Abstract
As virus-related disruptions continue and even grow, and as we move further into 2020, we see evidence of our management education community’s continued reflective journeys about the future of our instruction. Academic popular press articles from outlets such as Times Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed, institutional websites, and our own MOBTS (Management & Organizational Behavior Teaching Society) listserv are full of teaching plans and pivots for the current academic year. Living in the constantly changing information cycle surrounding higher education engenders instability and even an exhaustion that has pushed us to consider new ways of engaging our students in this and coming terms. For this Editors’ Corner, we turn to metaphor, educators as curators, as a tool by which to reframe our work. We believe proposing a metaphoric approach to our reflective journeys offers three benefits for readers to consider. First, our metaphor invites us to situate our teaching practice within the ever-greater inclusion (intrusion?) of technology in our work. Second, it reduces the pressure some of us feel to create sparkling and snappy course materials for an online environment. Finally, it supplements our sense of creative expression and agency through our teaching.
The metaphor of educators as curators—creators or custodians of a collection—allows us to reconsider and augment the nature of disciplinary expertise. As we talked about this editorial and what we wanted to say about the materials we use to teach, it struck us that this topic is one of the only editorials we have written that discusses content, or what we use to teach. So, this editorial is a “yes—and” extension to our usual topics. Experiential pedagogy within management education remains grounded firmly as a process-based practice; our learning objectives, for example, are much less about memorizing what values Rokeach included in his taxonomy than about helping future leaders understand how their employees’ values inform the workplace behavior with which they must contend. Indeed, the teaching modality metaphor we frequently employ within the MOBTS and Journal of Management Education that shifts from the “Sage on the Stage” to the “Guide on the Side” is inherently a process-based sequence. But curators are deeply concerned with content, the “what” of their collections.
Describing educator as curator adds to both content and process considerations. Curation as an act and as an art is predicated on a close connection to the materials assembled: the verb “curate” derives from the Latin curare, which means “to care.” It is not that we care, but how we care that offers a new way of thinking about teaching and learning practices. It is a values-based process: We pick what we value. Curators find, critically evaluate, and foster meaningful connections among different “pieces” no matter the context or collection. Just as a museum exhibit curator “determine[s] how an audience moves through an exhibition and artistically invite[s] them to make discoveries (Fountain & Nordlund, 2019, p. 16), an educational curator also is the agent of collecting interesting and novel ideas and materials but is not the original creator. As educational curators, our course designs set up a cogent path through the content that we have carefully culled from a variety of sources, choosing materials we think will allow students access to the learning objectives without dictating the meaning students take from them. Thus, a unique gift of curation is that it offers a freedom and license to cast a wide net for those interesting and novel materials that each of us values, leaving behind the burden and responsibility for actually making them.
Technology’s Presence
Our original motivation for writing about this topic came from our reflective conversations during the online learning migration forced by COVID-19. However, as we continued to think about it, the curation shift applies not only to the shifts in learning contexts in response to COVID-19 but also to much broader issues of technology use per se, identity issues for educators, and privilege in being “right.” As Mills (n.d.) provocatively writes, no one is creating new knowledge at this point given the ubiquity and stunning reach of search engines. Simple search engine queries about any topic we can think of generate countless results. The sheer volume of materials that has been placed online is essentially countless. While not everything we find and may want to use from the internet is freely available, much of it is, and it can be stunning, high quality, and helpful. Of course, we also know that the internet contains a limitless black hole of terrible stuff—inaccurate, dangerous, or hateful. Or, all of those. The sheer volume of materials available online has perhaps obviated the need for any of us to create anew while emphasizing the need to wade through and craft informational collections. What has become much more valuable than generating materials, Mills asserts, is fostering in our students the skills to ascertain intelligently the quality of what they retrieve online and discern facts from rubbish.
For example, textbooks have formed the theoretical and conceptual foundations for our courses for decades; they are the original curated collections for academics. Textbook authors as curators have the power to direct our attention in ways we may not even notice, which is one of the ethical issues with curation that we have discovered through examining textbook content—what it includes and what it leaves out. Textbooks as those important manifestations of “knowledge” have been critiqued in our pages (e.g., Foster et al., 2014; Snyder, 2014) and so we need to model what those authors have advocated we do: Become our own curators, transparently culling meaningful content that fits what we want students to learn, while simultaneously owning that process of curation. Our curation skills must be honed in an increasingly digital learning world.
Casting Our Nets: It Is Already Out There
Becoming a curator and resisting a deeply engrained urge to develop our own materials is not simple or intuitive in academe. We get “credit” for the novelty and contribution of our content—our ideas have currency in this field. The positive feeling of creating course content that will contribute to student ownership and engagement is difficult to throw off, exposing the metaphor to an uncomfortable downside: Curators relinquish ownership of and privilege toward the ideas collected, instead allowing others to judge them on their merits (Litchfield & Gilson, 2019). Educational curating interrupts our usual course preparation process. While we still need to create our learning objectives and set about building course materials that serve those learning objectives, curators do not move then to creating their own but cheerily explore materials that already exist and that are valued by other communities. Curators move well beyond customizing from the current and known set of materials; customized textbooks, for example, offer efficiencies and personalized tweaks but stay within the safe and known parameters of the current textbook’s collection. Curators seek widely and broadly, listening to other conversations, challenging their own assumptions, honoring others by including disparate learning materials in equivalent ways to “ours.” And, just as we might enjoy a guided tour in a museum or art gallery, so too will our students benefit from our engagement with them in discussing the ideas we have curated for their course.
It can be difficult to resist sharing only those models, theories, and practices we “know work” in management. It can be difficult to resist the kudos we may receive from developing our own shiny new webpage or slideshow. Beatty notes her own teaching practice trajectory from “being threatened by slickly produced content on YouTube” to now “welcome[ing] expanded formats such as videos, podcasts, blogs, and articles to nurture student interaction and application, to help students craft critically interesting and personally meaningful knowledge” as ultimately liberating and valuable for students (Beatty et al., 2020). We want the best for our students: Who knows whether something completely new is worthwhile?
Creative License
Curation can be an underappreciated form of creativity, perhaps because of the pervasive lens of academic freedom and its focus on making sure what we do in each of our classrooms is “ours.” Extending what Litchfield and Gilson (2019) write about the value of curation from a managerial perspective, as educational curators the creativity we share with our students comes from “exhibition” of our collection, or “imagining and adopting multiple perspectives from which to view and sample the assembled ideas” (p. 221). So, our job is not only to carefully seek out and assemble excellent learning materials from many different places but to steer, intentionally, our students toward engaging with those materials differently. The intentional different-ness of perspectives allows students a level of ownership over the material that otherwise may not occur, leading them to their own meaningful learning outcomes.
Curating as an art is not monodirectional; part of curating’s creativity comes from navigating among different roles and positions from which to experience the collection. Those who create, examine, argue about, and enjoy a collection are at once learners, critics, teachers, appreciators, and moderators. Finding meaning among artifacts or curated materials can be unexpected and does not follow a straight path (Litchfield & Gilson, 2019). Rather than this being a destabilizing or alienating experience for educators, letting go of the need to centrally determine or delimit the meaning students take away from our courses can instead offer a liberation that returns joy and levity to teaching practice.
Educational Ambidexterity
If that is true, then who are we as “educators”? Who decides what is “correct” and “true”? Who generates “knowledge” when curating? In a post-truth world skeptical of branding “facts” as evidentiary, that is a complex and genuinely polarizing question. But to assume the knowledge-holders and truth-keepers are always educators, that we are the final arbiters, runs counter to experiential learning’s adherence to a co-learning model of engagement.
What roles now do educator and students have if not teacher and learner, respectively and cleanly? Curators are brave. They allow disparate and conflicting opinions on materials from students, but in stepping away from creating and advocating for particular models and content, curators create a space where additional possibilities can flourish. Curators can stand on the shoulders of giants, sharing marvelous work many can celebrate and learn from, without having to own it. That is a gift, but also a challenge for educators who are used to caring—a lot—about the content, and who have spent years crafting precise materials to share with students that are just the way we want them. Giving up that need for control can challenge every part of our educator selves. As always, we invite readers’ comments and reactions to our editorials.
In This Issue
In many ways, this issue has allowed us to practice educational curating by sharing a variety of thought-provoking work from various corners of our educational community. We are delighted to share republication of two articles designated as recipients of the 2020 Lasting Impact Award. The Lasting Impact Award recognizes an article published in the Journal of Management Education at least 10 years prior that continues to have a significant impact on management education or educators, either conceptually or practically, since its publication. This year, we honor two such articles that serve as a set by addressing teaching philosophy statements both conceptually and practically:
Beatty, J. E., Leigh, J. S., & Lund Dean, K. (2009). Philosophy rediscovered: Exploring the connections between teaching philosophies, educational philosophies, and philosophy. Journal of Management Education, 33(1), 99-114.
Beatty, J. E., Leigh, J. S., & Lund Dean, K. (2009). Finding our roots: An exercise for creating a personal teaching philosophy statement. Journal of Management Education, 33(1), 115-130.
In a new article, Joy Beatty, Jennifer Leigh, and Kathy Lund Dean offer reflections on their experiences with teaching philosophy statements over the last decade, noting both the ways in which their own work has evolved as well as their thoughts on teaching philosophy since the publication of the original articles. A podcast with the authors, hosted by Associate Editor Amy Kenworthy, accompanies the JME articles.
Continuing the teaching philosophy statements theme, Melinda Laudon, Abby Cathcart, and Dominique Greer provide a Curated Collection of subsequent research on teaching philosophy statements. Those curators identify three streams of inquiry that frame research in that area, and offer their thoughts on opportunities for future research and inquiry.
This issue also includes a special section edited and introduced by George Hrivnak and Amy L. Kenworthy on “Insights, Provocations, and Next Steps: Discoveries from the Research in Management Learning & Education (RMLE) UnConferences.” From the first UnConference in 2013 at Bond University in Australia to the most recent in 2020 at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, Journal of Management Education is proud to support and embrace the organic and participant-driven interactions reflected in the six articles accepted for publication in the special section.
