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Students wishing to pursue careers in international business, notably in the developing world, must be prepared for complex, unpredictable, uncomfortable, and messy realities, and to collaborate with others very different from themselves. Mainstream business school learning environments are generally highly structured, cognitively oriented, predictable and hence not particularly conducive to orchestrating the disruptive experiences that can develop such abilities. In this article, we show how a field-based course in an East African country can support such learning. Based on data gathered from students over several iterations of the field course, we draw on experiential learning theory (ELT) in showing how the top-down orchestration of the course constituted a learning space that produced three main types of disruption to students' taken-for-granted habits and assumptions, namely: intense sensory impressions and sensations, loss of predictability and control, and learning interdependency on others. Students had to "bottom-up" manage these disruptions while conducting a group assignment with local students, to a tight deadline, producing "dissonances"--feelings of discomfort--that triggered the ELT cycle. Our findings show that such disruptions can foster learning of the abovementioned abilities; and we suggest ways in which such learning spaces might be created closer to home than East Africa.

The so-called 'hidden curriculum' (HC) is often presented as a counterproductive element in education, and many scholars argue that it should be eliminated, by being made explicit, in education in general and specifically in higher education (HE). The problem of the HC has not been solved by the transition from a teacher-centered education to a student-centered educational model that takes the student's experience as the starting point of learning. In this article we turn to several philosophers of education (Dewey, Kohlberg, Whitehead, Peters and Knowles) to propose that HC can be made explicit in HE when the teacher recognizes and lives his/her teaching as a personal issue, not merely a technical one; and that the students' experience of the learning process is not merely individual but emerges through their interpersonal relationship with the teacher. We suggest ways in which this interpersonal relationship can be strengthened despite current challenges in HE.

Research on academic activism tends to foreground vociferous and explicit forms of activism that pursue predefined political agendas. Against this backdrop, this article proposes that academic activism can take more subtle forms. Writing as an academic activist collective, we unpack what subtle activism might look like within the context of contemporary academia. We use Foucault's concept of heterotopia to argue that subtle activism can expand the space of what is possible in academia today by experimenting with quietly unsettling norms rather than overtly opposing or rejecting them. We offer a set of principles that might underpin a subtle activist agenda, extrapolated from practices from colleagues and from own activist collective. We hope that these principles may serve to inspire other academics wishing to engage in subtle activism by unsettling everyday practices that discreetly challenge the status quo, thereby contributing to gently shifting the agenda for how it is possible to conduct intellectual work in the contemporary neoliberal university context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes an approach, broadly inspired by culturally inclusive pedagogy, to facilitate international student academic adaptation based on rendering tacit aspects of local learning cultures explicit to international full degree students, rather than adapting them. Preliminary findings are presented from a focus group-based exploratory study of international student experiences at different stages of their studies at a Danish business school, one of Denmark's most international universities. The data show how a major source of confusion for these students has to do with the tacit logics and expectations that shape how the formal steps of the learning cycle are understood and enacted locally, notably how learning and assessment moments are defined and related to one another. Theoretically, the article draws on tacit knowledge and sense-making theories to analyse student narratives of their encounter with the Danish system. A framework is offered to help teachers conceptualise, and excavate, the tacit dimensions of local learning culture of which they may not be aware, and reflects on how and when these might best be communicated to international students.

This article argues that mainstreaming responsible management education in line with the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) requires close attention to the hidden curriculum (HC), that is, the implicit dimensions of educational experiences. Altering formal curricular goals and content alone is not enough to improve students' sense of social responsibility. Business schools are conceptualized in this article as multilevel learning environments comprising various message sites where students undergo moral learning and socialization processes. Using perspectives from HC research combined with transformative learning and communities of practice theory, the article offers an inquiry-based framework for PRME implementation that takes these moral learning and socialization processes into account. It provides suggestions for how to address the hidden curriculum both in the diagnostic phase of assessing a school's PRME needs and in the implementation phase where PRME is integrated into business school learning environments. The concept of "meta-messages" is introduced to account for how students apprehend the HC at business schools. (Contains 6 notes and 2 figures.)

This article explores how the concept of reflexivity is used in intercultural education. Reflexivity is often presented as a key learning goal in acquiring intercultural competence (ICC). Yet, reflexivity can be defined in different ways, and take different forms across time and space, depending on the concepts of selfhood that prevail and how notions of difference are constructed. First, I discuss how the dominant usages of reflexivity in intercultural education reflect and reproduce a Cartesian view of the self that shapes how ICC is conceptualized and taught. I discuss three assumptions that this view produces: that the self is accessible and transcendable, that reflexivity is universal across space and time, and that the self can act as its own remedial change agent or "inner consultant." I argue that because reflexivity is understood in many different ways, attention to definition is crucial, both in designing learning objectives in intercultural education and in devising ways to attain them. Greater attention is also needed in intercultural education to the ways in which selfhood, and hence also reflexivity and constructions of difference, differ across space and time. (Contains 6 notes.)

This article uses life course theory and family bargaining theory to explore how decisions over schooling are negotiated in poorer Mexican families for whom compulsory basic education is a luxury. It explores educational decision making by conceptualizing education in terms of the way it meshes with other social relations and institutions across the life span. This article is based on a case study of a public "secundaria" (lower secondary school) located in a marginal area on the outskirts of Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. Although the data were collected from one school, the theoretical framework proposed is intended to be informative for schools and populations sharing similar conditions, namely, economic insecurity that makes it hard for parents to plan ahead to support their children's schooling or to invest in their own futures, lack of integrated social security mechanisms that facilitate school attendance and support households across the life span, and a system that delegates responsibility for guaranteeing educational rights to families but in which failure to attend school is not formally sanctioned. (Contains 16 footnotes.)

The paper highlights the importance of affectivity in school retention in public secondary schools in Guadalajara, Mexico, in a socioeconomic context where the students themselves often decide whether to stay in school or to drop out. In such contexts, students' feelings towards the school and the teachers can become crucial in deciding whether to persist with school or not, especially when they are already under pressure due to economic difficulties and other family pressures. Yet currently, pressures to achieve efficiency in schools limit staff capacity to establish more personal contact with students. The article looks at how three key spaces within Mexican secondaries could potentially reinforce one another to help attend to students' emotional well-being, but also points to obstacles that currently prevent these spaces from being used in a constructive way.

Based on qualitative data generated during a faculty development program for teachers of first-year students at a Danish business school, we explore teachers' reflections about tactically mobilizing different positions in teaching situations. We propose that positioning theory offers a promising tool for understanding teachers' assumptions about their professional identities and, when used in faculty development programs, can strengthen teachers' awareness that they can situationally orchestrate pedagogy by purposefully shifting between different positions. Over time, this awareness may help to develop teachers' situational wisdom. We introduce the concept of "pedagogical positioner" to capture this meta-positioning skill. We further identify three positions that teachers can adopt when teaching first-year students: the content expert, the learning facilitator, and the supportive caregiver. Based on positioning theory, we conceptualize the discursive positions, storylines, and rights and duties that emerge in teachers' accounts of these shifts. Finally, we discuss the advantages and limitations of reflexive and interactive positioning in teaching, and suggest how awareness about different positions might be fostered through faculty development programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines a conceptual framework for conceptualising students’ experiences of curricular space from an aesthetic perspective. The curriculum is conceived as a three-dimensional, aesthetic artefact that elicits sensory responses and judgements about meaning that can impact learning. Space is conceived in terms of three dimensions that may either be produced or foreclosed by curricular structures and content: time-space dimension, autonomy dimension, reflective dimension and cognitive dimension. Together, these spaces enable imaginative space, which is important for innovative and creative thinking. The Japanese concept of ma is proposed as a fruitful way of thinking about space in curricula not as wasteful, inefficient or a mere void to be filled but as the element that enables learning to result from exposing students to structures and content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]