Utilizing Socially Responsive Knowledge
- 1. Research in management education is severely lack- ing in its focus on the delivery to those living in extreme poverty. To date, most of the work has not addressed the issue, or it has addressed it from the perspective of replicating Western programs for wealthier international elites. In order to accomplish delivery, we can utilize the three-part concept of knowledge domains. I report here one instance where management educators used classroom training and international travel to reinforce all three domains while also creating change in the lives of the stu- dents and of those in poverty. The case study also portrays a classroom exercise eventually growing into a stand-alone nonprofit organization. The lessons from that experience illustrate new roles for management education in—and for people in—conditions of extreme poverty. Knowledge Domains: Three Types Irwin Altman describes one approach that faculty members in higher education can use when they have an interest in (re)shaping how students relate to social issues and to future societal needs.1 From his psychology expertise, he outlines three domains of knowledge that he suggests must be developed and utilized simultaneously in order to “educate the good citizen of the future:” • foundational knowledge: content, theories, history, and methodology of a discipline • professional knowledge: practitioner skills and content, often vocationally focused, of a field • socially responsive knowledge: first-hand experience and understanding of issues in a society Altman reiterates that the triad is intertwined and that all three are co-dependent—in particular, socially respon- sive knowledge cannot stand apart from the other two forms. He suggests that schools already excel at providing foundational and professional knowledge, but they do not excel at generating or utilizing socially responsive knowl- edge. We suggest that when Western students use founda- tional and professional knowledge while performing service Utilizing Socially Responsive KnowledgeBy Lisa Jones Christensen and Jennifer Boehme Kumar PHOTOs:top:Marandamurphy,bottomleft:tytyrley,bottomright:Tylerwoolstenhu.me 14 ESR —SPRING 2008
- 3. learning projects in less advantaged contexts, the lessons they gather con- stitute socially responsive knowledge. HELP International, or HELP, is an excellent case study of this interaction of domains, and the study illustrates lessons learned for providing management education to the poorest. The First Year: Response to Crisis During the close of 1998, Hurricane Mitch devastated much of Central America. Dr. Warner Woodworth, a professor of organizational behavior at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University, responded to the crisis by creating an open elective course entitled Becoming a Global Change Agent. From the outset, the class was planned as an action research experience aimed at mobilizing col- lege students and training them in specific ways to change the world. It was also created as a way to organize teams who would help plan trips and/or travel to Honduras during the summer of 1999 as relief and reconstruction volunteers—with a focus on creating microfinance projects. The college course was a par- ticipatory experience with a heavy emphasis on the potential of micro- finance to help people rebuild lives. Overall, seventy-nine students par- ticipated. Class participants formed teams to plan the logistics of going to Honduras and to explore what microfinance institutions (MFIs) were currently in the country, which MFIs were open to partnerships, and what relief and humanitarian aid was required by the local impov- erished families. Additionally, class members organized a Honduras culture team to teach volunteers about local norms, values, and technical terms. They established a public relations team to obtain media attention, a fundraising team to help generate money, and a microcredit resource team to research competing microfinance methodolo- gies and eventually train everyone in rudimentary techniques of village banking. The class was designed to allow students significant autonomy in almost every aspect of organization building, and the students voted to name the new organization HELP Honduras (Helping Eliminate Poverty in Honduras). During the course of the sum- mer of 1999, forty-six students traveled to and served in five regions in Honduras. Each student was committed to volunteer eight weeks or more. The students identified and approached a microfinance organization as a partner, and with the nonprofit organization FINCA International, they worked during the summer to jointly create new com- munal banks. Between founding new banks and recapitalizing old banks, the students created one hundred new microbanks. HELP Honduras’s microcredit efforts created approxi- mately eight hundred jobs, benefiting nearly four thousand individuals.2 The partnership terms with FINCA included a clause whereby FINCA would manage all of the new banks after HELP volunteers left the country, thus ensuring future sustain- ability. Therefore, the presence and subsequent departure of HELP did not create dependencies in the com- munity or within FINCA. Students worked with managers of microbusinesses by participating in projects that entailed teaching business, language, and computer skills to individuals or groups of adult learners. Through function- ing in this capacity, students and faculty learned much about teach- ing business skills to the extremely impoverished. Participants from that formative year learned that individu- als, even young people, can have a tangible effect on the lives of others. They also learned the importance of preparation, cultural understanding, financial management, and business skill acquisition for the volunteers and the recipients. Clearly, the overall experience incorporated all three of knowledge domains. By the time the students left the program they had the oppor- tunity to utilize their foundational knowledge of accounting and inven- tory management principles and their professional knowledge about content delivery and negotiation skills to develop a proficiency in acting on a problem in a socially responsive, efficacious way. They also generated socially responsive knowledge as they learned about processes and behaviors that did or did not “work” in the con- text of extreme poverty. In addition to providing finan- cial and emotional benefits to the Honduran people, many students report that their work with HELP informed subsequent life decisions and behaviors. An extreme example of this is the case of one volunteer Individuals—even young people—can have a tangible effect on the lives of others. 16 ESR —SPRING 2008
- 4. who served in El Salvador for one summer prior to attending a pres- tigious culinary institute. After his summer with HELP, he decided to change his career focus in favor of doing something to more directly contribute to poverty elimination. He subsequently started sponsoring the education of a Salvadoran student, and he altered his own educational plans in favor of pursuing a JD/ MBA degree. Currently, he works in Tanzania as a clerk involved with the Rwandan genocide trials. Obviously, not all volunteers are affected so markedly, but this case illustrates the potential implications of service- learning projects like HELP. The Growth of HELP International as an NGO HELP has expanded its operations every year since its inception, and management has incorporated it into a nonprofit organization operationg under the name HELP International. From the beginning in 1999, HELP has enabled more than five hundred students to travel in a combined ser- vice and learning capacity more than thirteen regions in nine countries. Table 1 indicates the number of volunteers and the countries where they have served, taught, and expanded microfinance. Typical projects volunteers employ in delivering management education to these participants include the following: • Weekly mini-business lessons given as a stand-alone project or dur- ing a microcredit bank meeting • Six-week business courses that meet three times a week • One- to three-day special busi- ness-topic classes given as workshops • One-on-one personalized con- sulting with microentrepreneurs • Business plan creation courses • Impact assessments for local MFIs During the last nine years, students and faculty mentors have returned from participating in these interventions with significant insights about what would improve the delivery of business and manage- ment education in universities in the United States and in impoverished communities where HELP operates. HELP management collects these insights as part of every volunteer’s exit interview. Lessons Learned It is important to clarify that the observations about key lessons were made in the context of delivering informal education to large groups (typically comprised of twelve to forty women or larger mixed gender groups) of fragmented, extremely poor, and often illiterate microentre- preneurs, small business owners, and managers. Table 2 provides a simple list of practices that HELP management has consistently seen succeed or fail in disadvantaged contexts across multiple continents. Table 1: HELP History: Countries Served and Number of Volunteers Year Countries Served Number of Volunteers 1999 Honduras 47 2000 Honduras El Salvador Peru Venezuela 72 2001 Honduras El Salvador Peru 33 2002 El Salvador Guatemala Bolivia 47 2003 El Salvador Guatemala Brazil 49 2004 El Salvador Guatemala 50 2005 El Salvador Guatemala Thailand 143 2006 El Salvador Guatemala Uganda 52 17 best practices
- 5. What Doesn’t Work HELP leaders have found that for most extremely poor students a formal classroom environment is intimidating. The term formal classroom refers to attempts to use a local college or university infrastruc- ture (i.e., rows of chairs, podiums, microphones, and large and possibly intimidating buildings) as the pri- mary place for teaching. Using formal classrooms at the outset can lead to difficulty in recruiting or to high levels of attrition after recruitment. Instructors often mistakenly assume that each class participant needs his or her own materials. HELP leaders have found that this assump- tion leads to spending misallocations and precludes attempting team-based learning models. It can also lead to teaching delays as instructors wait until materials are collected, copied, or are otherwise available. Students in extremely disadvan- taged contexts do not necessarily have expectations of having their own materials, nor are they always comfortable with an influx of materi- als at the outset of classes. Instead, they are often quite familiar with models of learning that require taking turns with materials, watching others use materials, and sharing—or that require doing without. For example, when students learn about inventory management, they work without cal- culators or they take turns using the calculators. They often pass around a clipboard to record ledger entries. These students are typically patient while they wait, and they tend to learn from the entries of others. What Works HELP management discovered that alternate teaching environ- ments—like the outdoors, churches, work facilities, and homes—have yielded significant success in terms of retention, recruitment, and demand. HELP instructors have found that eventual migration to more formal classrooms (particularly those in local schools utilized during evenings) is possible after a reputation for nonintimidating methods has spread throughout the community. Other positive techniques are to use experiential methods, such as simulation games or role playing, that tie student life experiences to business or management topics.3 Usually, using these methods allows instructors to teach compelling busi- ness concepts first and then introduce formal names and theories later. For example, in teaching the theoretical concept of separate entities in business practice, HELP instructors talk to students about their struggles to keep family mem- bers away from their business mer- chandise. Participants can understand and elaborate on this problem from their shared experience, and they can talk together about possible options to keep the entities separate. But they rarely grasp the concept when instructors use Western tactics and begin discussions with the theory of separate entities. HELP management learned that with experiential methods, instructors can more easily move to PHOTO:Tyturley
- 6. Table 2: Issues in Implementing U.S. Management Practices in Disadvantaged Contexts Western Practices That Do Not Translate Well Formal classroom environments early in educational process Leading with theory-based introductions Assuming that each student needs his or her own materials English-language instruction Screening based on literacy Adjusted Practices That Do Translate Well Alternate teaching environments (outside, in homes, smaller classes, etc.) Experiential methods (games and role plays) Teaching concepts first and theories later (or never) Tailoring educational content by geographic location and according to local cultural mores Checking assumptions that teachers and learners have about the role and motive of profit maximization Revisiting biases about student motivation other business development topics. In this example, the next topic is usually a discussion of separate bookkeeping for business and family enterprises. Another tactic that has proven successful across multiple contexts is tailoring educational methods to geographic location and/or cultural biases. For example, HELP instruc- tors found that urban residents dem- onstrate an understanding of business concepts in ways that are quite simi- lar to what one might expect from a typical Western college student. These urban students in developing coun- tries tend to quickly understand con- cepts, such as negotiation techniques or economies of scale and scope, and to more quickly apply these concepts in their own businesses. For example, help volunteers in Uganda found that teaching marketing principles in an urban or semi-urban setting was fairly easy. Participants in the class could cite examples of techniques they had seen that were effective or not effective because they were accus- tomed to seeing and interacting with multiple forms of marketing. In contrast, a HELP volunteer teaching in a very rural setting, where many of the students had little interaction with marketing and rarely traveled out of their small village, reported that the concepts were difficult for many participants to grasp. For instance, when HELP volunteers asked pig farmers how they could let others know they were selling pigs, they struggled to find any other option than simply telling their neighbors that they sold pigs. These class participants had not been previously exposed to other types of marketing. Generally speaking, HELP instructors have consistently found that rural participants learned more slowly than their urban counterparts and that business concepts must be taught differently in extremely rural areas. Thus, simply being primed to adjust content by geography has improved the teaching. The final two techniques that have improved the teaching of busi- ness concepts to the extremely poor relate to considering instructor biases. In the West, we encourage creativity and industry and tend to correlate these skills with increased success in business and management. However, by using games to teach business skills in developing contexts, HELP has repeatedly found that players who show high levels of creativity and industry in the game do not neces- sarily automatically have the skills or mindset to translate that creativity 19 best practices
- 7. and industry to their businesses. The games have illustrated that students possess the skills, but instructors need to take extra care in translating the game lessons to real-life behavior. Some students who were highly successful in the context of games still claimed that their skills could not help them in their real lives because they believed that being poor was their fate. Therefore, HELP volunteers learned they needed to understand the students’ perspectives on poverty and alter their lessons to work within that context. This finding serves as a critical reminder that not everyone learns by the same method. Instructors may also need to adjust their mindset concerning assumed students’ motives. They should note that a bias in training towards the profit-making motive can affect the holistic picture of student lives. Participants are not always primarily driven by a strong profit motive because business for them is also interwoven with family and cultural concerns. Thus, they often choose to adjust their profit margins depending on their customer instead of always charging the highest price. Instructors may also need to help students see the long-term implica- tions of some of their preferences. For example, many of the people HELP teaches grow cash crops for exporta- tion. The land is fertile and yields cash crops to sell in foreign markets. However, instead of using part of the land for growing vegetables for their own families, they use all of the land for cash crops and then use the income to purchase similar or less nutritious products from the local market. Situations such as these illustrate the responsibility of teach- ers to understand the holistic view of students’ lives. Clearly, understanding the participants’ perspectives is key to using business knowledge for maxi- mum positive effect. Conclusion As researchers and practitioners expand the role of management education to include new and atypical stakeholders in developing country contexts, many questions and challenges remain to be answered. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Lisa Jones Christensen is an assistant professor of entrepre- neurship at the University of North Carolina. Her research and teaching focuses on sustainable enterprise, corporate social responsibility, lead- ership, change management, and change implementation. Through her research, she co-founded HELP Honduras (now HELP International). Jones Christensen has a PhD in organizational behavior and has been published in numerous edited books and journals. Jennifer Boehme Kumar is the executive director of HELP International. She has held that position for eight years. Her service in the organization began as a volun- teer during its first year. This paper—with its grounding in the model of knowledge domains and examples of socially responsive knowledge generated in such set- tings—seeks to inform others as they refine the role of management education in development interven- tions. We hope this paper benefits researchers and practitioners as they attempt to increase the self-reliance of students living in such settings. Endnotes 1 Irwin Altman, “Higher Education and Psychology in the Millennium,” American Psychologist 51, no. 4 (1996): 371–378. 2 Warner W. Woodworth, “Microcredit in Post-Conflict, Conflict, Natural Disaster, and Other Difficult Settings” (Paper commis- sioned by the Microcredit Summit Campaign in 2006). (Based on the statistic that in Honduras, one job typically supported five people.) 3 See John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938/1997) and David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984) for more information on experiential learning. Understanding the participants’ per- spectives is key to using business knowledge for maximum positive effect. PHOTO:Tyturley 20 ESR —SPRING 2008