Introduction
This paper views reveals antenarratives in a
fundamentally different way, especially with respect to
the “before” component of the antenarrative. In lieu of
looking at the antenarrative as having a “before”
component, this paper explains that in some cases the
antenarrative and the narrative may not experience any
sort of divide. In such cases, the narrative finds itself
in a sort of aionological (Mendez, 2024) loop where it
neither progresses not regresses in spite of the fact that
the world around the narrative is continuously evolving.
In this work, we will explain how a
“celebrity” university professor had such a powerful
persona that he was able to create a master narrative, the
“frozen” the narrative of his university, even well after
he retired. The result was an irrelevant pedagogy and
resulting teaching materials and a course framework which
most students couldn’t make sense of, let alone having
very little interest for it.
The next section will introduce the
methodology, followed by a vignette style story in a
nutshell, before the theory section discusses preliminary
findings. The final section is a draft discussion and
conclusion.
Methodology – A Co-Constructed
Autoethnography
This paper is a co-constructed
autoethnography (Frandsen and Pelly, 2020; Pelly and
Brandon-Hopper 2022; Pelly and Brandon Hopper, 2024). This
methodology blends theory and practice perspectives into
one seamless voice. In
this work one author exercises the voice of the
practitioner, and the other is the voice of the
academician. Storytelling vignettes derive from the
practitioner’s real-world experiences, and the theory
vignettes utilize a framework selected by the theory
author.
The Story in a Nutshell
When it comes to celebrities, one usually
thinks of actors, musicians, athletes, hosts of TV shows,
successful and rich businessmen/women… Yet celebrities are
also very much to be found in our own academic world,
whether it be “the” researcher that comes up with
ground-breaking publications and becomes the reference in
a particular field of interest, or “the” professor that is
unanimously acclaimed as an exceptional figure by students
and faculty colleagues. They are “the” professor whose
class every student wants to attend, “the” Professor who
mentors junior faculty members and sparks off their will
to strive for greater achievements. They become legends
and leave a permanent trace on their faculty, one that
perdures long after they retire.
In my Business School, our legendary
celebrity was Luke Martin. He had inspired a countless
number of students, undergrads as much as graduates. Luke
was, amongst other, renowned for his lectures in
epistemology, a mandatory course in the PhD program, a
course every single PhD candidate was eager to attend. I
still remember how he could make complex and obscure
concepts crystal clear. Under his teaching, Deleuze and
Derrida’s ideas suddenly became a breeze to grasp, and he
managed to make otherwise rather dull, but key authors,
almost interesting. Luke was captivating. He also had a
brilliant sense of humour and didn’t hesitate to rely on a
fair dose of sarcasm. Junior faculty’s dream was to
emulate Luke’s teaching. It was not uncommon for post-doc
graduates or visiting scholars to attend his epistemology
lectures.
While his teaching was praised, Luke was also
a free thinker. The admiration he was the object of gave
him the leeway to lead the department in whatever
direction he pleased to. Given this unquestionable
reputation, he was able to indulge in constructing a
rather intricate framework with a sociological and
epistemological twist that came to define how the course
of Management was to be taught throughout the whole
school, whether it be to bachelor undergrad students,
master’s graduate students or continuing education. While
this framework was tightly bound and coherent, it remained
an arbitrary intellectual exercise with its own logic.
Yet, with is charisma, Luke got most of the department to
endorse it. He was particularly convincing at getting
fully onboard junior faculty members whose first teaching
assignment typically entailed teaching this mandatory
course. So much so that his influence and mark perdured
way after he retired. It became a defining element of the
school’s identity. And as junior faculty moved forward and
got tenure, they made sure new faculty members
unquestionably embraced it.
This Management course was also taught by PhD
candidates who were given sessional lecturer appointments.
As a PhD candidate, I got to teach it once. At the time, I
was silently questioning the relevance of this framework.
Indeed, it was complex, with several elements binding
together and culminating in a sort of system into which
key management concepts where to be fitted. The course
also relied on business cases that were to be solved using
a prescribed and very rigid template. I didn’t rock the
boat, I delivered the lectures and moved on.
Some ten years later, after graduating with
my PhD degree, I was left roaming to craft a place for
myself in the academic chessboard. Money was tight so when
I was offered a sessional appointment by the coordinator
of the Management course to undergrads, I accepted.
Reviewing the course’s syllabus, I realized how unchanged
it had been left, structured around the same framework.
Furthermore, it relied on the very same case studies it
used to. As I progressed through the semester along with
my students it became blatant as to how cumbersome a
framework it was. Undergrads students, fresh out of high
school, completely lacked the knowledge to grasp its
sociological underpinning, let alone did they have an
interest for it. Yet, assignments and exams required them
to master it, on top of mastering what should have been at
the core of the course, that is, fundamental key
management concepts. I remember asking a mentor of mine, a
renowned tenured Professor at the Schools’ MBA department,
for advice as to how to facilitate my students’
comprehension of the framework and even more so, justify
its very worth. He replied by acknowledging its very
relative merits and stressed that nowhere else in business
schools was management taught in such a way. While it
comforted me in my questioning of its relevance, it also
left me more and more uncomfortable having to teach it.
Indeed, teaching something you question is a painful chore
to handle.
Furthermore, the Management course being
mandatory and one of the first course all of the 25
incoming groups of BCom students where to take in their
first semester, it had been highly standardized. Not only
did we, as lecturers, have no leeway whatsoever as to the
material to be presented, we had no say about the
students’ assignments and exams and how they were to be
graded. This was all determined by the course coordinator
who not only was not a tenured faculty member but did not
even have a PhD. We were strictly directed not to “fine
tune” our grading with + or – along the letters. Worse, we
only saw our students’ mid-term and final exams after our
own students did, which to me was the uttermost absurdity.
How could I properly prepare my beloved bachelor students
for their exams reviewing key concepts in class if I
didn’t even know what they would be questioned about? It
went against a fundamental teaching value of mine, namely
doing my very best to facilitate their success.
Return to the Agora?
This story highlights how the antenarrative
of the “celebrity” professor as the before our heroine’s
teaching journey. She
describes how as a doctoral student, she was impressed
with this professor’s charismatic personality and jumped
at the opportunity to teach one of his classes. Yet, much
as a person who begins to dislike sausage once they see
how it is made, the allure of the exciting graduate school
course begins to dissipate once the same framework
appeared inappropriately applied to an undergraduate
course.
Our practice author indicates that such a
course may have been appropriate for her father’s
generation, when students were better prepared for deep
philosophical discussions that marked the educational
experiences of the course designer’s generation. Unfortunately,
times had changed, and this “before” antenarrative, which
could have been exciting previously, became an outdated
relic in the “now” as an actual narrative. What was more
perplexing was that this same course remains unchanged
more than a decade later when our storyteller taught the
course again as a tenured faculty member. We observe that
the “before” antenarrative became and remained the grand
narrative, even though everything else around the course
enjoyed an alternative temporality. It appeared as
if this course and its before narrative were stuck in an
aionological loop (Mendez, 2024).
Discussion and Conclusion
This paper makes several interesting
contributions. From the perspective of education and
pedagogy, it shows the farcical nature of courses that
refuse to change with the times. From the perspective of
theory, it shows an interesting circumstance where the
before narrative becomes frozen in time and reified into
the dominant narrative. This aionological time loop
(Mendez, 2024) is not dissimilar from the Tamara-Land
experience (Boje, 1995; Boje et al, 2022). In Tamara,
participants are confronted with aionological time –
in this form as a play that freezes time to concresce on
fascist Italy. Participants are invited to wander from
room to room, each room with its own loop that repeats in
an endless cycle. While
the time loop in Tamara serves as a source of
entertainment for the audience, this loop has detrimental
impacts upon pedagogy as will be further developed in the
full paper.
