Teaching note – Critical pedagogies: practical examples from the marketing classroom

ABSTRACT

Through five empirical accounts of critical teaching practices, this note addresses how we can teach and seeks to understand the strategies and approaches employed by marketing scholars to incorporate critical and moral reflection into the marketing curriculum, and be more critical and imaginative in reshaping marketing practices in the face of current challenges. The pedagogic examples offered acknowledge the powerful potential of the marketing classroom in developing critical and creative mindsets of future leaders and practitioners. These illustrations of the passion and creativity of marketing teachers can inspire colleagues to experiment with and develop their ideas in the classroom, and offer a model for sharing experiences that we hope may encourage more colleagues to do likewise.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical pedagogy
• student engagement
• critical thinking
• ethics
• societal change
• access

Acknowledgement

As a member of the NIPE research group, the second author acknowledges the support from National Funds of the FCT – Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology within the project UIDB/03182/2020.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Access

You can search for the Tales of Consumption podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or listen here: https://www.spreaker.com/show/tales-of-consumption

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mona Moufahim

Mona Moufahim is a Senior Lecturer in the Marketing & Retail division of Stirling Management School, University of Stirling. Her current research combines consumer research, politics and marketing to further an understanding of the social, economic, political and environmental implications of religious tourism. She is also interested in the mechanisms of power and resistance at the interface of market institutions and consumer-citizens (with a particular focus on marginalized communities). Her work has been published in journals including Organisation Theory, Tourism Management, Marketing Theory, Journal of Marketing Management. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the Research Committee of the Academy of Marketing.

Teresa Heath

Teresa Heath is an Associate Professor with Habilitation in marketing at the University of Minho, prior to which she lectured at the University of Nottingham. She is a member of the research group NIPE. Her research focuses on transformative marketing and its intersection with sustainability, consumption and education. Her recent and ongoing research projects look at meanings of consumption, care and ethics. Her work has been published widely, including in the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Marketing Theory, European Journal of Marketing and Management Learning. She is a member of the Education Committee of the Academy of Marketing and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Lisa O’Malley

Lisa O’Malley is an experienced educator who champions critical and creative approaches to pedagogy. Central to this is an appreciation that students are human beings and citizens of the world, and not simply customers of a university or future marketing practitioners. Consequently, students benefit from participating in engaging classroom experiences that stimulates their thinking and provides them with opportunities to interact with the world more reflexively.

Katherine Casey

Katherine Casey is a lecturer at Kent Business School, University of Kent. She holds PhD in Marketing from the University of Limerick and was an Environmental Protection Agency Postdoctoral Fellow for two years. Her research takes a critical perspective on sustainable consumption, production and disposal, the ethics of consumption, community-based initiatives, alternative food consumption, alternative food networks. Her research interests lie at the nexus of politics and marketing, where consumption becomes political, and politics are manifest in the everyday.

Janice Denegri-Knott

Janice Denegri-Knott is Associate Editor of Marketing Theory and co-editor of the Journal of Promotional Communications. She is Professor of Consumer Culture & Behaviour at Bournemouth University where she teaches Consumer Insights. She is also Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg. Her research interests span from conceptualising and documenting digital consumption and its practices, the emergence of media technology, and more generally the subject of power in consumer and marketing research. Her work has been published in journals including Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Theory, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Consumer Culture, Consumption, Markets & Culture and the European Journal of Marketing.

Alev Kuruoglu

Alev Kuruoglu is an Associate Professor with the Consumption, Culture and Commerce research unit at the University of Southern Denmark. Her main research and teaching interests lie within the political, spatial, and affective dimensions of markets and consumer cultures. Her research attends to various intersections of gender, social class, ethnicity, and center-periphery dynamics and the role of technologies in market-mediated contexts such as gyms, healthcare, music scenes, food spaces, and craft communities. Her work has been published in marketing and sociology journals as well as in edited peer-reviewed books. She co-hosts the Tales of Consumption podcast

Ismini Pavlopoulou

Ismini Pavlopoulou is a Lecturer in Digital Marketing at the University of Stirling. Her doctoral research focused on implementing gamification in social marketing programmes, using online gamified services for physical activity, and explored consumer engagement, motivation and value perceptions in such platforms. She has published in the area of gamified servicescapes, and her current research interests involve e-sportsmanship, digital health, digital inclusion, accessibility and wellbeing among diverse consumer groups.

Anuja Pradhan

Anuja Pradhan is an Assistant Professor at the Consumption, Culture and Commerce group at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. She has a PhD in Marketing from Lancaster University, UK. Her research interests include minority consumers’ marketplace interactions, taste making, and media & cultural studies, with a focus on ethnicity, gender, and social class. She teaches and supervises Masters and Bachelors students on subjects like Consumption Studies and Advanced Marketing Communications. Her research has been published in Marketing Theory, Journal of Customer Behaviour and Research in Consumer Culture Theory.