The Global Challenge for Accounting Education

Abstract

Accounting and education are both global phenomena, and there is thus an argument that accounting education should be consistent and comparable across the globe. However, accounting, and accounting education are all socially constructed and globally they have been influenced by their historical, social, economic, political and cultural contexts. This has resulted in many fragmented, heterogeneous communities of practice and many diverse audiences or stakeholders with their own interests and legitimation strategies. There is thus a problem for accounting education to be defined, and to coalesce to one world model that fits the needs of all nations. However, global accounting education can adopt similar learning objectives by using constructivist, experiential and situated learning approaches that are embedded in to the learning programme. The International Education Standards (IES) of the IAESB should be revised to embed these three learning approaches, and IFAC and the IAESB should adopt various strategies to gain pragmatic legitimacy for its education standards.

Key Words:

• International education standards
• accounting education
• constructive learning
• situated learning
• experiential learning
• legitimacy of the IAESB

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues Louise Crawford, Elizabeth Monk and Monica Veneziani with whom I have been working with for many years for all our fruitful discussions and joint research that has allowed me to come to the views that I have expressed in this paper. I would also like to thank the IAAER, ACCA and ICAS for all their help and support over the last few years. Any errors contained within the paper, however, are my own.

Notes

1 The accounting and finance areas have seven topics, the organizational and business section covers 10 topics and the IT area covers five topics.