Reflections on teaching
Before joining academia, I worked for seven years as a professional marketing manager in a market research consultancy firm, and for the Mexican flagship airline, Mexicana Airlines. These professional experiences revealed a disappointing insight about marketing education, which is that textbook marketing and actual marketing practice differ significantly. This insight motivated my teaching approach to reduce the gap between classroom and practice.
My teaching inspiration rests upon both my experience doing marketing and the teachers that encouraged me to become a lifelong learner. From both, I learned to see problems from multiple angles, apply theories to practice, and think critically. I apply these learnings to my teaching practice. Students are encouraged to think like experts using evidence, theory, and their expertise. Students are active learners when they co-create practical knowledge framing problems, using evidence to solve them and become reflexive managers with an interest in lifelong learning.
I began teaching at Aalto University in 2015 (Finland), after completing my doctorate at Hanken School of Economics. As soon as I started teaching, I questioned how to innovate in a field in which textbooks and practice differ. A set of questions guided my teaching approach. How can students put into action what they learn in my class? How to teach students with work experience? How to foster student engagement? How to develop theoretical and practical expertise? To answer these questions, I drew from the literature on andragogy, how adults learn, as opposed to pedagogy, and how children learn. Adults learn better when they reflect upon their current professional problems or through curiosity.
During my teaching career, I have worked toward transforming my class into an andragogical learning space in which students mobilize both, scientific and practical rationalities. I believe that blending both rationalities help students to become reflexive practitioners. While the current education approach emphasizes technical competence alone, the world needs business leaders who are responsible managers, life-long learners, and critical thinkers. In today’s world of post-truth, uncertainty, and social inequality, the responsibility of business leaders must go beyond the quarterly revenues of their firms. Instead, we must educate reflexive managers that are aware of how their actions affect the lives of real people.
My teaching method
Marketing, advertising, and consumer research are applied disciplines – they must be actionable. This means that marketing managers should be able to solve unique practical problems for which there cannot be general answers. The question, thus, is how does one teach actionable knowledge? I
approach this question in my teaching by blending two contrasting onto-epistemological rationalities: scientific and practical.
Scientific rationality is concerned with objectivity, and thus requires teaching abstract, universal, standard, and generalizable propositions – including rules, models, and formulae. In contrast, proponents of practical rationality argue that the act of knowing implies active participation in, rather than detachment from, the world. The practical rationality approach rests upon the works of prominent educational theorist John Dewey who accords primacy to the understandings and judgments that emerge from immersion in the world. Practical knowledge is both representational and emergent, involving the ability to classify situations in ways that go beyond the textbook and thus broaden what counts as experience. Practical knowledge is not just cognitive but embodied and enacted; hence, it is never fully or even likely to become codified.
While university-level education focuses on scientific rationality, dismissing practical rationality is limiting. Scientific rationality suggests that educators should aim to equip students with a portfolio of techniques, models, norms, and universal standards, backed up by sound evidence-based procedures. The limitation is that matching theories to specific business problems is no easy task as there are no agreed criteria for working out what theories should be invoked in each case; a significant limitation that generates accusations in which management education is ‘too theoretical to be useful.’
In contrast to scientific rationality, practical rationality calls for situated, local, and unfolding knowledge creation. Practical rationality mobilizes critical reflexivity, adaptive learning, and collaborative forms of inquiry. Building upon the work of management education theorist Henry Mintzberg, educators must create opportunities for students to articulate what is tacitly understood; examine possibilities to develop, refine, or correct practices; help practitioners to switch between general theories and local challenges. In the words of Gosling and Mintzberg (2004: 21), learning “…does not mean musing; it means wondering, probing, analyzing, synthesizing - and struggling.”
My approach to teaching and learning in marketing emphasizes the need to generate spaces for knowledge co-creation in which students mobilize rationality (in multiple forms) to produce actionable knowledge. I attempt to teach students to think like marketing managers do. In consequence, my teaching approach aims to transform the classroom into a trading zone where students and educators mobilize both scientific- and practical- rationalities.