The Prospect of Inclusive Pedagogy in Efficiency-Centric Governance Paradigm: Business and Entrepreneurship Teachers’ Perspectives

Abstract

Teaching in college entails managing substantial trade-offs across quality dimensions – broad perspective and linkages versus in-depth focus, functional or cross-functional approach, workplace versus conceptual emphasis, efficiency, flexibility, student motivation, inclusion and leveraging diversity, learning uniformity or individuality etc. This paper focuses on teachers’ reflections on their teaching in an environment characterized by dominant expectation of standardized output-driven education. The aim of the paper is to explore how faculty members and visiting staff of an international undergraduate business programme leverage elements of inclusive pedagogy in their teaching, what is their rationale for it and in what elements are the perceived trade-offs substantial for the teacher to feel discouraged in further development of inclusion. Interviews were carried out with teachers of International business administration of TalTech, Estonia – a programme with relatively high student diversity in race, culture and educational background. The study comments on inclusive teaching practices that are available for integration more easily (such as learning design accounting for student learning styles, diverse groupwork facilitation, group and peer grading) as well as practices perceived to fall outside of teacher’s reach in routine teaching (such as personalized student motivation management, accounting for diversity in students’ capabilities, individualized feedback). In sum, teachers appear to have a moderate amount but limited degrees of freedom in implementing elements of inclusive pedagogy provided this is in line with their teaching philosophy regardless of the confines of efficiency-centric governance paradigm.