Highlights
Abstract
Keywords
1. Introduction
2. Literature review
3. Methods and data
4. Results
5. Discussion
Appendix A. . Descriptive details of participants
References
Abstract
This paper reports on a teaching innovation using participant-generated drawings. Experienced managers were asked to produce a drawing to illustrate their work from an accounting perspective. The drawings were then used to make the managerial context of the participants the explicit starting point for personalized executive learning. This study is the first in the sphere of accounting education and research to take drawing seriously as a learning method. The results of the experiment show how drawing can be further used as a tool in management education by facilitating the visualization of the managerial contexts participants work within.
1. Introduction
This paper reports on a teaching innovation in the field of accounting and managerial work. Participants in an executive MBA accounting course completed a learning assignment using visualization, which involved experienced managers producing a drawing to illustrate their managerial work from an accounting perspective. This article aims to contribute to the literature by exploring the potential of drawing as a novel pedagogical approach in management education, a field accused of being overly focused on traditional teaching models and approaches (e.g., Asik-Dizdar, 2015, Bennis and O’toole, 2005, Khurana, 2007, Mintzberg, 2004, Pfeffer and Fong, 2002, David et al., 2011, Rubin and Dierdorff, 2009, Miley and Read, 2018, Minocha et al., 2017). More specifically, despite recent innovations (e.g., Krom and Williams, 2011, Tucker, 2017), the accounting elements of MBA programs have also been criticized for a lack of innovativeness (e.g., Böer, 2000, Hermanson et al., 1998). The critical importance of accounting education research and utilizing its findings to develop teaching has been highlighted as one area in need of improvement (Ravenscroft et al., 2008, Rebele and St Pierre, 2015).