Pragmatic postmodernism and engagement through the culture of continuous creativity

ABSTRACT

In order to engage students who have difficulty with the dominant world-view presented by accounting, or who have negative views of accounting, a different approach to teaching is required. We developed the concept of pragmatic postmodernism in the teaching of accounting to merge a postmodern teaching philosophy with the constraints and realities of teaching accounting. It represents an attempt to synthesise the individual learning needs of contemporary students who have difficulty accepting the dominant world-view of accounting with the constraints inherent in the resourcing, architecture and systems surrounding the teaching of accounting. The purpose of this research is to describe the thinking behind a pragmatic postmodern approach to the teaching of accounting. We provide examples of teaching approaches consistent with pragmatic postmodernism, that we have used successfully in our teaching to engage students who might otherwise be disengaged in their learning because of their rejection of the dominant world-view of accounting. In keeping with the philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism, we do not offer a magical panacea but an approach to thinking about teaching that seeks to prioritise the individual learning experience while remaining cognisant of the many constraints on the teaching of accounting.

KEYWORDS:

• Creativity
• engagement
• postmodern education
• pragmatic postmodernism
• student engagement
• teaching innovation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank participants at the RMIT Accounting Educators’ Conference 2016 for their helpful comments. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions which led to improvements in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Frances Miley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5706-6372

Andrew Read http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3473-6684

Notes

1 Slang for ‘language’.