Abstract:

In Brazil, most higher education institutions hire faculty based on their level of specialization and publication. Institutions assume that faculty’s knowledge in their specialty fields assures adequate performance in undergraduate teaching. Several authors indicate, however, that the absence of pedagogical training leads to the adoption of traditional and naturalized teaching methods that follow from the experiences of the teachers as students, reflecting their personal history. Faculty then develop their careers without realizing how their teaching practices were socially constructed or understanding how learning takes place; they usually do not keep up with discussions on new or even existing alternative pedagogical methodologies. When university stakeholders – such as students, families, employers or government – challenge traditional teaching and demand changes, various difficulties and resistances come into play. This article proposes to analyse how Mathematics faculty in a business school view the role of their discipline in the education of administrators; and to explore which pedagogical practices these teachers adopt. Our aim is to understand what perceptions and practices reveal about the faculty conception of the teaching and learning. To achieve these objectives, between April and July 2016 we interviewed in depth the eight Math faculty in a renowned business school in São Paulo, Brazil. The interviews followed a semi-structured script and allowed for the verification that:
(i) six of the eight interviewed professors reproduce a “banking vision” of teaching and learning, a paradigm in which students are considered “blank slates”, where the teacher “deposits” content, later “withdrawn” through assessments; in this view, faculty role is to present the content and the student role is to absorb it;
(ii) the interviewees were unable to mention any specificities of Mathematics in the context of administration; they consider that Math internal traditions and objectives have priority over the specific objectives of training administrators; additionally, their expectations relative to the learning of Math in the context of business administration are the same as they would be when teaching Mathematics for engineering – an activity they mentioned consistently as a gold standard for Math teaching practice;
(iii) interviewees consider Mathematics as a discipline which doesn’t need to be contextualised, as its main role is “to develop the intellect”, on the basis of manipulating highly abstract ideas; they believe that it is not their role to explore applications, but rather rely on the assumption that mathematical concepts form “a base” from where students will “later” be able to build applications to real problems, as necessary; they favor teaching “pure Mathematics” as opposed to “applied Mathematics”.
It is our interpretation that Math faculty perception of the discipline as an “intellectual exercise for the brain” is, over time, both a cause and a consequence of their unawareness (i) of the objectives and content of the Business Administration program as a whole; and (ii) of student previous knowledge and actual needs. This perception is consistent with the choice of traditional teaching strategies.

Keywords:

Teaching and learning, education of administrators, higher education, math, professors.