When Management Education Gets Its Hands Dirty: Reading Dallyn et al on Compost, Critique and Care

I've been thinking about this piece by Dallyn, Checchi, Prado, and Munro—"Conscientisation and Communities of Compost: Rethinking management pedagogy in an age of climate crises." It names the problem clearly and then actually offers something else.

Most sustainability teaching in business schools operates within what they call "corporate sustainability solutionism." We add modules on CSR, tick boxes about the SDGs, teach students to write better sustainability reports. Meanwhile, the house is still burning.

The authors introduce this idea of "scalar mismatch", when your solutions operate at completely different levels from your problems. Individual behaviour change versus systemic collapse. Organisational sustainability initiatives versus the need to transform entire economic systems. It's like trying to face a forest fire with a water pistol—misaligned in scale, even if well-intended.

Not Just a Metaphor

They bring together Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy with Donna Haraway's call to "stay with the trouble." From Freire: education is always political, rooted in experience, aimed at collective transformation. From Haraway: compost as a practice of multispecies care, a call to stay with the trouble rather than seek quick fixes.

Instead of treating "Communities of Compost" as metaphor, they're making it literal. They've collaborated with a local community garden in Newcastle, secured funding from their university, installed compost bins, and are planning to bring students to engage with soil and waste and the slow work of decomposition.

The compost bin becomes a place where business students can experience different ways of organising. Different relationships to waste, to time, to the more-than-human world. You can't disrupt the nitrogen cycle or optimise decomposition. You have to work with processes that operate on their own timescales.

They outline how site visits will work: students will discuss the composting process, add cardboard and vegetable peelings, learn about vermicomposting. There's planned practical education about what can and can't be composted, in what proportions, how to mix materials depending on texture and scent. They're designing what they call "the beautiful science of composting."

They don't overclaim. The modules are being designed for next academic year. They've added composting worms as part of the setup to foster "multi-species relationships," but they're still figuring out how to connect these concrete practices with broader questions about land relations and food production.

Not All Students Want to Talk About Worms

The honesty about student reactions is one of the best parts. They describe inviting guest speakers from local Community Supported Agriculture organisations to talk about food sovereignty. Student responses were mixed. One student told them in feedback that the speaker offered nothing relevant to their future assignment. Another was keen to get contact details to do a project on social entrepreneurship and composting.

They acknowledge this reflects "the real diversity of student perspectives and opinions around engaging with the climate crisis through alternative perspectives." Student receptivity is "variable, contextually specific and difficult to predict."

They don't pretend this work is easy or that students always embrace it. Some find explicit content about land relations uncomfortable. The authors don't smooth these tensions away. Instead, they create spaces where these tensions can be explored. The educator's role is to ensure these debates happen, not to impose particular conclusions.

Start With the Soil

Reading the whole piece, what strikes me is how modest their actual experiments are. They're not claiming to have solved anything. They've installed some compost bins, planned some site visits, invited some guest speakers. They're testing whether starting from concrete practices, getting hands dirty with soil, might help students engage differently with climate breakdown.

This isn't about teaching sustainability as another strategic lever. It's about composting the very idea that management must always mean control, speed, and growth.

The thread they're trying to weave is from community composting to broader questions about food systems and land use. They want students to experience caring for soil firsthand, then consider how that connects to industrial agriculture, monocultures, the destructive effects of nitrogen fertiliser. The hope is that starting from lived experience might make these bigger questions more tangible.

It's patient, slow, compost-paced work. They're dealing with institutional constraints, student resistance, the challenge of integrating sustainability content across different levels of a degree programme.

Finding Kin in the References

Looking at their references, there's a remarkable convergence with the theoretical landscape of Teaching Otherwise. bell hooks on transformative education. Freire on critical pedagogy. Haraway on staying with trouble. Critical management theorists questioning corporate narratives.

You're part of a broader group of educators refusing business-as-usual in management education. The connections are clear, from critiquing extractive educational models to insisting that pedagogy is always political, from emphasising embodied learning to committing to collective rather than individual transformation.

Reading this felt like recognition. The theoretical foundations are similar—the same feminist pedagogues, the same anti-colonial thinkers, the same refusal to accept that education must reproduce the systems it studies. Their "care as curriculum" shows up in the attention to soil care, to multi-species relationships, to the patient work of composting. Their "criticality as method" appears in the critique of corporate sustainability narratives.

The shared references show similar values and frustrations.

This Isn't Disruption. It's Decomposition.

Using soil and compost as the medium for this work is interesting. It's humble, earthy, unglamorous. It requires attention to cycles of decay and regeneration that operate on timescales longer than semester systems or career plans.

They're working with what they have access to, a local community garden, some internal university funding, the constraints and opportunities of their institutional context. They're not waiting for perfect conditions or complete institutional transformation. They're finding small spaces where different relationships might be practised.

The questions they're left with are good ones: How do we create pedagogical experiences that genuinely connect local action with broader movements for change? How do we work with whatever land and soil is available to us? What would it mean to take seriously the more-than-human participants in our educational spaces?

In a field obsessed with innovation and disruption, they're offering something different: the patient work of cultivation, the slow transformation that happens when we attend properly to the communities we're part of.

Yes, I think you've found kin. The kind who work with soil and stories, who thread theory through practice, who understand that change starts in the classroom but goes beyond it.

What might our own compost bins be? Not metaphorical ones, but actual places of slow breakdown and new life, spaces where students, soil, and stories might decay something extractive, and grow something else.