Dear Angie

Hello everyone. The teaching year is well underway. Many of you will have had some exciting classroom experiences or difficult problems. This column has some interesting suggestions for developing better critical thinking abilities, an amazing exercise for developing socially responsible students, a very different exercise that has students using a different manner of expressing understanding, and a couple of questions. In addition, the winners of the Innovation in Accounting Education award at last summer’s conference have agreed to share their classroom exercise with us. Be sure to look at The World Baseball League (developed by Ian Feltmate and Ian Hutchinson of Acadia). And be sure to get back to me if you can help out with the questions.

Dear Angie:
I am teaching taxation. Do you know of any survey material about teaching Canadian taxation in Canadian universities (e.g., books used, content, teaching methods)?
Tearful in Taxland

Dear Tearful:
I am not aware of a tax teaching material survey. Perhaps those teaching taxation can name the texts they use and how they attack particular tax courses. I can then compile something of interest to you and other tax instructors. OK everyone in tax — let’s assemble something for this poor soul trying to teach tax!

Dear Angie:
How about finding out what different people do on the first day of classes in terms of introduction to the course, setting expectations, etc. Clifton Philpott, Kwantlen University College

Dear Clifton:
I would also love to hear what people do on the first day of class. One thing I do to break the ice in an introductory class is to have students introduce themselves to the person next to them and spend a few minutes chatting. Then I have them introduce their “new friend” to the rest of the class, making sure to mention something unusual about the person. I like my classes to be very interactive, so I like to set a tone of “ease” right from the start. I am dealing with classes of about 60 students. I know this would be impossible in some very large classes. Ummmmmm, wonder what you do to set the tone in a very large class? How about other ideas for Clifton?

Dear Angie:
I teach accounting theory, which is a required course. Scott’s 3rd edition is a wonderful text for the financial justification of the profession, but I augment it with a couple of theories of epistemology and three theories of ethics. As you can imagine, the students are aghast at the very words, let alone the content, of epistemological and ethical theories. It helps to have recent newspaper articles from business magazines and newspapers that ground some of these very abstract concepts in the mundane practices of accountants and managers.

The point at which we all really turn the corner in this course is during the mid-term week. During this week, I have the students gather in small groups to produce an image of how they understand the course content to date. I allow about an hour of class time to begin the process. They can ask me any questions about how to execute the task — except, of course, what image they should use. Inevitably, someone complains about a lack of artistic talent, to which I reply that art is not what we’re about in the task and everyone will receive 10 marks of 100 for their output, provided they are present the following week. The following week, all the groups present their images and explain them to the class. Anyone absent without good cause gets a zero.

They can use any medium they choose. However, most use the transparencies and pens I provide. They have a week to create and prepare an explanation of their image. The only rule is no text allowed on the image. Once they recover from the shock of being asked to draw something to illustrate what they have learned, they undertake the task with enthusiasm. It’s a pleasure to witness the effort they devote to their task and the quality of their output. To be sure, a few groups have shirked over the years, but the vast majority report that they enjoy the task and the outcome. I use image making as a form of active learning that also requires students to engage a different side of their brain — the visual learning side instead of the logic and text based side. Moreover, because the students collaborate, they have an opportunity to learn from each other. This deepens their understanding of how the theoretical concepts relate to the usefulness of the accounting profession in society. From the comments I receive on my teaching evaluations, students appreciate the opportunity to not only learn and apply some philosophy, but also to engage in reflection and debate about conflicts of interest inherent in their chosen future profession.

I have an article in progress about the teaching strategies I use throughout the course to stimulate active and collaborative learning but this particular strategy is probably unique, and it works. If you’d like to know more I’d be pleased to share some of the images and explanations with you.

Maureen P. Gowing
John Molson School of Business Concordia University
e-mail: mps@jmsb.concordia.ca
phone: 514-848-2424 ext 4143

Thanks Maureen. What an innovative idea. Could you share an image or two with Angie sometime in the future?

Angie’s Suggestion Page

Bringing research into the undergraduate class environment is something we all can do. This should help us attract bright minds to undertake graduate work in our field. The number of open accounting positions is ten times larger than the number of students graduating in any given year. We must encourage good students to consider graduate work in accounting.

Our first suggestion comes from Rajib Doogar (University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana). Rajib finds that pairing relevant research articles with topics in advanced/intermediate accounting makes the students take a greater interest in accounting rules and their imperfections, and thus learn to think critically. More specifically, he assigns a few research articles for class and has small groups of students prepare one-page summaries to share with the rest of the class. They then discuss the four basic questions:

What’s the issue?
Who cares and why?
What do they find?
Do we believe the findings?

Rajib believes that research articles, by their very construction, help students focus much more quickly on the gap between the economic reality and its necessarily imperfect articulation through accounting language. Not to mention its even more imperfect articulation through the politically contorted “reality” of GAAP (speaking here of US GAAP only, and leaving the question of “my GAAP is better than your GAAP” to more intelligent minds). Another benefit is that since almost any well written paper, and every not-so-well-written paper, offers good grist for the mill, he can simply assign papers he has not yet read and thus have fun too.

If any of this is interesting, you can check out Rajib’s course home page at www.business.uiuc.edu/doogar/ACCY493/493.htm where you will find a syllabus and much more. Thanks, Rajib, for sharing your idea. I particularly like the idea of assigning papers you want to read and getting a summary from your students. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

Another great idea comes from John Shepherd of Prince Rupert. Besides being home to a campus of Northwest Commuity College, Prince Rupert is also home to “Khutzeymateen”, Canada’s only grizzly bear sanctuary. (You can get all kinds of useful information from reading Dear Angie!). John outlines how his school encourages students to make a contribution to their community, developing future socially responsible citizens.

John says that “in 1998 their school created a course, MGMT 260 — Applied Management Studies — where students earn 3 credits for designing and undertaking projects in the community. Some of their previous projects included:

a 2003 Prince Rupert Visitors Survey
a feasibility study that lead to the formation of the North Coast Water Quality and Biotoxin Society
a community profile for the Prince Rupert Economic Development Commission
several projects related to the 1999 Northern B.C. Winter Games
website design for non-profit organizations

One website design project was done for the Coalition of Inclusive Communities (who wanted to develop a website promoting multiculturalism and antiracism in Prince Rupert). This website is the third one developed by business students at the Prince Rupert Campus working with local non-profit organizations. Other organizations helped by Prince Rupert students include the local public library and the Prince Rupert Rotary Club.

What a great idea to involve students in community projects. When I was going to graduate school at the University of Saskatchewan, the tax students went to seniors’ homes and did tax returns. I wonder how many of us could create class projects that both provide a learning objective and help community members. A few years back, I had students visit small businesses and assess their internal control systems. In hindsight, I should have forwarded the students’ evaluation reports on these systems to the business owners, as many contained good suggestions for improving their internal control systems. Thanks John.

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