Editorial

Imagine if everything we thought we knew about business and management education was wrong. What if business and management education was not built on evidence about effective methods but was rather built on generations of custom and practice? What if business and management education offered a student experience that was, when you take away virtual learning environments, powerpoint and the odd prezi, pretty much the same experience as 10, 20 or 30 years ago? What if we do things in business and management education because we have always done those things, because we shy away from the new and innovative as they involve risks we’re not willing to take, because it’s just a whole lot easier to do things the way we have always done things? What if we use the peculiarities and specifics of business and management education, like large cohorts, as an excuse for not changing our practice rather than a reason? What if everything we thought we knew about management education was wrong?

Welcome to this first edition of Business and Management Education in HE.

Stewart Lee, the 41^st best stand-up comedian in the UK, once talked about the frustrations of arguing with a taxi driver who, when confronted with counter-evidence, responded that “you can prove anything you want with facts”. Of course you can’t prove anything with facts but you can prove more with facts than you can without. But facts require evidence and evidence is not something in short supply in management education specifically or higher education generally. In the UK, for example, we now have data from the National Student Survey, HESA Key Information Sets, module evaluations (quantitative and qualitative), league tables from the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times and the Good Universities Guide (and probably others) and this is on top of the data we have always had about student demographics, assessment, performance, progression, good and bad degrees, entry tariffs and on and on. In the United States, there is much that is similar and ratemyprofessor.com. Europe, Asia and Australasia all have something that is both similar and different. Evidence is everywhere but transforming that evidence into meaning and that meaning into facts, well that’s something different entirely.

How close is the relationship between all of this evidence and our practice? We have evidence about our practice – what works and doesn’t work, what is effective and ineffective, what facilitates and what frustrates – but that is not the same as having evidence which informs our practice and, therefore, having practices in management education that are driven by evidence. In this new era of big data about everything, when analytics is applied what often comes out of the process is that the practice may be wrong or that there just may be a better way of doing things. In a fascinating book about football (which you should read whether or not you like or understand the game), Kuper and Szymanski (2012) show that so many established truths are really half-truths or downright falsehoods and they are everywhere from the financing of the game to the running of clubs, the managing of teams and the tactical decisions before and during a match. When established wisdom, custom and practice and the way we do things comes into collision with serious and detailed analysis the serious and detailed analysis usually wins.

This is, though, not really a new idea. Almost a quarter of a century ago, Ernest Boyer (1990) argued for a scholarship of teaching in which teaching is recognised, rewarded, scrutinised and justified in the same way as research. And why not? The two central planks of academic work are teaching and research but why should only one of them be subject to the rigours of enquiry into validity and reliability? If we’re happy, or at least acquiescent, in having our research judged as 1, 2, 3 or 4*, or are content to see it boiled down into an impact factor so precise it runs to two decimal points, then why not do the same for our teaching? Before we submit our research to be scrutinised by at least two of our peers, we make sure that the rigour is there, that the methodological approach is thought through and rationalised, that the outcomes are clearly measured and articulated so why don’t we have the same mechanisms for our teaching? If we’re not carrying a six-figure research grant, what duty do we owe to the people who actually pick up the tab for our academic work?

At the danger of this opening editorial becoming a manifesto, not that that would necessarily be a bad thing, what is this journal for? Paulson (2001) suggests that the scholarship of teaching and learning may have 10 different characteristics and we will probably be focusing on three of them. First, this journal will aim to examine, interpret and share practice. Teaching frequently takes place behind closed doors as an almost private experience shared by the teacher and student and so much that is good, inspiring, challenging and motivating goes unnoticed. Teaching may well take place in the moment, at times you probably do have to be there to really understand what happened but how can we learn from it if we don’t share. Michael Caine was spoke about no actor having an individual style but rather being an amalgam of everything they have seen other actors do; the great actors are those that see what others do and adopt and adapt it for their own uses. Maybe we can do the same and create some more great teachers. Second, we’ll try and be at the forefront of innovation and impact. A lot of teaching maybe custom and practice but a lot of teaching is also built on imagination and creativity and we will look at that and see how it impacts on both ourselves as teachers and pedagogues and also on our students. And that impact on students raises the final aim and that is to examine the relationship between teaching and learning or rather the relationships between teaching and learning. My guess is that there is a link between teaching and learning but that link is often assumed, frequently implicit and, more often than not, fuzzy and not direct or absolutely causal.

Business and Management Education in HE will be a place for debate and discussion, where ideas, practice and theory will be presented and challenged, hopefully with good temper and moderation but maybe not always. The plan is that nothing should be beyond limits, there should be no sacred cows or unchallenged assumptions and any ideas that share the twin characteristics of being interesting and rigorous can find a home here. There are no philosophical predispositions, this is a journal for positivists and phenomenologists and so we will have a methodological blend of hard numbers, analysis through words and action cases of learning through doing.

As someone who has long passed their 20^th year as an academic, my career has gone through a host of different stages. I was once a researcher who resented teaching for getting in the way and then became a researcher who was glad that teaching offered a break from the almost endless literature reviewing and number crunching. From being a researcher who taught, I became a teacher who researched and have ended up as something approaching a pedagogue. This is not a journey that everyone can or should or will want to take but it has bought me to a place that isn’t lonely but rather is full of people, like-minded and otherwise, who have something interesting and important to say about the practice of management education. My manifesto is not that everyone should become like us but rather that we have things to say about teaching that are valuable and so it is worthwhile engaging with us. Business and Management Education in HE will provide evidence that can and should inform your practice and will do so on as wide a variety of topics as you could maybe imagine. And if your imagination runs ahead of us, then maybe take a break from writing about the practice and theory of business and management and write about the practice and theory of teaching it instead. You might even like it.