Moving beyond experts’ answers: unmasking silences of the social in management accounting courses

ABSTRACT

Two U.S. accounting educators reflect on their experiences deploying resources in a manner that highlights human elements that have traditionally been downplayed in cost/management accounting pedagogy. Structured as a critical essay and a field report, the authors ground their discussion in perspectives from Freirean (1972) pedagogy and Hirschauer’s (2006) work on the “silences of the social.” Conventional assurance of learning protocols, content specification guidelines for certification programs, and statements from accounting professional bodies influence accounting educators to deliver “appropriate”, objectively measurable, and seemingly neutral information based on current rules and best practices. A limitation of this approach is that the most important issues in a society may be those where either (1) a consensus on best practice has not yet been determined or (2) positions favored by authorities are less than optimal for some members of society. The primary contribution of the paper is to render visible “silences of the social” that mask subjective human aspects embedded in management accounting pedagogy. The authors’ tentative recommendation is that critical thinking elements should be introduced early in the curriculum and not reserved for the masters’ level.

KEYWORDS:

• Cost accounting
• management accounting
• accounting education
• Freirean pedagogy
• critical thinking
• debate

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• I20
• I21
• I23
• M41

Acknowledgements

We would like to express thanks to the Editors (Giovanna Michelon and Sheila Killian) and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. In addition to the support of the dean and faculty at our home institution, we owe a special thanks to our students for their willingness to explore accounting through multiple lenses.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The issue does not merely arise from within the accounting profession but is indicative of broader social technological issues. Healy (1999) noted that digital resources are associated with students’ waning ability to make discriminations between shades of gray. Others argue modern parenting styles discourage independent decision making (Cline & Fay, 1990; Pricer, 2008; Hodgkinson, 2009; Somers & Stettle, 2010; Ward et al., 2017; Carr, 2017).

2 Pacioli video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoTc3wLTqkk); Others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrfVhZwrqfo;(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdbO7ZSc4B4); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47KI96R4Hps.

3 http://aaahq.org/Portals/0/documents/Website-FinalListofRetractedArticles-6-25-15.pdf

4 Debate has long been recognized as an essential skill for recognizing fallacies of logic and to influence others (Seo, 2022). The debate format used in this class loosely followed a framework developed by Timothy West, Lisa Roth, and Yanelly Vellegas of Northern Illinois University which received Honorable Method for the 2014 Mark Chain/FSA Teaching Innovation Award.