, David Brannon, Douglas Sanford, and Lori Ellison chronicle their efforts to move a traditional business school capstone course toward an exciting learning opportunity using live case competition. The scope of their change initiative is impressive and readers can take many practical lessons from their article about how to conceptualize change on a broad scale, manage stakeholders, consider students’ needs, and stay focused during such a process. By identifying clear tensions and challenges, and how the authors addressed them, this Instructional Change in Context article is an excellent example of our goals for this section: allowing Journal of Management Education readers insights and vicarious learning around others’ experiences with change.
Our last article in this issue offers a unique frame on cross-cultural competencies and issues facing Western teaching and learning assumptions. Peter Lamb, Shih-Wei Hsu, and Michal Lemanski consider “translation intelligence” as a threshold concept, allowing a critical analysis of cross-cultural pedagogies from a non-Western perspective. Ultimately concerned with relevance of Western-embedded learning and knowledge for a non-Western student population, those authors argue for contextualization and adaptation as required vantage points and teaching skill sets.
