Abstract
In the literature on how to prepare students to tackle Grand Challenges (GCs), little attention is given to faculty preparation to teach GCs. In this article, we explore the challenges educators face when teaching GCs through storytelling and reflexivity on their teaching and institutional experiences of embedding sustainability and a “business for good” ethos. We present an account of how public narrative theory can be utilized by instructors to engage in social reflexive practices with peers about experiences teaching GCs. The first author provides a reflexive account of challenges experienced in teaching Leadership and GCs. The co-authors engage in reflexive practice to enable a shared inquiry on how best to prepare educators to teach GCs. We discuss the value of shared reflexivity in the context of an initiative to integrate sustainability in business school education, highlighting individual, institutional, and subject-related challenges. Importantly, we propose that educators engage in self-reflexive and collective sense-making as a way to build transdisciplinary communities of practice with a greater understanding and appreciation of the challenges and opportunities faced individually and collectively in teaching GCs, which is paramount to accomplish meaningful change in management education, to prepare students better to tackle GCs.
Keywords
Introduction
There is an increasing need and pressure for management educators to make adaptations to business school curricula to equip leaders to address the complexity of global challenges, such as healthcare inequality, unlawful work practices, poverty, animal species loss and the illegal trade in endangered wildlife, etc., often referred to as Grand Challenges (GCs) (Alday et al., 2024) . GCs are global, complex, multi-faceted problems requiring divergent stakeholder groups to work collaboratively to improve future social and environmental outcomes (George et al., 2016). The most widely adopted GCs are the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) (George et al., 2016). Increasingly, it is recognized that the nature of GCs requires diverse problem-solving skillsets with transdisciplinary integration between the natural, social, and health disciplines and non-academic stakeholders, often from industry (George et al., 2016; Shantz et al., 2023). In addition, to better address the complexity of GCs, responses to GCs necessitate a systems-thinking approach (Meadows, 2008) that takes account of multiple and often contradictory criteria of worth, entails radical uncertainty, and prompts evaluative considerations (Ferraro et al., 2015; Kennedy et al., 2025). When considering collective outcomes that better serve the common good, management education has a duty to support learners with an appreciation of the inevitable tensions and dilemmas that arise between organizations and society at the systems level and develop a leaders’ capacity to take a more encompassing view of performance, to include economics, society, and the planet (Bealt & Shaw, 2024; Shantz et al., 2021).
Unsurprisingly, management educators grapple with relevant approaches for teaching the broad array of technical, cognitive, affective, behavioral, and ethical awareness skills required to tackle GCs in an environment where technical rationality and positivist philosophy dominate research, teaching, and discourse, and a normative approach to curriculums is often adopted (Brydon-Miller & Coghlan, 2015; Colombo, 2023; Schön, 1983, 2017; Shapiro Beigh, 2025). Moreover, business school education, steeped in neo-liberal economics, has been slow to adjust to contemporary GCs, and many of the connections made to, for example, the SDGs remain weak and superficial (Christensen et al., 2007; Weybrecht, 2022). In this context, educators are urged to avoid adding to the rhetoric of responsible management education and closely examine the perpetuating rational assumptions in business curricula (Hibbert & Wright, 2023; Solitander et al., 2012). In particular, there is no leadership “toolkit” for addressing the ambiguity, complexity, and non-linear nature of GCs. Furthermore, because no single discipline can attend to all the necessary knowledge and skills to address GCs, many educators are re-evaluating education in their discipline and looking to the literature, such as education for sustainable development (ESD), and to other educators and stakeholders for practical guidance.
In the literature on how to prepare students to tackle GCs (Brammer et al., 2019; Seelos et al., 2023; Shantz et al., 2023), various scholars have proposed skills and capabilities that responsible leaders require to tackle GCs and provided insights on the pedagogical implications (Funke, 2010; MacMillan, 2025; Shantz et al., 2023). However, little scholarship has examined the leadership skills and development required for management educators to design and teach GCs. While it is recognized that management educators are well-placed to develop future leaders to address GCs (Alday et al., 2024; Shantz et al., 2021), it is also acknowledged that management educators who teach GCs face considerable challenges, including “institutional constraints, career pressures and self-limiting disciplinary mindsets” (Shapiro Beigh, 2025, p. 532; see also, André, 2024; Mukhathi et al., 2022). In particular, the challenges for instructors that teaching GCs creates in varying contexts—classrooms, programs, career stages, the university reward system, etc., have not been sufficiently explored in the extant literature, nor, in turn, the implications of these challenges for equipping students to tackle GCs. We seek to address this gap by raising some pertinent questions: What are the specific challenges instructors face when teaching GCs in varying contexts? How can management educators learn and evolve their teaching practices to internalize the leadership skills necessary for success? What are the connections between what we do as educators and what our students learn? What should we ourselves be learning and why? How can educators be supported in this regard?
In this article, we focus on the challenges and opportunities facing instructors teaching GCs in the context of a “bolt-on” MBA program that was in the preliminary stages of making a transition to an infused program. Shantz et al. (2023) analyzed the curriculums of the top 100 FT ranked MBA programs and found that instructors typically integrate GCs in “bolt-on” MBA programs as standalone modules. GC modules in “bolt-on” programs have the characteristic that they “row against the tide” of a traditional MBA, and students experience the teaching of GCs as an add-on to a traditional MBA, often as elective modules. Furthermore, GC modules of this kind typically integrate GCs in specific disciplinary fields, in relative isolation from efforts to integrate GCs in other discipline-related modules. In this context, we consider the experiences of an educator in designing and delivering a GC elective module in the field of leadership—Leadership and GCs—and the challenges that the instructor experienced while teaching in a “bolt-on” program.
According to Shantz et al. (2023), three common barriers prevent educators from effectively integrating GCs into MBA curricula in the context of a “bolt-on” MBA program: (1) traditional MBA education focuses on economic and technological imperatives instead of grappling with the structural contradictions and dilemmas faced by organizations when trying to balance economic, technological, societal, geopolitical and environmental opportunities and challenges. For instance, the traditional MBA consulting project often fails to incorporate stakeholders outside of the shareholder realm; (2) pedagogical approaches tend to overemphasize case studies, deductive reasoning, and data analytics as predictive tools of the future; and (3) educators are not equipped and/or avoid the discomfort of the ethical and moral dilemmas inherent in GCs in the classroom setting. In conclusion, Shantz et al. (2023) argued that business schools need to take more radical steps to infuse GCs throughout the MBA curriculum.
Building on this work, this article proposes a narrative inquiry methodology that educators from different disciplines and areas of practice can use to engage in transdisciplinary discussions with peers about their experiences teaching GCs in related fields. By proposing a structured multi- and transdisciplinary peer learning process in the context of a “bolt-on” program, we envisage the methodology facilitating instructors teaching GC-related modules in different fields to systematically explore common challenges and potential ways to address these that could assist the transition to a GC-infused curriculum. Specifically, we introduce public narrative theory (Ganz et al., 2023; Ganz & Lin, 2012; Ganz et al., 2010) as an underpinning practice for developing educators to teach GCs that, in turn, could assist in better preparing future leaders to tackle GCs. We adopt the notion of reflexivity (Cunliffe, 2016a; Cunliffe & Jun, 2005; Lalonde & Roux-Dufort, 2013) as a lens to observe the role and experience of the management educator when teaching GCs and sustainable development to situate our approach within narrative inquiry traditions. While many studies conceptualize the use of reflexivity in education, few studies apply reflexivity to the educator’s teaching experience (Hibbert et al., 2022), where the researcher’s positionality is proposed as the analytic instrument itself. This article goes beyond the educator’s reflexive practices to include peers by proposing that educators reflect on their knowledge of teaching GCs with colleagues who teach in related areas, such as sustainable finance, ESG reporting, social entrepreneurship, business ethics, sustainable supply chains, etc. We propose the practice of storytelling and reflexivity utilizing an adaptation of Ganz’s public narrative theory as a mechanism for socializing relational reflective practices among educators to tackle similar challenges from different perspectives. The colleagues engaged in this shared reflexive practice to integrate the SDGs in the Business and Society stream, and all authors share a common interest in social innovation and change. Our reflective accounts revealed three insights: (1) educators encounter role-related and pedagogical challenges when teaching GCs; (2) institutional structures face challenges when embedding sustainability across programs, and institutional structures may leave faculty working in isolation; and (3) shared reflexivity generates opportunities for pedagogical enhancement through peer coaching and the development of communities of practice.
We make two contributions to the literature on preparing students to tackle GCs by focusing on faculty development for teaching GCs. First, we present a public narrative inquiry methodology that enables instructors to identify and reflect on specific challenges in teaching GCs through individual and shared reflexive practices. This reflexive process extends beyond introspection; it generates actionable insights that can inform curriculum design and teaching approaches and supports the co-creation of facilitating the development of shared recommendations that can mobilize collective action strategies among faculty within their institutional context for embedding sustainability across programs, and peer coaching practices. Second, we demonstrate the pedagogical value of this practice for teaching GCs and preparing future leaders to address them. We argue that shared reflexivity fosters collective sense-making, offering a mechanism for the development of actionable strategies, such as creating transdisciplinary communities of practice to support faculty development. By promoting educator reflexivity and collective sense making, this approach offers a process for bridging theory and practice in management education and for building communities that better equip future leaders to address GCs in their context.
Management education and knowledge remain scrutinized for promoting shareholder primacy (Murray, 2013 ; Smith & Rönnegard, 2016; Starkey & Tempest, 2025) and for not adequately preparing business leaders to tackle GCs (Snelson-Powell et al., 2016; Starkey & Tempest, 2025). The complexity of contemporary global challenges requires leaders to go beyond traditional positivist, techno-economic frames, values, and tools, commonly taught at business schools (Colombo, 2023), and to embrace other disciplines, perspectives, value systems, and methods, including being adept at ethical decision-making and social influence (Horan, Lahie & Sayer, 2025; Joseph et al., 2020 ; Solinger et al., 2020).
This article is structured as follows: we first provide an overview of the conceptual foundations adopted to provide a scaffolding for three management educators from varying ontological and epistemological practices to engage in a form of individual narrative inquiry and shared reflexivity. We then present the methodology of the article, using it as a mechanism to engage in transdisciplinary discussions among peers about pertinent on-the-ground challenges facing faculty teaching GCs against the backdrop of wider college-level and school-level initiatives to integrate ESD into undergraduate, postgraduate, and MBA curricula. The discussion section reflects on the value of the research approach and argues for the importance of reflexivity and public narrative methodologies among educators seeking to better equip students to tackle GCs. Reflections from a further sharing of the approach with colleagues who teach education for sustainability are also presented.
Conceptual Foundations: Reflexivity and Public Narrative Theory
We draw on the work of Cunliffe (2004, 2016a, 2016b), Alvesson et al. (2008), and Hibbert (2013) to provide a shared mental model of reflexivity for instructors teaching GC-related modules. We define reflexivity as the ongoing examination of how our assumptions, social positions, language, and conceptual frameworks shape our understanding and perceptions of reality, and the actions that we take. It requires questioning the simple acceptance of “what is” and exploring the foundations of our knowledge and practice. The exploration of assumptions and modes of thinking recognizes the relational and constructed nature of meaning. It brings about greater levels of awareness of how social contexts, infrastructures, and power dynamics influence research and practice. Reflexivity enables the interrogation of the premises, processes, and consequences of how we think, know, and act—thus expanding ways of thinking and being, to engage more responsibly and intentionally in leadership practices and action. Reflexivity is fundamentally a first-person inquiry that scaffolds a relational-dialogical engagement with others to co-create meaning, and we have employed first-person narrative to provide an accurate and ethical representation of our decisions, doubts and interpretive shifts. We adapt Ganz’s public narrative theory as the mechanism to access, articulate, and communicate shared values and engage in storytelling as a basis for social change in the context of GCs (Ganz et al., 2023: p.70). Public narrative theory frames leadership as the art of transforming values into collective action through the power of storytelling. Ganz’s pedagogical approach to leadership development teaches leaders to articulate a “story of self,” “a story of us,” and a “story of now.” We adopt Ganz’s argument that through the development of public narrative skills, educators can share their values and character through storytelling (“story of self”) and mobilize and connect to others through an understanding of shared values (“story of us”), evoking a response to act or not act in the present (“story of now”). Through the human sharing of dilemmas and choices, educators can introduce others to why they are called to lead (e.g., to teach GCs) and deepen relationships to assemble others to take collective responses and actions to teaching GCs. Revealing through narrative and storytelling the choices made in times of adversity and, in turn, listening deeply to the dilemmas of others opens educators up to stories of shared values and hope and, importantly, recognizes the power of shared values as an enabler of commitment to shared action, moving educators beyond the confines and comforts of their disciplinary expertise and areas of knowledge.
Reflexivity and Narrative Approach Methodology
Providing an account of our approach, we outline the steps for educators engaging in this practice. In the first step, a focal instructor shares with colleagues a lived experience of challenges faced in teaching GCs, for instance, challenges that may have caused emotional disturbance, self-questioning, examination of assumptions and values related to teaching GCs. In this instance, the focal instructor, also the first author, began by engaging two colleagues, the second and third authors, both of whom are involved in teaching modules that integrate GCs (SDGs) in other functional areas of management. In practice, multiple configurations of peer groups can evolve or be envisaged. Additionally, peers could form groups around those interested in developing the practices of teaching GCs. To invite a reflexive experience, the focal instructor should commit to writing a first-person reflexive account of the teaching challenge or dilemma experienced (“the story of self”) and share it with the peer group. Peers should then respond individually to the focal instructor’s account based on their lived experiences without recourse to academic literature or each other. Similarly, they should write a first-person account that draws on their experiences teaching GCs (their “story of self”).
In the second step, the instructors come together to engage in collective sense-making of the individuals, sharing reactions and observations on the individual narrative accounts, providing peer consultation and coaching. Together, the instructors then develop (and commit to writing) a shared account of what this might mean in the context of the institution they are a part of. This “story of us” becomes a mechanism for broader engagement with the challenges faced by educators in their institutional context. In the final step, the instructors collectively reflect on their “story of us” and write an account of what actions can be taken, strategies deployed, and where the limitations lie, to move forward into the next cycle of teaching (“story of now”) and embedding education for sustainability. Table 1 illustrates each of these components in detail.
Methodology Applied to Instructors’ Experiences Teaching GCs.
This practice of reflexivity is guided by the themes emerging from the process. In this article, the authors’ responses focus on themes connected to the teaching of sustainable development to business students, such as the cross-disciplinary nature of the knowledge required, the limited resources and institutional supports available for teaching, the skepticism some students demonstrate to non-traditional teaching methods, the different student motivations for undertaking business degrees, and the lack of extant literature for teaching and established teaching practices. The engagement in reflexivity practices with colleagues helped to bear out multi-layered themes, and to encourage a shared reflection on and discussion of mutual professional challenges, resulting in a collective call for action focused on establishing transdisciplinary communities of practice around teaching GCs/sustainability.
Context
The elective module described by the first author comprises a mixed cohort of full-time and executive MBA candidates, with 125 hr of learning and 24 hr of classroom time split over eight sessions. The aim of the module is to develop the capabilities and skills leaders require to navigate and address GCs. Specifically, the module focuses on developing future leaders who can (1) navigate
Drawing on insights from several disciplines, including ecology, economics, computer science, communications theory, public policy, political science, organizational behavior, business and society/CSR, and social learning theory, and specifically from Shantz et al. (2023), the module content teaches students to appreciate and develop their listening, empathy and inquiry skills to attend to the varying needs of stakeholders, to build the capacity for being comfortable with uncertainty, to imagine multiple plausible futures, and finally, to be their own agent of determining and voicing right and wrong. The context of technical problems or acute crisis events, such as the pandemic, cyberattacks, the response to terrorism (e.g., 9/11), wildfires, biodiversity loss, and the Great Recession, provide the backdrop for evaluating the leadership required to tackle GCs. Theories related to leader character (Crossan et al., 2013), moral imagination (Werhane, 2002), public narrative theory (Ganz et al., 2023), and systems thinking (Jaradat et al., 2022; Senge, 1990), alongside the core skills of communication, storytelling, peer feedback, and decision making under pressure, are introduced to students.
The module design engaged learners in case study analysis and experiential learning, including simulations and role plays, along with a carefully selected panel of guest speakers, to introduce students to the broad array of transdisciplinary knowledge and practical skills required to tackle GCs. The module topics provided the context for debating and discussing the responsibilities of leaders in business, specifically when tackling the complexity of global challenges in acute crisis contexts. Table 2 summarizes the topics and theoretical underpinnings utilized to address the themes identified as the skills critical for leadership and GCs (Shantz et al., 2023).
Summary of Module Topics and Theoretical Underpinnings.
The module introduces students to public narrative theory, reflection and reflexivity practices, and peer coaching to invite students to reflect on their values, evaluate assumptions and to empower them to move beyond espoused theories to a better understanding of theories in use (Schön, 1983) to raise their awareness of what they think they will do when faced with a challenge and what occurs when they make a decision and take action. Students sometimes disengage, sometimes with cynicism, and occasionally in ways that trigger a response from the educator or other students.
By the end of the last iteration of this module, the first author experienced having to “work harder,” not feeling in “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi et al., 2005), and “out of sorts,” in essence, a feeling of languishing. To make sense of these experiences, the first author set out to engage with the methodology of this article and introduced the concept of public narrative theory and reflexivity to the co-authors, to see what we could learn from our individual and collective experience. The practice of public narrative theory, situated in Ganz’s particular development of the theory, afforded the authors the opportunity to engage in sense-making individually and collectively during a time of social change in their institution, specifically in the context of an initiative to integrate GCs throughout the school curriculum. This institutional context is further detailed in the discussion section.
Outcomes of the Narrative Approach: Story of Self, Us, and Now
First Author
The first author is a scholar-practitioner with an academic and research background in team leadership and organizational learning. She spends much of her organizational life working with C-Suite and senior leadership teams, grappling with the complexity of global problems. She has been teaching leadership to MBA students and executive leaders for over 15 years. She is the recipient of several academic awards for teaching and research. Her narrative account is presented here: The class size was 54, the class list provided was incomplete, not all students could access the pre-work, and the classroom was extremely hot. I wanted to introduce students to the concepts of reflective practice and reflexivity, and to develop a social contract for learning early and quickly. Some students were struggling with the in-class exercise to get all voices into the room and invite introspection. It took time to get 54 voices into the room, and using myself as a source of data, there was a trade-off between hearing all voices and retaining energy. I overheard a couple of students at the coffee break complaining about the introduction exercise. I felt caught up in my own head for the rest of the session. In the second session, I noticed that a small group of students were disengaged, and, in some cases, I experienced them as churlish and argumentative, in what I perceived as ego-driven discourse rather than intellectual curiosity. Other students were frustrated with class colleagues. I continued an approach of inquiry, inviting perspective and not operating from a place of “expert” (Torbert, 2021). The lack of engagement from the same group of students is heightened in the third class when I observed them instant messaging during a guest speaker’s lecture. Afterwards, I shared these observations with the class and asked students to stop instant messaging each other or to leave class and engage in their conversation somewhere else. After class, a couple of the Executive MBA students signaled to me that the behaviors of others were distracting from their learning experience. After what I experienced as a long week and wrap up to the module, I am conscious that towards the end, I had defaulted to a place of expertise, the safety of theory, and examples of other leaders and moved away from experiential and emergent learning methods. I had not used public narrative theory as a teaching practice, by role modelling my “story of self” and inviting the students to engage in sharing their “story of self” with peers. So why do I care? This is not my first experience of classroom dynamics. I have taught thousands of MBA students and sat on MBA course committees for over a decade. I recognize when teaching my tendency to expand and retract, and I have developed strategies to step back from triggers and respond from a more resourced place. Overhearing students complain during the coffee break validated my view that the class size was too big for the type of learning experience that I wanted to create. I interpreted the lack of engagement by some as a lack of maturity. By continuing a purely facilitative and action inquiry stance, I impeded other students’ learning. I neglected insights from adult development theory (Torbert, 2021), that some students were signaling a need for me to show up as an “expert,” despite the contradiction of them being experts in their domains and wanting to learn from me and from each other. My shadow side was not responding well to feeling disrespected, despite all the developmental “work” I have engaged in and my abilities to deploy better strategies when feeling challenged and under threat. I was disappointed with myself for getting trapped in a vortex of unproductivity. I typically find that when I use myself as a source of data and share with others what I am experiencing and feeling in the moment, it usually acts as a reset to more useful dialogue and understanding. I was irritated that some students were not appreciative or aware of their privilege and the circumstances surrounding them. I was operating from a place of judgment and had lost my capacity for mutual positive regard. The irony is not lost on me that how we respond to challenges tells us something about ourselves and teaches us something about our values and moral resources. This fits with my view that leadership and collaboration are socially constructed. I have ideas as to why I was derailed. I know the class size (usually capped at 30, some 20-24 more students than normal) played a part. I learnt of the class size when it was too late to do anything about it, and in my tendency to be helpful, I did not assert myself to my program colleagues to share the problems that this could create. I know (in terms of what and how I teach) that capping the class size to 30 (ish) is important. That said, the class size is something that I recognize as a comfortable narrative that allows me not to go deeper into the part I played in what was socially constructed. I observed early in the module that the dominant need in the class was for me to meet their expert action logic (Rooke & Torbert, 2005; Torbert, 2021) and share from a place of “expert.” As I shared my “story of self,” something rings hollow and sounds like defensive routines (Argyris, 2014) to avoid addressing my feelings of inadequacy, as if I have not done an excellent job. But that is not it; that’s the noise, the distraction. The experience tapped into what I have felt for a while and ignored: can I fulfil my purpose of contributing to tackling societal problems by teaching GCs on the MBA? Is this enough? Do I believe the business school system can change and take on the GC of re-examining its societal role? Am I losing hope, and more importantly, who am I becoming through my choices? Is this a moment where I am being called to lead and do something different? If so, now what?”
Second Author
The second author is an assistant professor with a background in economics (PhD) and several years of experience in engaged research at the UN for the SDGs (Marie-Curie fellowship). He teaches business and the SDGs in modules in the Business and Society and International Business streams at Undergraduate, MSc, and MBA levels. During 2022-2024, he held leadership roles in initiatives to integrate sustainability in the undergraduate curriculum. His narrative account is presented here: My interpretation of the first author’s account is that she has described a recent trigger moment (caused by perceived lack of student engagement) that caused discomfort and prompted a reflection on teaching practice and a questioning of the meaning in her role as an educator teaching GCs. I am impressed by her response to take time to reflect critically on these experiences and to share her thoughts with colleagues and seek peer consultation and coaching. My own experience as an educator started in the positivist tradition, teaching modules in various fields of economics at a business school in the UK. However, compared to these experiences of teaching in well-established disciplinary areas, I find the teaching of GCs/sustainable development particularly challenging for several reasons, often insufficiently recognized or reflected on by educators. Sustainable development, unlike other fields of enquiry, does not fit neatly into specific disciplines; instead, it cuts across multiple disciplinary areas, pushing educators to the limits (and perhaps beyond) of what it is reasonable to expect them to know. In addition, as a rapidly growing field of systematic enquiry (evidenced by the recent proliferation in academic publications in the area), keeping abreast of developments and the many innovations in teaching practice is increasingly difficult. I am struck by the first author’s storytelling of her experience and her decision to engage colleagues in a shared critical reflection on the challenges of teaching GCs. It has created an opportunity for us to collectively reflect on the scale of the challenges before us and to think more deeply about our roles in business schools. Open exchange, critical reflection, and cross-disciplinary community support are important to overcome challenges. This was my first experience of engaging in narrative inquiry with colleagues, and engaging in honest reflection is a good starting point for building a community of educators that can better prepare students for achieving sustainable development. Such a community is needed precisely because of the complex, multifaceted, transdisciplinary, dynamic, and political nature of GCs. Being challenged by others in our teaching is to be expected, especially by those new to the field who hold a narrow understanding of the nature of the challenges and the types of solutions required (e.g., a focus on technical fixes). We need to feel comfortable putting ourselves out there as educators on unfamiliar ground, develop support networks, and devise strategies for how we cope and how we bring others in and along. By sharing our experiences and the feelings they evoked, we can better recognize each other’s perspectives, find common ground, and establish stronger relationships. Arguably, it is only through such networks that we can deliver the level of change and scale of impact required. Greater recognition of the challenges inherent in teaching GCs/sustainable development and supporting each other as a community of scholars and a community of practice, I feel, are important actions to consider going forward.
Third Author
The third author is in her final year of her PhD at Trinity Business School, researching corporate political activity. She has an academic background in public policy (B.A., Masters) and management (MSc.). She is a Teaching Assistant on the course International Governance and Sustainable Business and received a teaching award for her work on this course in the last academic year. Her narrative account is presented here: The first author describes her journey of self-reflection after experiencing a challenging situation while teaching. This honest and vulnerable reflection discusses a series of moments that made her increasingly feel disconnected from her students. As a result, she built up a wall and diverged from the original teaching methods she had used previously. What follows is an open discussion and questioning of self about the importance of teaching GCs and the challenges an educator faces when presented with a group that does not fully subscribe to these topics. This account illustrated to me the struggles an educator faces when bringing values and dilemmas into the classroom. More specifically, this account reflected on how teaching leadership and GCs require vulnerability, and just how difficult that can be when you feel disrespected. This reflection highlighted how even experienced educators can struggle with teaching sustainability due to the wide array of feelings, emotions, and moral dilemmas involved. To effectively teach sustainability, educators must embrace vulnerability, as you must carefully and meticulously balance an inclusive and engaging learning environment with the sometimes-contrasting values of students and themselves. This can create a learning environment where you may have an internal conflict that the students may be unaware of. Taking on GCs requires a true sense of collaboration, and there needs to be mutual trust in place to be effective when teaching sensitive topics. When that is lost, it can be challenging to be as vulnerable as both you and your students need. For me, this is an almost unspoken issue in the field of sustainability education, and the first author is shedding light on the dilemmas many educators face. Still, this reflection is the beginning of a broader conversation around the need for peer groups to engage in sense-making to evolve as educators. In sustainability education, your beliefs, values, morals, and responses are frequently challenged, forcing you to either hold firm in your beliefs, question what you held as true, or adjust them based on added information or perspectives. My experience is that this can be an arduous process to go through, and it can be even harder to articulate and pinpoint how this impacts you on a personal level. I believe it is important for us to come together to discuss how this is impacting us at a deeper level and to continually reflect on our own biases and responses. Checking in with yourself and your peers is integral to this field, and recognizing the importance of this is key to having a fulfilling relationship with your work and your students. After engaging with this reflection process for the first time, it made me wonder why this is not a more widespread practice for grand challenges educators.
Story of Us
We met on several occasions to share our reactions and observations to the individual narrative accounts and to develop a shared understanding of our accounts and insights. A shared narrative account of our process and resulting actions is provided here: The approach prompted us to reflect on the first narrative, a critically reflective account of teaching GCs, which enabled us to reflect independently on the role of the educator when teaching GCs and sustainability. The interaction brought out new perspectives and ideas and enabled an environment for learning and reflection. We were struck by the similarities and differences in our perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences that surfaced, allowing us to come to a shared understanding of the challenges we face as our university/School moves to integrate sustainability across undergraduate, postgraduate and MBA programs. We were left with more questions than answers and determined that we needed to open the conversation to a wider group of colleagues in the business school to engage their perspectives and learn of their experiences as a mechanism for bringing about the next cycle of change.
Story of Now
“The engagement in shared reflectivity provided us with a shared sense of the task ahead and has enabled us to develop mutual respect and responsibility for developing individually and collectively as educators and change-makers, and to speak more openly about how we define impact in research and teaching. This is a crucial step as it has allowed us to engage in the experience of holding multiple perspectives and to develop empathy and understanding for ontological and epistemological differences. We propose that others adopt and experiment with this approach and that transdisciplinary communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1999; Monaghan, 2011) from within business schools. Communities of practice that bring together informal groups to share knowledge about a topic or practice related to the dominant work of the participants enable sense-making, innovation, and dissemination of learning. Transdisciplinary communities of practice among educators teaching GCs offer a platform for developing and engaging in shared goals that could open doors to more integrated research, teaching, and impact. The process prompted shared sense-making of pedagogical challenges when teaching GCs, highlighted institutional challenges when embedding sustainability in management education, and led to a collective call for action, including replicating the methodology in a faculty seminar to foster collaboration and resource sharing.
The opportunity for knowledge sharing should enable opportunities for sharing resources, co-creation of teaching methodologies and materials, and the potential for enhancing the integration of theory and practice.”
Experimental Application of the “Story of Now”
It is reasonable to posit that other readers will have different interpretations, and the more we can involve and engage others, not only will we glean richer insights, but it may go some way to breaking down the boundaries that sit within the walls of traditional universities and management education (Nisula & Pekkola, 2018). Towards this end, we held a 1-hr seminar at our school, where we replicated the methodology of this article with a broader community of colleagues. All of the seminar participants are involved in teaching GC-related modules in areas such as social entrepreneurship, responsible leadership, nature positive business, sustainable finance, and organizational development at varying levels of seniority (including professors, associate professors, assistant professors, research fellows, teaching fellows, and doctoral students).
For this seminar, we started with an account of the first author’s teaching experiences, which was first provided to participants, and the second and third authors responded to this account (as described in this article). We extended the process using a discussion format by opening the floor to invite others to reflect on the authors’ accounts. Responses were quite varied and rich, ranging from expressing empathy with the first author based on their experience of dealing with challenging student situations to highlighting the freedom that GCs/sustainability educators have to learn from other disciplines. Another participant recounted a story of a past student of their course who had thought the course was “rubbish” yet later in their professional career specialized in the area and developed a strong appreciation for the module and its content. Another participant highlighted the importance of creating a reflective community of practice and scholarship around the teaching of sustainability. One participant expressed how the process of shared critical reflection, as applied in the seminar, made that person proud to be part of the business school and its community of educators in GCs/sustainability.
Overall, replicating the exercise with colleagues was a valuable learning experience, fostering a shared sense of solidarity and a deeper understanding of the challenges faced individually and collectively in teaching GC-related modules. Specifically, it facilitated open conversations among colleagues, fostering an appreciation for how we could collectively contribute to a community of peers involved in implementing education for sustainability across degree programs in the business school.
Discussion
In this article, we examined an instructor’s experiences teaching GCs using a narrative inquiry methodology to bridge research and practice and identify specific challenges instructors face in teaching GCs. Our narrative accounts reveal systemic and individual challenges, including institutional-level structures that may drive silos, potential duplication of content across programs, and tensions for educators when teaching GCs. These findings extend Shantz et al. (2023) by showing how institutional constraints manifest in teaching practice and outcomes and illustrate Hibbert’s (2013) argument for reflexivity by demonstrating its collective application as a faculty development mechanism for educators embedding GCs and sustainability into management modules and programs.
The process yielded actionable outcomes, including the development of communities of practice to foster greater collaboration and shared learning.
We also reported opportunities to better prepare educators for teaching GCs. Using two models of MBA curricula presented in Shantz et al. (2023), “bolt-on” and infused MBA programs, we now discuss our findings in the context of a curriculum change initiative to integrate GCs (specifically sustainability) throughout the curriculum (see Table 3). The purpose of the discussion is to shed light on the specific challenges facing faculty teaching GCs in this context and to consider the value of our recommendation regarding transdisciplinary communities of practice as a mechanism to help School to transition from a “bolt-on” MBA program to an infused program.
Challenges Facing Instructors Teaching GCs in a Curriculum Change Initiative to Integrate GCs.
Source. Adapted from Grand Challenges and the MBA, by Shantz et al. (2023). Copyright 2023 by SAGE Publications, with authors’ additions highlighted in italics.
Drawing on Shantz et al. (2023), the objective of a “bolt-on” MBA program is to ensure students have an opportunity to learn about GCs. In this context, the integration of GCs in teaching is led by the course leader and designed around the traditional business school curriculum with a stand-alone core or elective course. While modules in bolt-on programs can change mindsets through transformational learning, efforts to integrate GCs may be insufficient in the face of the complexity of GCs, reinforce a silo mentality, and leave students feeling hopeless and negative (Shantz et al., 2023). By contrast, in an infused program, the objective is to equip students to make business decisions with long-term societal gain as the ultimate goal. Curriculum change is led by the MBA director and designed around a traditional discipline-based business school curriculum, with each function anchored in GCs and interconnected. Learning is planned within an overarching framework to guide pedagogy, concept mapping across courses is undertaken, and the process of co-creation among faculty lends itself to a stronger commitment to the vision. This allows learners to gain a holistic understanding of concepts, increase their appreciation of diverse moral and transdisciplinary perspectives, and provide space for critical reflection.
In this article, we argue that the first author’s teaching experience can be characterized as teaching GCs in a “bolt-on” program that is transitioning to an infused program. The school’s curriculum change initiative sought to deliver a curriculum with some of the characteristics of an infused MBA program. The initiative’s objective was to equip students to take a “business for good” approach by integrating sustainability content into undergraduate, postgraduate, and MBA degrees. The initiative, led by senior management, provided a mandate to program directors and module leaders to include sustainability content in modules. Faculty, having varied ontological and epistemological assumptions about GCs, decided the level of integration of individual module content, with some faculty demonstrating a strong commitment and passion for the strategy and others unsure or less invested. Integration was designed around a traditional business school curriculum, seeking to integrate sustainability in each disciplinary stream (see Table 3). However, the initiative also omitted several features of infused curricula, including an overarching framework to support the vision, clear mapping of concepts at the MBA level, and the removal of core modules in the finance and economics disciplines, which have now been reinstated. Such an approach did not facilitate the co-creation of content or offer explicit opportunities to create interdisciplinary content or transdisciplinary student-learning and assessment projects.
The first author’s teaching of GCs predates the school’s initiative to integrate sustainability in all degree programs. The module was designed around core capabilities identified in Shantz et al. (2023), and the pedagogical approach invited self-examination of values, assumptions, and morals, with no clear answers or solutions on how to address the complex nature of opposing values, assumptions, and morals, and polarities that can arise from the ethical dilemmas of addressing wicked problems. The timing of electives (in this program) occurs after the core curriculum and at a time when students are focused on their next career move, and in the case of full-time students, employment. Despite the elective nature of the module, some students pushed against the questioning of shareholder primacy and pedagogical approaches that do not provide the comfort of defined solutions and are more normative in nature. This illustrates that modules in “bolt-on” programs may be insufficient to bring about a sustainability mindset in future leaders. The educator felt “left to their own devices,” and unsupported when it came to the delivery and implementation of GCs education. The account highlights the individual-level challenges that GC educators face when “rowing against the tide” of a traditional MBA.
The second and third accounts relate to teaching modules introduced as part of the School’s sustainability initiative, described above. By taking a bottom-up approach to sustainability integration, the curriculum change initiative relied on individual module leaders’ personal commitment to teach GCs to drive progress. Yet, it resulted in a lack of coordination among instructors. While their accounts also reflect a sentiment of being left to their own devices, there are notable differences between them in that they report a distinct set of challenges. The second author’s account reflects a concern for subject-related and institution-level challenges that reflect the author’s prior engagement with integrating sustainability initiatives at undergraduate level. Whereas the account of the third author can be placed within the context of the initiative’s increasing demand for qualified teachers of GCs, drawing on this author’s interdisciplinary and policy background and interest in teaching sustainability. It is notable that the third person’s account reflects on individual challenges that are not uncommon for early career scholars.
In this context, the authors’ recommendation to develop transdisciplinary communities of practice to better prepare instructors to teach GCs is notable in that such a community could help to plug several gaps between the infused program and curriculum resulting from the School’s initiative (see Table 3). In particular, it could help to develop an overarching vision for integration, allow for a clear mapping of concepts across the curriculum, and facilitate transdisciplinary discussions on the teaching of GCs that provide opportunities for exploring interconnections and developing collaborations to strengthen educators’ commitment and capacity to teaching GCs. We therefore propose transdisciplinary communities of practice as a mechanism to create space for emergent professional development of faculty at all levels of seniority, to wrestle with immanent complexities, uncertainties, and trade-offs of radically changing the relationship of the business school with society, where the criteria of success for business for good is measurable, transparent, and reported.
Contribution to GCs Pedagogy
This article and its account of teaching Leadership and GCs reveal the centrality of critical reflexivity as a lens to examine identity, values, and moral resources, which enables educators to engage in a shared journey of reflection and learning and take an ethical stance. This article demonstrates that reflexivity, when structured through public narrative, is not an end in itself but a lever for faculty development and institutional change. Ganz describes leadership as “accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty” (Ganz et al., 2010, p.527). We began this article through a process of two of the authors meeting in a course provided by our university to learn how to embed sustainability into our respective disciplines. We could not anticipate how the interaction would unfold, and we had no way of knowing what would come out of the experience. We were stimulated by the parallels between our experience and the skills we were trying to teach, including navigating uncertainty, understanding multiple perspectives, and examining the core of our humanity to bring about the leadership needed to tackle GCs.
The article addresses the need for educators to internalize the leadership behaviors required to teach GCs. In particular, we make a direct connection between the need for educators to engage in the practices they are asking of students. Specifically, educators engaging in reflexive practices are important in developing their skill sets to instruct students in the areas of complex problems. By engaging in critical reflexivity in collaboration with colleagues teaching in related areas, educators of GCs can strengthen their resolve and resilience to better prepare students to tackle GCs, reinforce key values, and source new perspectives and resources for teaching. While the article focused on applying a critically reflexive practice to the educator’s experience of teaching GCs, future research could explore the merits of preparing future leaders to engage in similar critical reflective practices in their professional workplaces with colleagues.
In this article, we focused on the educator’s experience, who shared a reflection on her experience of teaching GCs with colleagues involved in teaching sustainable business. The article started as “a story of self,” sharing an educator’s response to teaching challenges in this area and her call to leadership to teach future leaders to tackle the complexity of contemporary GCs. It developed into “a story of us,” through sharing interpretations and perspectives and mobilized us to take collective responsibility for sharing our resources. Applying the methodology presented in this article expanded our sense-making at each stage of the process, resulting in a shared action of inviting colleagues and peers into the process. Our “story of now” is to call on management educators to consider their role in shaping the leaders of tomorrow by engaging in transdisciplinary communities of practice that transcend the boundaries of traditional university structures to enable innovation and risk-taking to devise new ways for our students to learn, lead, and make a contribution to addressing the GCs of our time.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank the editors of the Special Issue and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, which significantly strengthened this article. We are grateful to our colleagues at Trinity Business School who participated in the faculty seminar, and of course, our students. We also wish to honor the memory of
Author’s Note
All authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript; the authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
