Transforming accounting curricula to enhance integrative learning

Abstract

Higher education is fundamental to the accounting profession. However, increased competition, the need to shape responsible global citizens and global influences impacting the profession have highlighted weaknesses in existing accounting curricula with regard to non-technical skills, professional values and ethics. This paper reports on an approach to improve student learning in a first-year undergraduate accounting subject through scholarship of teaching and learning and critical participatory action research. The paper highlights the importance of embedding opportunities for integrative learning in accounting curricula to enable students' developing professional competencies and lifelong learning. It also provides a model for accounting educators to enhance integrative capabilities in their courses through engagement with scholarly research on teaching.

Teaching sustainability: complexity and compromises

“…This perception aligns with literature that identifies experiential learning or learning-by-doing activities as important sustainability education mechanisms (Figueiro and Raufflet, 2015; Dean et al , 2018). Data indicate that all interviewed educators considered sustainability as a complex process and aimed to develop and implement active, student-centric teaching strategies that support the development of a holistic and integrated understanding of sustainability in business.…”

“…These, as Schön (1987, p. 8) puts it, are "premised on technical rationality" and not always suited to addressing complex issues. In the accounting discipline, e.g., curricula has traditionally focused on the teaching of technical knowledge: accounting education therefore lacks opportunity to address social transformation and transferable skills (Dean et al, 2018;Bayerlein, 2015). One educator expressed the problem as follows: 'It was a challenge just to design an appropriate curriculum [on] necessitating training and support for educators to ensure that existing sustainability frameworks are well understood, and suitably integrated into existing curricula (Cebrian and Junyent, 2015).…”

“…Underpinning this pedagogical approach is experiential learning theory, whereby students build on existing knowledge through constructing new knowledge through engagement in social activities and experiences with the world (Kolb, 1984). Experiential learning has long been upheld as theoretically informing higher education practices, and more recently has been supported as valuable for business education (see Gonzalez-Perez et al , 2019) and more specifically for sustainability education (for example, Dean et al , 2018; Perkiss et al , 2018).…”

Mediating Effect of Students' Perception and Satisfaction on the Relationship of Learning Environment and Accounting Career

“…Factors in a learning environment significantly influence students' intention to have a career in the accounting field, as these research findings are curriculum, lecturer competency, and intensity of lecturer and student interaction. Dean et al (2018) have emphasized the contemporary accounting curriculum constructed with an integrative approach so that students comprehend how accounting role in society and later get influenced to have a career in the accounting field.…”

Advancing Sustainability Education in Business Studies through Digital Service Learning

“…In recent years, there has been a global call for business, accounting and management education (herein, business education) to undergo curriculum transformation to account for the ever-increasing need for sustainability education (Bayerlein 2015;Boyce 2004;Dean et al 2018a;Saravanamuthu 2015). Higher education professionals are faced with the complexity of designing curricular that engages students in sustainability issues and that develops core competencies to prepare graduates for organisational sustainability challenges (Cebrian and Junyent 2015).…”