Creative and Arts-Based Pedagogy in Management Education

For educators who want to teach differently but aren't sure where to start — or who are already experimenting and want language for what they're doing.

Management education has a dominant method: present a framework, apply it to a case, assess the outcome. It's efficient. It's auditable. And it produces graduates who are technically competent at working within existing systems while being genuinely unprepared to question them.

Arts-based pedagogy starts from a different premise. Not that learning should be more enjoyable (though it often is), but that some of the most important things students need to understand cannot be accessed through analysis alone. Ethics, complexity, imagination, the capacity to hold contradiction without rushing to resolution: these don't emerge from case studies. They emerge from making, doing, creating, noticing.

This pillar collects the practical methods and the thinking behind them.

What counts as arts-based pedagogy

The short answer: any method that asks students to produce something rather than just analyse something. Visual collaging. Storytelling. Media-making. Speculative writing. Working with objects. Walking. These aren't decorative additions to a "real" curriculum. They're epistemological choices, decisions about what kind of knowing we think matters and who gets to do it.

The longer answer is that arts-based approaches challenge which students get to be good at learning. Dominant academic formats (essays, exams, presentations) privilege particular kinds of expression: linear, individual, text-based, confident. Students who don't naturally inhabit those forms are quietly told their way of knowing doesn't count. When a student creates a collage that holds contradictory images in tension, or writes a letter from their 2050 professional self to their present self, they are producing knowledge. It looks different. It counts.

In a business school context, this matters beyond inclusion. The challenges students will navigate, climate disruption, inequality, technological transformation, require imagination, not just analysis. Creative methods develop exactly that capacity. Not as enrichment, but as foundation.

Start here: three ways in

If you want a method you can use next week, start with Visual Collaging for Complex Thinking. It works across levels, requires minimal materials, and consistently surfaces insights that written tasks miss. Story From an Image is another low-barrier entry point that works for any subject and any group size.

If you want to understand the pedagogical argument, Zines, Podcasts, and Pedagogies of Possibility explores media-making as a form of collaborative knowledge creation. Room in the Bag of Stars thinks through what it means to gather knowledge rather than conquer it, drawing on Ursula Le Guin's carrier bag theory.

If you're working on assessment, When Media Meets Ethics is a field note on building a portfolio approach that asks students to develop ethical analysis through cultural engagement. It's grounded in what actually happened when I tried it with second-year HRM students.

On resistance

Students resist creative methods. So do colleagues, sometimes. So do the institutional structures that evaluate teaching through completion rates and module scores.

The student resistance is usually one of three things: anxiety about academic legitimacy ("is this rigorous?"), anxiety about creative ability ("I can't draw"), or anxiety about vulnerability ("this feels too personal"). Each of these is worth taking seriously.

The legitimacy concern is actually the most interesting one, because it's not wrong. Arts-based pedagogy does challenge what counts as valid knowledge in academic settings. The response isn't to reassure students that it's "just as rigorous." It's to make the epistemological argument explicit, to say directly that the capacity to imagine otherwise is not a soft skill but a core professional competency, and that emotional intelligence and ethical sensitivity are not supplements to analytical thinking but preconditions for it.

The creative ability concern dissolves quickly once students understand they're not being assessed on artistic technique. The vulnerability concern requires more care. When students resist bringing their whole selves to learning, they're protecting something real. Arts-based pedagogy works best when it creates enough safety for students to lower that protection voluntarily, which means designing for it: low-stakes entry points, explicit framing about what's being asked and why, and facilitation that holds the room without flattening it.

Playing Our Way to Different Futures is a field note on what this looks like in practice, specifically through LEGO Serious Play and the Climate Play methodology.

The question underneath all of this

There's a question that sits beneath every arts-based method I use, and it's worth naming it directly: who do we think students are?

If we think they are empty vessels to be filled with frameworks, we design one kind of classroom. If we think they are people who already know things, who have experiences and intuitions and ethical instincts worth developing, we design something different. Arts-based pedagogy is a commitment to the second view. It treats students as knowledge creators rather than knowledge consumers, which changes not just the methods but the relationship.

That shift is not comfortable for everyone, including students who have learned to be comfortable in the passive role. Authority Redistribution explores what it actually takes to move power in a classroom, practically and relationally.

What's in this section

Teaching materials: step-by-step practices ready to adapt and use. Essays and reflections: the thinking behind the methods, honest about what works and what doesn't. Field notes: accounts from actual sessions, including the resistance and the surprises.

Browse by tag, or start with whatever is most useful to you right now.

The methods here are not a system. They're an orientation toward making, noticing, imagining, and the kinds of knowing that management education tends to leave out.