Conference Agenda

Business schools around the world are facing growing impetus to nurture inclusion and equity, and to confront long-standing attainment gaps for minority students (OfS, 2022). Traditional curricula often fail to support diverse identities and cultures creating feelings of alienation leading to potential isolation and drop-out. This paper introduces the integration of structured creative activities as vehicles for self-discovery to cultivate safe, inclusive environments in business and management education where all students can thrive.

Cultivating “identity safety” through positive representations together with a creative and non-judgmental environment help to improve belonging (Lowe, 2020). Furthermore, facilitating students’ discovery and expression of their authentic self promotes the autonomy and competence that fosters motivation according to self-determination theory (Iftode et al., 2023; Deci & Ryan, 2008) .

Specifically, detail of a workshop entitled “Portrait of Your Future Self” held for a group of marginalised students at a UK Business School is provided. The four-hour session led student participants through introspective creation of personal artwork envisioning their desired future selves and goals. Following models of self-authorship from a liberal arts tradition, the activity emphasised openly exploring identity apart from external expectations. Detailed qualitative analysis reveals workshop themes of connection with one’s inner authentic self, relaxation through decompression and flow, hopefulness for the future, and non-judgment.

Interview data found the activity deeply impactful for fostering wellbeing and for envisioning deeper purpose (Sharma & Yukhymenko-Lescroart, 2018). Themes suggest the creative process allowed discovering and articulating students’ “true self” aside from daily pressures and constraints. In addition, sharing future self-portraits organically built empathy and community. Largely, the workshop activated the process of flow and through this a sense of inclusion by valuing participant’s inner lives and fostering optimism (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997).

Overall, this arts-based approach is positioned as exemplifying a conscious pedagogy – a pedagogy where experiences are intentionally designed to meet neurobiological needs such as safety, belonging, love and joy which serve as prerequisites to growth and learning. I argue a conscious pedagogy integrates critical and constructive paradigms with the potential for equity and repairing exclusion respectively (Macdonald & MacLeod, 2018).

Wider integration of self-authorship work may accelerate cultural shifts towards belonging for marginalised students and as such one must consider the scalability implications and limitations of the study. In addition, one can argue that brief interventions have limited impact without wider ecosystem cultivation. Creative sessions allow glimpses of alternate modes of learning but require support through resourcing, formal structures, and leadership messaging. Future research would involve longitudinal studies measuring identity safety and attainment after experiencing workshop interventions.

The paper poses the question: how may creative expression foster inclusion? It proposes a conceptual framework which positions the connection between the main emergent themes and how they mutually reinforce each other in a positive, virtuous cycle. Starting with a non-judgmental creative space, this enables connecting with one's authentic self. By reflecting on identity and values, individuals gained self-awareness.

This self-knowledge then gives hope and agency allowing envisioning of desired future states, fulfilling the third theme of feeling hopeful about the future. Achieving this hopeful view subsequently leads to outcomes depicted in the first theme - feeling relaxed and able to decompress. With optimism about goals and a clearer sense of identity, stress is reduced.

Finally, the lower stress and appreciation of the creative activity makes it more likely for participants to access and connect with their authentic self once more closing the reinforcing loop.

This paper proposes therefore that intentional use of emotive, imaginative pedagogies could help satisfy and motivate those discouraged and alienated by cognitive-heavy business curricula thus helping universities to address the attainment gap.

With enhanced student mobility opportunities through the European Credit Transfer & Accumulation System (ECTS), increased internationalisation, and greater diversity and inclusion of non-traditional learners, current student profiles of European Higher Education Institutions hold significant potential to be truly transformative learning environments. The curricular focus of formal programmes of study and informal learning of the hidden curriculum shape these environments within which student engagement and relationship development are critical. This doctoral research examines collegiality perceptions and experiences of third-level graduates and questions how student collegiality as a peer-to-peer engagement process can be supported throughout undergraduate business degree programmes.

Commitment to inclusive practices in higher education are increasingly associated with systemic change, for example with the development of the university for all (Fleming et al., 2023) and critique of learning strategies to engage diverse student groups (Sanger, 2020, Thomas, 2016, Trees, 2013). A curricular context emerges that prioritises the relational nature of learning and recognises the connectedness between pedagogy and assessment. Social cognitive theory consequently informs the theoretical framework underpinning this research aimed at extending a plurality perspective of higher education that matches the diversity of the student body. Curriculum is thus conceptualised as encounter, largely influenced by the seminal contributions of Maxine Greene’s expansive orientation for curriculum with a call to give voice to those silenced, to expand and deepen shared beliefs (Greene, 1993), to broaden perspectives to seize new meanings (Greene, 1977) and particularly her theorising of curriculum as always emerging “out of an interplay among conceptions of knowledge, conceptions of human beings, and conceptions of social order” (Greene, 1993: 216).

This interplay is as relevant in Europe today, where the contextuality of time and place where encounters occur is one of the complicating factors, as is the individuality, prior knowledge, and interest or disinterest, of those involved. This complexity and the consequent reimagining of curriculum as “lived experience” instead of planned programmes, is the underlying rationale for Pinar’s preference for the verb currere, to reflect the active running of the programme where curriculum is “experienced, enacted and reconstructed” (Pinar, 2011: 1). Curriculum as encounter includes individuals and groups or bodies, essentially all social actors, and extends to interaction between multiple players at the five sites of curriculum making identified by Priestley et al. (2021). Curriculum making is therefore, integrated and complex, occurring through constant interaction between these multiple sites with their inherent power dynamics, and in context-specific ways to produce unique social practices (Priestley and Philippou, 2018). While recognising the interplay of all five sites, for the purpose of this research the focus on collegiality will primarily be at the nano level (between student peers) embedded within one micro context (one academic department) to highlight the interconnected dynamics and importance of encounter between knowledge, human beings, and social order in curriculum enactment.

Collegiality as a concept holds significant potential to elucidate agentic relationships in curricular encounters in higher education. While collegiality has been studied primarily from a faculty perspective (Burnes et al., 2014, Elton, 2008, Macfarlane, 2016), this research seeks to examine perceptions of student collegiality amongst graduates to ascertain if collegiality can be supported. The work of Fielding (1999) in conceptualising a more inclusive radical collegiality points in this direction as does the work of Brown (2021) distinguishing four typologies of professional, intellectual, social, and emotional collegiality amongst doctoral students. Furthermore, the use of group assessment as the context for examining student collegiality contributes to the necessary problematisation and naivety of the assumption that successful completion of a group project or task can be equated to successfully working collectively as a group (Channon et al., 2017).

This paper is the result of international conversation and collaboration regarding outside learning, teacher preparation, and innovative curricular design in out of school learning environments. This paper explores ways in which two curriculum scholars are “rewilding” curriculum through two distinct projects that critique existing curricular and school based patterns, and present viable alternatives to the restrictive environments often experienced by students in traditional classrooms. Rewilding, an idea in land conservation that restores an area to its natural and uncultivated state, is viewed here as a curricular concept – focusing on the innate learning that happens within experience, with minimal “management” from educators.

Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It's about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes (Rewilding Europe, 2022). This serves as both a substantive concept addressed in the Boundary Waters Teacher Institute, as well as a metaphor examined through a curricular lens. What might it look like to “rewild” our curricular practices? How is curricular practice in school damaged? How has teacher curricular practice been degraded in American schools? How might we draw upon curricular orientations that nurture the innate curiosity of the learner (problem based, integrated, embodied) in schools?

The first project is a Cyprus based forest school, research and resource center that gives the opportunity to children to experience a nature-based curriculum, in a serene environment, amongst trees, hills, and ponds. The soil, stones, branches, leaves, wood, and the sky are part of their classroom and their learning material. Observation, exploration, inquiry, building, crafting, trying out possibilities, risk-taking, playing, are part of their experiential learning journey. The forest school also gives the opportunity to teachers to explore ways to create a rich, natural learning environment for the children to unleash their potential through natural installations and set up of the environment in a multitude of ways.

The second project is a teacher professional development program in the United States that takes place in the Boundary Waters Canoe and Wilderness Area (BWCA) in northern Minnesota. The program presents a developing theoretical conceptualization of curriculum that may provide insight towards 1) reclaiming the innate spirit of wonder and learning found through experience and 2) embracing an approach that serves ecological mindedness by seeking an interdependence of knowledges.

The weeklong wilderness program takes place in the Boundary Waters Canoe and Wilderness Area (BWCA) in northern Minnesota, an area that includes over one million acres of undeveloped and ‘wild’ land. This serves as a meaningful backdrop in which to ponder the meaning of ecological and justice oriented curriculum, as well as the limits of protection absent a meaningful land ethic to guide human action and human systems. Most importantly, the experience affords practicing teachers to meaningfully reflect on what it means to integrate relevant knowledges through an experience.