The meshwork of teaching against the grain: embodiment, affect and art in management education

Abstract

This paper offers a reflexive ethnographic account to problematize conventional approaches to academic teaching that focus purely on rational, disembodied, and linear production and consumption of knowledge, in neoliberal, metric-driven academic environments. Interweaving diary notes and reflexive dialogical exchanges with images of arts-based teaching, we discuss how we might engage both students and teachers in embodied and relational forms of learning and knowing grounded in experiences of unknowing and unlearning. We discuss the potentials of exposing in the classroom the messy, ‘dirty’, dreamy, sensuous, embodied, affective and artistic work that informs teaching differently to disrupt conventional Business School pedagogies. Engaging with such creative possibilities might, we suggest, meaningfully transform management education and enable educators to cultivate an epistemic humility that transcends the ego. Therefore, this meshwork of teaching against the grain might also help resist and hopefully reframe contextual constraints and hierarchical dynamics impeding meaningful and relational Business School pedagogies.