Abstract:

This paper derives from our critically informed teaching practice, in the teaching and assessment of global business in the postgraduate programmes in a business school setting in South Africa. Framed within the critical pedagogy theoretical framework, drawing in particular from Freire’s critical pedagogy, we seeks to offer some insights and possibilities for building critical reflexivity capabilities, a metacognitive skill not only pivotal to deep learning, but to authenticity and lucidity in thinking and writing. Essentially, this work introduces a Critical Engaged Assessment Technique (CREATE) that can be used to support and assess deep learning and intellectual transformation of postgraduate students in a business school, set out in the developing country that exhibits inequities in the education system. The assessment technique is a dynamic and alternative technique that charters a close alignment of instruction and assessment within an authentic context.

The objective of this paper is to introduce and describe a framework for interweaving assessment with community engagement in the teaching and learning of business education, to cognitively transform students, while developing their capacity for deep learning. The framework is positioned within the critical reflexivity theory. We define critical reflexivity as the capacity to draw from self-reflection in a way that allows collaboration of all sensory and intuitive modalities, while conscious of the disciplinary lenses that inform current thinking. The outcome of reflexivity is the ability to transform self and society. The most defining questions that shaped the ideas presented in this paper are: how do we cultivate a writing ethos that fosters scholarliness that is liberated from a parochial way of being, dictated to by only Western norms and values? How do we bring out the voices of our students to support their journey to intellectual maturity?

Incorporating our reflections in the design of the global business curriculum, as well as interview data and reflective written pieces of 250 postgraduate students who took a global business module in 2019 and 2020, we introduce a four dimensional assessment:
(1) theorisation capability;
(2) critical thinking capability;
(3) personal growth; and
(4) community impact.

Keywords:

Critical reflexivity, critical pedagogy, community engagement, critical thinking, engaged scholarship.