Using Film to Rethink Teaching and Learning
Our research began with a shared concern. While teaching management theory, we became increasingly aware of a mismatch between traditional text-based pedagogy and the image-saturated environments students inhabit. We started questioning not only what counts as management knowledge, but how the ways we see and frame organisations shape what we understand them to be.
This reflection led us to develop the Teaching Development Fund project Reimagining Management Education. From the outset, Arianna Careddu from the University of Cagliari was central to the project, bringing expertise in philosophy of language and multimodal communication. Together, we experimented with film as a conceptual tool rather than an illustration, using cinema to explore how HRM, leadership, employment relations and ethics are staged and contested in organisational life.
Student responses revealed both insight and uncertainty. Some connected theory to embodied scenes with striking clarity. Others struggled with unfamiliar cinematic forms or linguistic barriers. Rather than treating this as a pedagogical problem to be eliminated, we analysed it as part of the research itself. We came to understand confusion not as failure, but as a threshold that requires careful interpretive scaffolding.
We are grateful to LIAS for providing the institutional support that has enabled us to transform an innovative teaching project into a sustained research collaboration and expand this work into a broader interdisciplinary initiative. We are building an inter-university and cross-college linking primarily the College of Business and the College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, particularly colleagues in media, communication, and law, while remaining open to all who wish to participate.
Inclusivity remains central to our vision. Captioning, transcripts, visual animation, and structured interpretive frameworks are not technical additions, but expressions of a wider commitment to accessible and reflexive research communication. If management shapes institutions and working lives, then the language and images through which it is taught and researched matter profoundly.
Looking ahead, we will convene two linked symposia, lay the groundwork for an edited volume on teaching management (and other subjects) through film, and develop future external funding bids. What began as a shared pedagogical experiment has become a broader intellectual project, which we hope will attract as many contributors as possible.