Enriching the intersection of service and transformative learning with Freirean ideas: The case of a critical experiential learning programme in Brazil

Abstract

In this article, we examine the value of combining transformative and service learning pedagogical practices in management education programmes to encourage management students to be more critical and reflexive regarding serious contemporary issues like social inequality and sustainability. We draw on a long-term management education experience conducted in the northeastern region of Brazil, where international students learn how to develop a real-time community-based project with local inhabitants. We argue that while service learning approaches promote pragmatic action-based principles, transformative learning acts at the epistemic level, contributing to change in values. In addition, Paulo Freire’s ideas are integrated to reinforce critical and reflexive dimensions of the learning experience. Our results offer a process-based model showing how a critical experiential learning pedagogy might lead to the development of community-based competences, which, in turn, might lead to changes in the deeply held values of the participants. Freire’s emancipatory ideas are applied not only regarding the relationship between teachers and students, but also to the distinction between Western and non-Western societies, going beyond questioning of the destructive consequences of financial capitalism to question the hegemony of one worldview over all other possible ones.

Keywords

Critical management education Paulo Freire service learning sustainability transformative learning

Introduction

The lack of sustainability of our planet is currently evidenced not only by ecological crises but also by serious social inequalities and increasing poverty, leading a number of critical analysts to emphasize the place of organizations and their managers as powerful players, and even as part of the ‘causes’ of the current situation (Blake et al., 2013; Kevany, 2007). This calls attention to the crucial role of management education. Despite the sense of urgency that characterizes our times, the key words emanating from management educators, researchers and curricula are the same that are leading humanity to an unsustainable planet: efficiency, productivity, growth, expansion and profit. Business schools are poised to take advantage of their privileged position as ‘educators’ – instructing and training decision-makers (Reynolds and Trehan, 2003) – by promoting more critical and reflexive questioning of the consequences of managers’ decisions, corporations’ actions and governments’ agendas, with regard to improving the quality of life, sustainability and fairness in their communities (Cotton et al., 2003; Kurucz et al., 2014).

Among different strategies that business educators might adopt to prepare future business leaders to act in more responsible and ethical ways, two pedagogical approaches have demonstrated their value: service learning and transformative learning. Service learning is a pedagogical approach in which students interact and deal with real problems in the real world, seeking to carry out projects to serve organizational or community needs (Kenworthy-U’Ren, 2003). It is widely known in North America and provides pragmatic and action-oriented principles that lead to an experiential pedagogy. Transformative learning is a pedagogical approach that operates on deeper levels of knowledge (Sterling, 2010), acting at the epistemic level and promoting a reflexive dimension often absent from service learning programmes (Blake et al., 2013). We argue that working at the intersection of service and transformative learning approaches has the potential to contribute to critical management education and should be further explored in both theory and practice. In addition, we have enriched this intersection by integrating one of the fathers of experiential theory – the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. A relevant reference in adult education literature, Freire has influenced critical educational theorists worldwide and we argue for the current relevance of his ideas and their potential contribution to critical management education. Our research question is, What kind of learning experience might emerge from the combination of transformative and service learning approaches, empowered by Freirean ideas, in management education programmes? To respond to this question, we analyse an educational programme that has been applied since 2010 by a Canadian business school.

Our results contribute to the literature on management education in three ways. First, we demonstrate the value of working at the intersection of two existing pedagogical approaches, service and transformative learning. Very few, if any, studies have illustrated the value of such a promising combination with a concrete empirical example. We reinforce the relevance of Freirean ideas to empower the critical and reflexive dimensions of experiential learning pedagogy. In addition to proposing a dialogical relationship between instructors and students based on Freire’s pedagogical model, we have applied the same logic of deconstruction of power relations to the relationship between Western and non-Western societies, inviting students and community members to reflect on the value and place of their knowledge and experiences. Second, we show that the development of real-time community-based projects might act as a bridge between the two combined pedagogical approaches. This represents a powerful tool for training management students to develop and improve their social competencies in a critical and reflexive manner while providing a service to communities. Finally, we propose a process-based model of critical experiential learning that helps to understand the interdependence existing between carrying out the programme itself and the social competences it can trigger, particularly community-based ones. This synergy, in turn, might act at the deep values level of future leaders and decision-makers.

Theoretical background

Pedagogical approaches to sustainability

We have observed alternative paths in business schools, suggesting that the negative consequences of unethical – or at least non-reflexive and uncritical – behaviour by the leaders and managers they have prepared for the market are evident enough to justify a change in the content and form of their programmes (Seal, 2010). Indeed, it is worth mentioning the model/patterns of practices proposed by the stream known as critical management education, which has already paved a prolific research tradition over the recent decades (Clegg et al., 2011; Perriton and Reynolds, 2018). The challenge for business schools is to create a pedagogical environment and to choose tools that train students in social competences that are not well-represented in mainstream management education. A number of social competences have been emphasized as ‘core’ in the literature, including communication skills, conceptual skills, interpersonal skills, learning skills, leadership, multitasking and prioritizing, teamwork and self-discipline (Sail and Alivi, 2010). Although relevant, the development of social skills does not guarantee the education of managers who are more responsible and ethical citizens. We align with numerous scholars arguing that the development of a ‘sense of community’ is highly important for management education (Reedy, 2003; Wilson and Cotgrave, 2016).

Service learning

Service learning can be seen as a strong pedagogical approach to fostering sustainability. It implies an experiential educational method that can promote substantial changes in learners and can be integrated in business schools as an alternative to the mainstream education of future managers (Brower, 2011). Service learning has a variety of definitions. The one most frequently used presents service learning as a branch of experiential education with active engagement as a component of its foundation. In this article, we focus on a civic engagement of students, where they are involved in activities that address community needs, combining service and learning objectives with the intent of inducing change in both the recipient and the provider of the service (Jacoby, 1996).

The literature identifies three different principles in an effective service learning programme, the three ‘Rs’ of reality, reflection and reciprocity (Godfrey et al., 2005). Reality refers to the vastness of social issues that students must address, including poverty, homelessness, hunger or illiteracy (Jacoby, 1996). Denson and Bowman (2013) emphasize that ‘students who are more open to and enjoy learning about different cultures, participate more in the universities’ civic activities and had a greater sense of civic duty’ (p. 567). Giles (1987) explains that the educational value of experience depends in part on the principle of reflection, which balances the learner’s subjective or internal elements and the external or objective elements of the experience. Reciprocity ensures that service recipients and students both gain from the exchange (Jacoby, 1996). The goal of service learning is that each party benefit, learn from the other and teach the other during the course of the experience. It means that students and community members become equal and trusted partners in providing different types of knowledge, working together to reinforce learning and improving results for both parties (Jacoby, 1996).

Godfrey et al. (2005) added a fourth ‘R’ for effective service learning – responsibility – which embraces the notion that, in addition to wealth-creation goals, students should assume the obligations of citizenship, based on moral values, to use their business skills, talents and knowledge to make a difference in the communities where they live and work. Finally, Barin-Cruz and Pozzebon (2017) added a fifth ‘R’: the reflexivity of the educator himself/herself. Although, the majority of researchers emphasize the principles for the students, the authors’ own experience and their inspiration by Freire’s pedagogy suggest that the principles should also be embodied by the instructors, who should adapt their pedagogical practices and educational programmes in light of their constant reflexivity. We further develop the influence of Freire in this work, particularly challenging the prevalence of ‘banking’ strategies and proposing cultural circles.

Service learning is neither a simple nor a cost-free pedagogy. It differs from traditional education in numerous aspects: students are invited to live and intervene in a different and unfamiliar context (Brower, 2011), students are active agents, the community is a valuable source of knowledge from which faculty members can learn (Barin-Cruz and Pozzebon, 2017). Service learning approaches are widely known in North America’s numerous business schools.

Transformative learning

Transformative learning is an experiential educational strategy that incorporates interactive methods of teaching and learning. Here, interactive means that the proposed methods and techniques transform learning from passive processes to active ones, so that power is shared between instructors and students (Kevany, 2007). The term transformative learning, a foundational learning theory in adult education, was first introduced by Mezirow. It happens when an individual critically recognizes that her perspective is no longer functional and decides to appropriate a new perspective. That person then reorganizes the way in which she views herself and her relationships, enabling her to change a situation through her own initiative (Mezirow, 1978). The heart of transformative learning is a process of critically questioning and reflecting on our own actions and beliefs, leading to a fundamental change in how we see ourselves and the world. In numerous situations, transformative learning might be seen as a pedagogy of discomfort, one that emphasizes the need for educators and students to move outside of their ‘comfort zones’, challenging dominant beliefs, social habits and normative practices to create possibilities for individual and social transformation (Zembylas and MacGlynn, 2012). This is quite aligned with Allen et al.’s (2019) approach to radical-reflexivity, which claims that it is

about questioning what we take for granted and examining the privileging and marginalizing effects of organizational policies, practices and hierarchies. In particular, it emphasizes our responsibility as managers, educators and citizens for shaping social and organizational realities and creating responsive and responsible organizations. (p. 786)

The question that emerges involves how this type of learning permits changes in one’s worldview and adult transformation. Sterling (2010) argues that learning can occur at different levels and transformative learning acts at the deepest levels – not always consciously but by influencing ways of thinking, knowing and acting. The first level of learning does not involve the value system and is related to the external objective world that is, ‘doing things better’. The second and more challenging level of learning requires highlighting the assumptions and critically evaluating them by invoking issues of values and ethics, which can result in changes in beliefs, that is, ‘doing better things’. The third level of learning relates to the epistemic dimension, which makes the consciousness evolve and reveals a more relational and ecological worldview, inspiring different sets of values and practices that is, ‘seeing things differently’. Thus, to change one’s worldview, epistemic transformative learning is necessary. Sterling (2010) notes that levels are somehow cumulative, that is, the second order of learning changes thought and action, whereas the third order changes all levels of knowledge.

Lange (2004) argues that transformative learning allows participants to establish a critical relationship with the dominant culture and with extant alienated social relations. In his view, this type of learning is not merely an epistemological process involving changes of worldviews and thinking but also an ontological process wherein participants expand their own sense of self-identity and change their position of being in the world, establishing a new way of relating to their material, social and environmental reality, and becoming active and involved citizens with social responsibility.

We propose that combining service and transformative learning approaches represents a valuable attempt that contributes to a more critical management education in the curriculum of business schools. What sort of learning might the combined approaches result in? First, we argue that it results in a pedagogy that combines pragmatism and reflexivity. One of the most relevant features of service learning is the pragmatic tone it brings to pedagogical programmes. However, it often lacks reflexivity. In order to amplify the ‘political’ dimension of pedagogical programmes applied to management education, we integrate a second approach – transformative learning – that adds an epistemic and reflexive level to the pragmatic one. Second, we suggest that working at the intersection of these two approaches might also influence the ‘pace’ of change. Changing worldviews and revising value systems represent a huge challenge in adult education. The integration of service learning with transformative learning – pragmatism and reflexivity – contributes to epistemological and ontological changes in a relatively shorter period of time.

Integrating Freirean ideas to empower the ‘intersection’

In the age of internationalization of curricula, more and more courses and programmes of the ‘campus abroad’ type have been proposed as an effective way to provide an immersive and international experience to business students. There is a window in this kind of academic programme to replace more traditional visits to enterprises in the foreign environment with experiential learning activities that promote deep changes in the participants’ values.

Our work provides some bridges with critical management education, a stream that has been established through alternative voices since the mid-1980s. From the network of Latin America critical scholars, we focus on one of the best known, Paulo Freire. Along with Piaget and Dewey, Freire is one of the intellectual founders of experiential theory (Baker et al., 2005). Freire was a Brazilian philosopher and critical thinker that put forward the pedagogy of freedom (Freire, 1998). Freire saw education as a political act: education is never neutral; on the contrary, it always ‘serves’ some interests and impedes others. Although Freire is quite influential in the critical management education literature, his work could be further cited, and it is virtually absent when we refer to service and transformative learning studies. Therefore, in our work, we argue for the value of purposively integrating Freire’s (1974, 1998) emancipatory ideas at the intersection of service and transformative learning.

One of the core notions, advanced by Freire, relates to the relationship between teachers and students. To avoid the ‘banking’ approach means to avoid fixed relationships where the teacher is the expert, ‘controlling programme content and imparting knowledge to passive students’ (Hagen et al., 2003: 247). Freire encourages mutual emancipation of teachers and students by proposing a dialogical approach, one where both learn together working side by side. Instead of having a simplistic directive nature, teaching becomes a two-way process where the teacher-student and the student-teacher become jointly responsible for the process in which all grow (Cortese, 2005). Therefore, to apply Freirean principles to a pedagogical program is to talk about emancipation, respective transformation and enhancing the development of critical and reflexive thinking (Reynolds, 1998; Tight, 2000).

Our view of ‘critical and reflexive’ is inspired by numerous critical thinkers, for whom criticality implies reflexivity, and reflexivity implies including ourselves in the subject matter we are trying to understand and revisit. We introduce discussion of our responsibility as social actors and we disclose our own ‘biases’. Critical and reflexive thinking thus implies a learning process wherein students become conscious of their assumptions – a critical consciousness – opening windows for an active response and the transformation of one’s world (Freire, 1974). Also, worth noting is the distinction between reflection and reflexivity: while reflection is seen as a systematic thought process searching for patterns, reflexivity means complexifying thinking or experience by exposing contradictions, doubts and possibilities (Cunliffe, 2002). In a recent work, Allen et al. (2019) supplement current debates by proposing the concept of radical-reflexivity. Therein, the authors relate reflexivity to transformative learning, asserting that a radical form of reflexivity is one that leads us to rethink our own constructions of realities, identities and knowledge, not only questioning sedimented routines and taken-for-granted practices but also better appreciating the interdependencies that exist among managers’ decisions, business and communities. We claim that our proposal is one concrete response to the authors’ call for educators to incorporate radical-reflexivity into the heart of management curricula.

The integrative approach proposed in this work results from the combination of service and transformative learning, empowered by Freirean ideas. Service learning brings engagement with a concrete, real-time community-based project. Transformative learning seeks to bring a disruptive learning experience, one that promotes deep changes in the students’ values and visions. In combining action-oriented principles promoting reflexivity and learning at second and third levels (Sterling, 2010) with Freire (1974), one of the key elements is to deconstruct the unidirectional relationship between teachers and students (Hagen et al., 2003), avoiding the ‘banking’ approach and reclaiming the educational act as essentially dialogical and political.

However, Freire’s ideas might go beyond rethinking the relationship between instructors and students. They could be applied to rethink the relationship between Western and non-Western societies. Freire’s way of disrupting hegemonic worldviews and often polarized dualities can be mobilized to encourage students to deconstruct the preconception that Western society is superior and ‘developed’, and that they – Western students – are well equipped to help local communities to ‘develop’. Herein lies an unexplored potential of Freirean ideas regarding the issue of sustainability education. Management students and managers looking for responsible and ecological experiences are typically shaped by a Western-based mind-set. Although, they believe that sustainability and a fairer society represent an issue that citizens and corporations should address with urgency, they do not give consideration to whether (a) the Western-based way of dealing with ‘progress’ and ‘development’ is necessarily beneficial and (b) the asymmetrical relationship between developed and developing countries, wherein the latter are expected to follow the former, can be questioned. Western-based students expect to go to developing countries to ‘help’ them to develop, assuming that the development path historically consolidated in Europe and North America can work as a universal model. Part of the focus of Freirean experiential learning is to put in question the ‘virtues’ of the developmental path proposed by the so-called developed countries.

Methodological design

To answer our research question, we investigated a management education experience designed and managed by two instructors who specialize in corporate social responsibility and social innovation, respectively. They are both Brazilians whose intellectual development has been strongly influenced by Freire’s ideas. The educational programme is a long-term programme known as community campus abroad (hereafter CCA), offered by a Canadian university business school where the two instructors work.

The campus abroad programme started in 2006, offering several options of a ‘business-oriented’ campus abroad (BCA) to students. Because having at least one internationalization experience was mandatory for completing the bachelor’s degree, the campus abroad was launched as an attractive alternative for students. Very quickly, the campus abroad became a ‘star’ programme in the school, with a lot of visibility. In 2010, a first ‘community-oriented’ campus abroad (CCA) was proposed. This implies that the CCA was one among other options competing with BCAs in a ‘traditional’ business school. By ‘traditional’, we refer to a business school that is a non-critical and market-oriented institution, with the major part of the faculty espousing a neoliberal approach and with very few options for seminars and courses where the students are encouraged to think critically. Due to its contrasting approach, vis-à-vis the dominant style of the school, the CCA drew attention and provoked a lot of ‘noise’ and intense discussions among professors and students. We could say that most reactions denoted a kind of incomprehension or strangeness: why were the students so attracted by a social-oriented programme that pushed them to put in question the actual capitalist system? Even if only a minority of students might attend the CCA each year, one can affirm that it is promoting change in the long run. Due to its huge visibility during its 9 years of existence, recently other courses have started to be introduced in the curriculum inspired by its critical and reflexive pedagogical approach.

The use of the word community was to differentiate the programme from others that were business-oriented. Community is defined here by its territorial and relational dimension, implying a group of people living in the same spatial location (in this case a small village), sharing social activities and establishing social relations over time (Bellemare and Klein, 2011). However, it soon becomes clear to the instructors that this would become a central concept of the programme. To build a ‘sense of community’ refers to the meaning favoured by Wilson and Cotgrave (2016) – looking for membership, fulfilling collective needs and aspirations, and sharing emotional connections. In sum, community is seen as both a process and an intrinsically positive goal. However, it is important to highlight an interesting critique of the notion of community, as commonly conveyed in participatory studies, offered by Reynolds (2000). The author argues that most of those studies outline an idealized and romanticized notion of community as something homogeneous, where equality could be achieved with democratic practices, obscuring the fact that most communities are, in fact, heterogeneous and fragmented, where dominance of one sub-group over others is likely to occur. In this article, we could not enter into this debate as we lacked sufficient material to analyse those power dynamics – and, analogously, we think that CCA programme students could not grasp the power inequalities that certainly operate behind the scenes. Indeed, one of the principles of the CCA is to encourage the students to not try to interfere in local power dynamics, as they do not have enough experience/knowledge or legitimacy to judge or politically interfere in those contexts. The instructors encourage the students to respect the local culture and to avoid judgements. They seek to avoid situations where foreign people – for example, management students – arrive in a local community and quickly start to interfere in local dynamics, as they could bring ‘best practices’ (sic).

The CCA provides students with the opportunity to develop a collaborative project together with a local community while immersed in a foreign context and experiencing the cultural, political, social and economic realities of the host country, Brazil. The period investigated in this study extends from 2010 to 2013, during which four cohorts of bachelor’s students participated in a programme to design and develop a community-based project in a small village in the northeastern part of Brazil. However, it is important to clarify that although the students entered into immersion with the local community, they worked directly with only a limited number of members of the community association (part of them were democratically elected by the entire community to manage the association, part of them are volunteers). Thus, when we refer to the local community, most of the time we are referring to participants in the community association.

Beginning in 2010, the CCA mobilized four cohorts of 20 students each, one cohort per year. Students worked in different phases of the same project with the local community in small groups. Their goal was to build a sustainable model for waste management, recognized by the local community as one of their critical problems. After 4 years of collaboration, a sustainable community garden was launched in 2013. The garden integrated the idea of composting, reducing the volume of organic waste, while providing organic legumes to low-income students of a municipal school. By the time the fourth cohort fulfilled its mandate, the legacy was not only a social and environmental business plan co-created by the students and the community but also an enduring transformation of deeper levels of knowledge (Sterling, 2010) in all parties involved in the joint collaboration.¹

The selection of the CCA programme as our single case study was primarily guided by theoretical considerations related to the research question and by the access to rich empirical material (Stake, 1994). CCA is characterized by a co-construction of a community-based project by the students, the instructors and the local community. Everything is developed together, from the definition of the ‘problem’ to the drawing up of possible alternatives and the implementation of a particular one. The instructors participate and learn with the students, avoiding leadership in the process. In keeping with critical pedagogy, the power of the instructor is relativized (Perriton and Reynolds, 2018). The basic principles instilled in the students before the trip and during the entire process are to learn to listen, to reflect on what they find ‘different’, to respect, to carefully express their doubts and to constantly engage in dialogue.

The community visited during the campus is a village of 16,000 inhabitants situated on the northeastern coast of Brazil. This Brazilian region is known by the low human development index (HDI), with significant portions of the population living in disadvantaged conditions. The instructors had made previous contact with the village association in order to plan the intervention and to build a dialogical partnership that would provide the students with a long-term learning environment. The goal was not to ‘solve’ any important issue related to poverty (the instructors found this type of goal too pretentious, and even irresponsible, to propose) but to build a small project where both sides could learn from each other. For the members of the association, it was an opportunity to interact with foreign students working in the domain of management and to integrate some of their ideas of how to perform a project. For the students, it was an opportunity to interact with people from a totally different context and to learn about their vision, particularly their interaction with natural resources and their strategies to deal with scarce resources. As all the students could speak Spanish, they could communicate directly with locals without translation (because, when speaking slowly, Portuguese and Spanish speakers understand each other).

Before leaving Canada, the students were invited to read a number of ‘post-developmental’ texts, including critical content related to post-colonial concepts – degrowth, great transition, post-extractivism, buen-vivir – diverse indigenous views, as well as epistemologies of the South.² The goal of the instructors was to expose the students not just to more critical views of capitalism, but to non-Western and post-colonial views (e.g. De Sousa Santos, 2011; Escobar, 2015). The main goal was to deconstruct the unilateral conception that ‘Western teach non-Western’. To the same extent that Freire’s pedagogy invites instructors and students to learn together, Western and non-Western also might learn together.

The pedagogical techniques applied were based on several concepts proposed by Paulo Freire (1988): historicity, generative themes, dialogue, praxis and consciousness. The key tool behind the operationalization of those concepts is the circles of culture. In order to put in place a culture circle, the instructors need to be vigilant, with constant reflection and criticism regarding their own pedagogy (Souto-Manning, 2010). One of the premises is to create a pedagogical space where all the participants – students, instructors, members of the community association – sit in a circle with eye contact and an atmosphere of respect for all voices. This requires the instructors to maintain focus without dismissing the voices of participants, in a dialogue whose paths are always under construction and which responds to the needs of both students and community members. The instructors proposed culture circles in all phases of the campus: definition of the problem, implementation, constant feedback and planning of next steps. They constantly encouraged the students to listen and to learn with local people more than to provide advice or follow their proven models.

Data collection

The CCA programme is well-documented with blogs, videos, reports, business models and documents produced by the participants. In addition, we conducted semi-structured interviews in keeping with a ‘grounded’, inductive approach. The questions³ tried to reconstruct the experiential process from the voices of the students, asking them to describe their experience, express their surprises and frustrations, reflect on what they have learned and the changes they have experienced. We interviewed 18 students (identified as E1 to E18 for purposes of confidentiality), who participated in different years of the programme from 2010 to 2013. The interviews took an average of 2 hours each. The interviewees included females (11) and males (7) who were between 20 years old and 30 years old, hailing from Canada (12), France (2), Lebanon (1), Costa Rica (1), Algeria (1), and Madagascar (1). The students were pursuing a bachelor’s degree in management, specializing in strategy, marketing, finance and sustainable management. All the interviews were transcribed verbatim. We also had the opportunity to have many conversations with the instructors. The empirical material, which included documents and transcriptions, was stored in the NVivo application to facilitate data analysis.

Data analysis

The data analysis was conducted in two phases following Gioia et al.’s (2012) guidelines, an adapted grounded theory approach. In the first phase, we used open coding techniques, searching for relevant words and phrases that showed who (key concerned actors, i.e. individuals, groups or organizations), what (the type of learning experience verbalized by the students) and how (links between the previous conceptual elements). We initially labelled this information with ‘in vivo’ terms and phrases found in the entire corpus of data. After this initial coding, we returned to the data to refine and regroup our codes, allowing us to establish a single set of ‘first-order’ themes, a total of 34. After completing the inductive open coding analysis, we entered a second phase of analysis. Following the generation of a single set of first-order themes, we applied axial coding techniques to link and interrelate them. This analysis allowed us to simplify and refine the categories, leading to second-order categories at a higher level of abstraction (Gioia et al., 2012). This passage from first to second order enabled us to produce a more robust set of categories of types of learning, 10 in total. Analysing and comparing second-order concepts, we arrived at a limited number – three – of aggregate or core categories, which summarized the elements of an emerging theoretical model. The result is a ‘process-based model’, along the lines proposed by Langley (1999), as we present in the next section. By process-based, we mean a model that enables an understanding of how actions and meaning might evolve over time, requiring a conceptualization of practices and the identification of patterns among them (Langley, 1999).

Results and discussion

In this section, we present the research results of our study. Appendix shows the complete data structure that emerged from our inductive coding (Gioia et al., 2012). The first column – first-order concepts – shows detailed practices experienced in the field that emerged from the students’ voices ‘in vivo’. The second column – second-order concepts – represents sub-categories that summarize and make sense of lived experiences of the students. The third column denoting aggregate categories – disruptive experiential learning, development of social, community-based competences and changes in deep values – represents broader conceptual dimensions that help to compose a process-based model. While the first column tries to capture the voices of the students respecting a constructionist perspective, the second and third columns are the result of the researchers’ interpretive work in trying to make sense of the inductive data. All this activity of defining first/second order concepts and aggregate categories was conducted in a systematic and rigorous manner, based on the inductive approach. It illustrates an analytical strategy informed by grounded theory that it is consistent with a constructionist vision of knowledge production.

The data structure was a preliminary step to building a process-based model, whose conceptualization is the main result of our analytical work. Figure 1 shows the aggregate categories and the second-order themes forming an initial but promising process-based model of critical experiential learning pedagogy for management students.

Figure 1.

A process-model of the critical experiential learning pedagogy for management students.

The logic behind the model is related to the relationships among the three broad categories and their embedded sub-categories. The first phase of the process is the conception and implementation of a critical experiential learning pedagogy, which combines practices from transformative and service learning approaches, empowered by Freirean ideas. This pedagogy invites students to experience full immersion through the mobilization of an actionable tool: the development of a real-time community-based project. Such elements helped to enable the development of several community-based competences, namely, learning to act collectively and to compromise, the ability to build trust with the community and the development of relational and distributed leadership skills. Finally, the development of community-based competences led to changes in the participants’ deep values, including those of the students, instructors and community members participating in the project.

Disruptive experiential learning

Two key elements of the experiential learning proposed by CCA put the participants outside their comfort zone: to experience contexts of scarcity of resources while taking part in a real-time community-based project. They live for a while in the setting of a disadvantaged community and they immerse themselves in the community culture. Full immersion is a key feature of many educational programmes applying transformative learning (Blake et al., 2013; Sterling, 2010). This means that students familiarize themselves with an often distinct manner and timing of dressing, eating, sleeping and feeling. This approach encourages students to develop a positive appreciation of what is ‘different’:

In terms of communities I think I learned a bit, and it inspired me a lot. I was very inspired by these women who live a rustic and simple life, but they are so smart and so engaged, so motivated. (E15)

Another characteristic, related to the principle of ‘reality’, is that students entered in contact, often for the first time in their lives, with huge social problems such as illiteracy (Jacoby, 1996). The CCA took place in a poor region of Brazil, forcing the participants to fully experience the context of so-called ‘less-developed’ countries, experiencing differences (Reynolds and Trehan, 2003). In the context of northeastern Brazil, the students could directly observe the consequences of social inequalities, reinforcing the ‘reality’ dimension in which students are encouraged to critically reflect on important social issues (Denson and Bowman, 2013; Reynolds, 1998). They start to call into question their Western-based taken-for-granted beliefs:

We have kind of American Dream mentality. If you are lazy you go nowhere; if you work hard you go somewhere. [. . .] in a lot of contexts, you can work hard and go nowhere because working hard is not enough, [. . .] and that was really what hit me. (E15)

The ‘post-colonial’ readings proposed before the campus encourage students to question themselves about the historical reasons for the social inequalities between the Global-North and the Global-South. In the cultural circles, the students go beyond lectures and readings, making connections between those readings and the ‘social inequality’ reality they are facing for the first time. This corroborates that knowledge-in-action requires learning by interacting with the real world (Kenworthy-U’Ren, 2003; Raelin, 2009), as the CCA’s approach creates the conditions for such critical reflections:

We had different backgrounds, but all have something to add. Each one has a talent to contribute. (E12)

Eventually, the students also begin to verbalize that what people call ‘reality’ is actually constructed by social actors, and that the social actors that are behind the creation of the conditions for poverty are often the same as those who come to offer a remedy.

The development of social, community-based competences

The critical experiential learning pedagogy, the first aggregate category, opens space for the development of social competences, a construct that encompasses a broad array of elements. The CCA approach recognizes that developing community-based competences is crucial to changing the individualistic manner that management students are used to maintaining. Five main sub-categories of community-based competences emerged from the data analysis: building trust with the community, developing relational skills, learning to act collectively, learning to compromise and developing distributed leadership skills.

Building trust with the community supports the ‘reciprocity’ dimension, where students and the community learn from each other as partners in providing different types of knowledge (Godfrey et al., 2005). In the CCA, the students needed to earn the trust of the stakeholders/community. The participants were in a position to benefit from ‘reciprocal learning’ (Sigmon, 1994):

They share with us their goals and expectations. We know that what we do will be towards that objective. (E10)

At the same time, students could help the association members give value to their local knowledge so as to construct a social model to build a sustainable community garden:

People want to do good things. And more interesting is that people there never took a class about business models, and they are really (running) one. (E11)

The students started to realize that people living in other contexts – even those considered ‘underdeveloped’ – perform tasks and things in a different manner (as also seen in previous quotations), without the former’s ‘ready to solve’ models, which means that their models are neither universal nor perfect nor infallible. During the culture circles, they start to relate the lack of sustainability, evidenced not only by ecological crises but by serious social inequalities of Western society, to the path of ‘progress’ and ‘efficiency’ that is so highly valued.

Developing relational skills emerged from our empirical material, extending one of the core social skills verified by Sail and Alivi (2010):

I understand that people in Brazil were very gestural [. . .] I tried to ask questions in a very concrete way, always thinking how they will interpret our questions. (E12)

One of the elements that helped the students to learn to act collectively is directly related to Freire’s ideas: the instructors develop a different kind of relationship with the students, encouraging them to assume an active role. We note here some of the key components of Freire’s pedagogy that make the culture circles tools for collective learning and reflection. Because culture is understood in its anthropological sense, students learn that they are not objects but subjects of a historical process. The horizontal dialogue process established is essentially a collective process that leads people in the circle to communicate with and to trust each other. They collectively enter into a dialectical action and reflection relationship, also known as praxis, which, in turn, may lead to critical consciousnesses (Freire, 1974). In the learning journey, the students worked in partnership with the instructors and the community members; they were encouraged to reorient themselves constantly to keep pace with dynamic changes:

We have to adapt ourselves according to the situation required. (E6)

In addition, the students embark on a reflexive thinking cycle. They need to face two omnipresent obstacles: institutional constraints and the limited availability of resources. This requires creativity and passion to face the obstacles. Students learn to compromise, putting aside the ‘ideal’ and the ‘planned’ model and working with what they have on hand, inspired by the community members:

Because compromise was something that I wasn’t really good at, and that was a great exercise for me . . . I think that I developed some tolerance, like developing different ways to compromise. (E2)

By developing tolerance and different ways of compromising, they learn to delegate, to trust others’ decisions and to engage with others in decision-making on a horizontal level, which are important attributes for leadership. They end up learning about distributed leadership, strengthening the capability to be collaborative, to be cooperative, to negotiate and to work as a team, with an overall boost to autonomy and responsibility.

The distinctive difference of our results in terms of communication and interpersonal and leadership skills is their intrinsic orientation towards community-based needs rather than to the organizational or stakeholder needs commonly found in extant business literature (Sail and Alivi, 2010). Similarly, we could note the synergy promoted by the bridge between service and transformative learning. While one acts more at the practical level – leading to action – the second acts more at the epistemological level – leading students to reflect.

The next section shows the results related to the third level of learning, corresponding to epistemic learning, which makes the consciousness evolve and reveals a more relational and ecological worldview, inspiring different sets of values and practices (Sterling, 2010).

Changes in deep values

Two main sub-categories of change emerged from the data analysis: critical thinking and awareness of the complexity of sustainability. As discussed in the literature review, one main influence of transformative learning is acting on the deepest levels of knowledge and awareness (Sterling, 2010). When combined with service learning and a community-based project, we observed that the results might go even deeper.

In line with Lange (2004), students exposed to transformative learning will experience not just an epistemological process involving changes of worldviews and thinking, but also an ontological process wherein participants expand their own sense of self and identity and change their position of being and acting in the world – what we called critical thinking, a concept essentially aligned with critical reflection (Reynolds, 1998):

Most of the time we take for granted that we have the education, we have the infrastructure; if we are sick, we go to the hospital, we are hungry we go to the food store. That is not the case over there. I think this is really a life-changing experience, because we get to see how people organize themselves to live in great quality but without that, not depending on cell phones, computers, and overconsumption . . . (E5)

Another attribute that helped us delineate the critical thinking category was developing self-knowledge, meaning a profound questioning:

I think this project gave me a different perspective of who I am, who I want to be and what I want to do for others. I went to help, and I came back feeling that I helped a little bit but they helped me a lot to learn about myself and what I want to do with my career, what are the important things for me now. (E13)

Moreover, students became aware of the lack of self-knowledge topics in the traditional management education curriculum. As noted by Sterling (2010), learning can occur at different levels. Humanistic value generates critical reflection by the learner, and may lead to changing of beliefs, assumptions and values, a learning on a deeper level. Students perceived the negative consequences of the prioritization of the profit approach in business schools and the uncritical capitalistic orientation that guides their education. They appreciated the experience of having alternative approaches to doing business, grounded in different values:

. . . in this school, it is all about profit, profit and profit . . . [. . .] it made me realize that there (is) more than one way to run the world, there are so many different things you can do, there are so many ways to create a fairer society. (E3)

Students realized the negative impact of neoliberal capitalism and the effect of globalization on communities. They were invited to reflect on new ways to address social and environmental realities, as suggested by Lange (2004):

Usually in business school we always learn performance, profitability, so it was very new for us (to) see a business focus on human beings instead of making money. We tried to think of people instead of money. (E7)

Therefore, a willingness to change the world by acting locally has arisen. Students wind up establishing a new manner of relating to their material, social and environmental reality, becoming active and involved citizens with social responsibility (Cranton and King, 2003; Kurucz et al., 2014; Lange, 2004), and reflecting the concept of awareness regarding the complexity of sustainability.

The CCA experience allowed students to develop a different worldview, confirming Mezirow’s (1978) proposal that transformation can occur when individuals recognize that one’s perspective is no longer functional and decide to appropriate a new perspective as being more valuable. One of the main points of this transformation was the awareness that the Western-based way of life is not a universal model to be followed, which complexifies the search for alternatives towards a sustainable world. The students participating in the CCA do not return to Canada with the sense that they have done great things or that they have heroically ‘solved’ social problems. Indeed, they return full of questions and doubts, and thinking about alternative ways of addressing poverty and ecological damage different than what they were used to. This result is well-aligned with what critical pedagogues have noted as the characteristics of a critical learning community.

Conclusion

This article examines the crucial role played by management education in leading students to engage in critical and reflexive thinking, questioning their own values and the current growth model, which is no longer benefitting humanity. Our concept of an ethos of sustainability is aligned with critical views like those proposed by Sterling (2010) and Redding and Cato (2011): to avoid mechanistic approaches to sustainability education that look at existing module descriptors, but rather to engage with a holistic and critical approach that truly reflects on the negative consequences of the current financialization and implementation of neoliberal policies of a ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2014).

Recalling the five tactics to integrate critical pedagogies as summarized by Contu (2009), our study blends two of them: hybridization and experimentation. Hybridization includes ‘critical political economic accounts, broadening views of what counts as managing, organizing and accounting, as well as focusing on alternative forms of organizing and experiences beyond capitalism’ (Contu, 2009: 9). The CCA programme illustrates a hybridization strategy by combining service and transformative learning, but mainly by integrating Freirean ideas, wherein the sources of inequalities to be found within the capitalist system are grasped and analysed in practice. In turn, experimentation integrates ‘strategies and activities developed in experiential learning, action learning and situated learning’ (Contu, 2009: 9). The CCA programme emphasizes an experiential, action-based and contextually situated learning experience by proposing collaboration in a real-time and concrete community-based project in a disadvantaged setting.

The article contributes at the theoretical and practical levels of management education. At the theoretical level, we describe an innovative pedagogical approach that is absent from current debates in business and management education: to work at the intersection of two experiential approaches – transformative and service learning – bringing, respectively, a pragmatic and epistemic/reflexive dimension. Given the current quest for increasing the focus of critical and reflexive thinking on topics like business ethics, corporate social responsibility and sustainability, the integration of transformative learning into the management curriculum provides a valuable experience. We argue that such criticality and reflexivity are empowered when we introduce Freirean concepts.

In contrast to the kind of entrepreneurial individualism that informs most of the content of conventional management education (Reedy, 2003), our study illustrates the value of the concept of ‘sense of community’ as an inspiring principle to be cultivated by the social actors involved: students, instructors and members of the local community. Community-based competences might help the students learn how to act in concert with others to reach common goals (Reedy, 2003; Wilson and Cotgrave, 2016). The five social competences triggered by the investigated experiential learning programme are qualitatively different from the classical management skills denoted in the literature (Sail and Alivi, 2010). They show the value of establishing a connection to community-based needs rather than to organizational or stakeholder needs, as is common in business literature. Therefore, our study corroborates the identification of an actionable concept that helps to bridge transformative and service learning approaches: the use of community-based projects as a pedagogical tool that enables all the parties to learn, to be challenged and to be transformed.

Regarding the contribution of Freire’s ideas, the pedagogical approach applied by the two instructors is aligned with several principles advanced by that critical educator. One of the most important is the recognition of all parties – students and members of the local community – as knowledgeable agents, adults that have a ‘considerable breadth of experience to apply to learning’ (Tight, 2000: 110), and who could become jointly responsible for the learning process. The relational dimension of knowing is outlined. Instead of influencing students by using the authority of experts or experienced specialists, the instructors create a dialogue in which all parties are considered providers of both questions and answers (Cortese, 2005). We believe that the transformation of the instructor-student relationship, extended to the members of the community, is one of the triggers for development of the social competences previously discussed.

Using Freirean ideas to rethink sustainability and social responsibility goes beyond questioning the destructive consequences of financial capitalism. It leads to questioning the hegemony of one worldview over all other possible worldviews. Most people targeting sustainability as an important issue still think that, to the same extent that ‘occidental’ man has been promoting the destruction of our planet, mankind also has the means – particularly by practicing social responsibility – to rethink methods and practices to promote a more sustainable world. In the CCA programme, Freire’s emancipatory ideas are not only applied to the relationship between teachers and students but also to that between Western and non-Western societies.

On the practical level, this research offers a concrete illustration of how to implement an innovative educational programme in business schools, particularly for the campus abroad. The proposed process-based model is a conceptual reading of a well-documented experiential learning experience. It integrates elements from service and transformative learning, and purposively add Freirean’s concepts that makes the ‘disruptive experiential learning’ actionable. Its value is to propose a consistent and concise view of that empirical experience, a connection between a substantive theory and practice. We encourage other business school academics to engage with service, transformative and Freirean approaches in their pedagogical practices. Although our study focuses on a campus abroad experience, most of the elements proposed could be integrated into a ‘domestic’ experience. Cultural circles, for instance, is an important technique to connect, listen, reflect and transform worldviews. It could be mobilized anywhere. However, it is important to recall that the implementation of a critical experiential programme in a traditional business school is not possible without confronting several challenges. One of the most common is what Feenberg (2002) would call ‘technocratic’ resistance: a number of administrative and technical barriers are imposed to the introduction of new programmes in the existing curriculum, which are presented as neutral rules but, in fact, conceal a set of interests invested in not questioning the status quo. This difficulty is even greater when we think that a true integration of a critical sustainability ethos should be transversal to most disciplines, and not concentrated in just a few. As noted by Allen et al. (2019), we need to engage scholars, students and managers in recognizing the responsibility of business and incorporating a ‘radically reflexive ecocentric approach to sustainability in the heart of a management curriculum’ (p. 792).

We would like to end this article in a more confessional tone, disclaiming two major limitations of our work. The first is the degree of criticality of the presented programme. As outlined by one of the reviewers, the results could be seen as simply pointing out the development of alternative competences rather than a more advanced reflexive critical account for those involved. This is a limitation but also a promise, as the context of traditional business schools are so instrumental and acritical that we need to start from somewhere. We believe that integrating Freirean ideas in North American business contexts is itself a boldness, a potentially disrupting step towards more critical and reflexive management education programmes. The second limitation is related to the reflexivity of the instructors (and our reflexivity as coauthors of this study). The programme reported here opens numerous opportunities to ask ourselves about our ‘pedagogical’ role and status, and the ‘true’ of the social transformation we are supposed to encourage. One might question to what extent the type of criticality proposed by the instructors is ‘correct’ or leads to the ‘right’ set of values. Inspired by Boaventura De Sousa Santos’ (2011) epistemologies of the South, we aspire to ecologies ‘of savoirs’, which means that different criticalities could coexist. Engaged pedagogy is one of the most relevant discussions we are having today in our university, which deserves an entire new article.

Footnotes

Appendix

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Rosane Dal Magro

Notes

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