Birmingham Business School Education Conference

Led by Vasco Alves, Helen Brain, and Anupam Mehta 

The modern business school faces many challenges and opportunities in delivering high-quality, inclusive education that prepares students for the complex and dynamic world of business. How can we adopt innovative and responsible strategies to enhance our teaching practices and student employability? How can we leverage the power of technology, practical sessions, assessment, and feedback to create engaging and effective learning experiences? How can we create an inclusive environment for a diverse student group?  

This track invites submissions from colleagues to explore issues related to innovative pedagogy, assessment and feedback, and developing inclusive learning environments. We invite contributions that explore, but are not limited to, the following issues and questions:   

Innovative pedagogy   

• How can student engagement and skills development be optimised by experiential learning approaches, such as case studies, simulations, role-playing exercises, internships, and consulting projects?  

• How can emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, digital games, and online platforms be effectively used to create interactive learning experiences? 
• What strategies can be used to promote collaborative learning to enhance students' communication, problem-solving, and leadership skills? 
• How can we use innovative teaching approaches to integrate sustainability and social responsibility into curricula? 

Assessment and feedback   

• How can we use authentic assessment practices, such as case studies, simulations, capstone projects, project and fieldwork to promote deeper learning and skills development?  
• How can assessment tasks be designed to promote equity and accommodate diverse learning styles and preferences? 
• How can technology-enhanced assessment tools streamline the assessment process, provide actionable insights, and support data-driven decision-making? 
• How to provide effective and efficient feedback for student's performance improvement?  

Creating an inclusive environment  

• How can we create inclusive and culturally responsive learning environments? 
• What challenges do students from marginalised groups face and how can adapting innovative teaching practices help them? 
• How can we support student well-being through our teaching and learning practices? 

Led by Sharin McDowall-Emefiele, Sarah Percy, and Edward Turner

In the rapidly evolving and dynamic global landscape, there is an increasing pressure on higher education institutions to respond to the new demands for future-ready graduates. This challenges some traditional teaching and learning practices, emphasizing the need to integrate more innovative and creative cross-disciplinary solutions.  Graduates are entering workplaces that are undergoing major changes, driven by forces such as artificial intelligence (AI), new ways of working (remote/4-day working weeks/the gig economy) and an increased emphasis on equality, diversity, and inclusion. This track aims to bring together key stakeholders to help better understand these challenges and discuss how they can work together to identify solutions.    

We are looking for contributions that explore the following issues and questions:  

Future Ready Graduates  

• How can universities ensure key skills are embedded in curriculum/module design? 
• Is there a need for stand-alone employability skills modules or is embedding enough? 
• How can we develop students' knowledge and skills in equality, diversity and inclusion? 
• How can universities adapt to the rapidly changing technological landscape to ensure students are work ready? 
• What practical examples can be showcased to share good practice? 

Cross-Disciplinary Solutions/Innovations  

• How can different discipline areas work together to identify innovative and creative solutions to wicked problems? 
• How can industry/practice be bought into the classroom? 
• What barriers exist in designing and implementing cross-disciplinary solutions/innovations and how can these be overcome? 
• What practical examples can be showcased to share good practice? 
• What empirical support can be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of new teaching innovations in enhancing student learning outcomes? 

An Industry Perspective on Employability Skills 

• What core skills are employers wanting graduates to demonstrate?  
• Is there a gap in skills expectations between industry and academia? 
• How can academia and industry collaborate to ensure any skills gap is identified and closed? 
• What practical solutions can be showcased to share good practice?  

Led by Caroline Chapain and Adam Nix 

An increasing number of Business Schools across the World are now looking at the way they can implement responsible management education to support a more sustainable approach to managing and doing business and equip future graduates to respond to the grand challenges that organisations face today. Like Birmingham Business School (BBS), more than 800 Business Schools are signed up to the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME).     

Responsible management/business education and learning (RMLE) is about embedding reflections about ethics, responsibility and sustainability into business school educational practices and ask students to consider how they can become responsible individuals in organisations and how organisations can be managed responsibly. A key part of this learning is about practicing moral reflexive practice i.e. “a way of being that involves questioning who we are in the world and how we can act in responsible and ethical ways” (Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015: 180). As such, RMLE promotes the development of a responsible management mindset i.e. a way of being/becoming, thinking/knowing, doing and interacting/living with others based on a relational model of learning i.e. self in the World & how it comes together in situ/in practice (Sunley & Coleman, 2016; Cunliffe et al., 2020; Gosling and Grodecki, 2020). It means moving away from a traditional way of teaching that is teacher-centered, descriptive, prescriptive focusing on profit maximisation and individualism and favouring more passive teaching methods to an experiential, holistic, student-centered, active, critical and reflective/reflexive pedagogy promoting an emancipatory and transformational approach to management.  As such, responsible management and business education involves modifying the curriculum, but also making changes in research practices, pedagogies, organisational strategies, and extra-curriculum activities. (Moosmayer et al., 2020: xxvii). This is reflected in the seven principles of PRME: purpose, values, teach, research, partner, practice and share.    

BBS’s commitment to decolonisation within business education falls within RMLE, as it asks academics, professional services staff and students to undertake moral reflexive practice. This acts to identify, disrupt, challenge and overturn colonial legacies and inequalities, and the resulting structural exclusion (often unconscious) of racialized and other nondominant voices in Business Schools. Importantly for this track, this includes the context of academic curriculum and pedagogical approach, where the valuation of certain topics and methods of teaching over others can be challenged (Monzó and SooHoo, 2014). For example, there is a growing recognition that various indigenous ways of thinking, traditionally marginalised as a result of European colonisation, are inherently based on a relational ontology between humans and nature that fosters sustainable and ethical ways of being, thinking, doing and interacting that can inform responsible business and management theories, approaches and education.   

Building on these issues and debates, we are looking for contributions that explore the following issues and questions:    

Promoting a responsible management mindset through RMLE  

• How can we transform our learning environments by integrating responsible management concepts and practices into our curriculum and pedagogy and do so contextually?  

• How can we foster responsible purpose and moral reflexive practice amongst business school staff and students?  

• How can business schools, business school staff and students engage more fully with the development of a responsible and/or sustainable mindset and with complex thinking?   

• How can arts or other experiential pedagogical tools be used to foster responsible management education and learning?   

• How can we partner with external organisations in practicing responsible management education and learning?   

• How can we support students’ awareness and employability towards jobs and occupations in relation with sustainable and responsible management?  

• What approaches and mechanisms can we use to develop communities of practice within the Business School environment both internally and externally?  

Decolonisation and responsible management education and learning (RMLE)  

• How can we foster decolonial thinking and practice in Responsible Management Education and Learning?  

• How can we better take into account identities, power, and inequalities in our societies and how these play out in the classroom?  

• How can we better accommodate for a greater range in ways of thinking around responsible management and business in the curriculum in terms of both content and pedagogy?  

• How can we better account for history, socio-political and cultural contexts and colonial legacies in RMLE?  

• How can we foster shared learning around decolonial thinking and practice in RMLE?