Rafael Burgos-Mirabal
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
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Training in the business and management (B&M) professions presents similar pedagogical challenges to training in engineering. Traditionally, B&M education is conceived of as technical training for developing professional competence toward gaining employment. Ordinarily, the historical underpinnings of B&M disciplinary formation, the constitution of the traditional curriculum, and the broad societal effects that the deployment of B&M education and practices have, still remain far from integrated and examined into most present-day B&M curricula. In this presentation, I wish to describe my experience in designing, implementing, and evaluating an undergraduate introductory course to international business (IB). Instead of following the traditional content facilitation from the conventional IB syllabus only, I decided to split the facilitation into three class components: (1) an IB strategy simulation which ran through the entire semester; (2) team-based coverage of the mainstream approach to the IB subject matter, which ran through the first half of the semester (“IB 1.0”); and (3) team-based co-facilitated coverage of critically contextualized approaches (“IB 2.0”) to the IB subject matter to which we had already been exposed during the first half of the semester. The course was conducted in a team-based learning classroom, and each one of the three components revolved around team-based tasks. I will also discuss assessment methods for each one of the three components. Although I wish to share my experiences with the audience, my presentational goal and emphasis would be to motivate a dialogue about the pedagogical, institutional, and socio-technical challenges and contradictions that my innovative intervention met in its first iteration, vis-à-vis any experiences that members in the audience share in engaging professionally-oriented content and students in their own institutional and curricular contexts.