On April 20 and 21, the Conscious Business Education project met an important milestone: members of all project partners got together in Munich for the LTT meeting – Learning, Training and Teaching.
Conscious Business Education (CBE) is an Erasmus+ funded research project coordinated by Munich Business School. It aims to develop a syllabus on the topic of conscious business for bachelor’s and master’s programs as well as for the field of executive education. What has been going on since the project kicked off in Barcelona about a year ago? Quite a lot.
Developing a Conscious Business Education Syllabus
At the LTT meeting, the MBS project coordinators Konstantin Mudrack and Prof. Dr. Christian Schmidkonz were joined by members of the project partners consortium consisting of the universities UPF Barcelona School of Management (Spain), Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic), Nova School of Business and Economics (Portugal), the Impact Centre Erasmus (The Netherlands), Julius-Maximilians Universität Würzburg (Germany), the coordinating partner Munich Business School (Germany) and PIMEC, Catalunya’s federation of small/medium enterprises.
One important agenda item of the Learning, Training and Teaching meeting was, in essence, forming the different courses the partners have developed into one coherent, coordinated syllabus: For this, the project partners spent a good amount of time identifying best practices within the 21 courses and were overwhelmed by the rich variety of methods, practices and tools the 12 different professors that created the courses had applied. Variety is good. While quite a number of best practices were identified, it was concluded not to mandate a “single way to teach a course”. Because there isn’t. Rather it is beneficial to promote creativity and diversity while identifying best practices as an example.
So what were the best practices identified? To name just three examples:
- Make students reflect – on their values and on their purpose. This shall trigger a reflective mindset and lead to a more conscious participation in class.
- Apply simple mindfulness practices at the beginning of each class: this sets the tone for the entire class.
- Introduce experiential, playful ways for students to explore the themes taught in the specific course.
Planning the Conscious Business Education Multiplier Event
The second major item on the meeting agenda was planning the upcoming Conscious Business Education Multiplier Event in detail. This conference will take place on June 28 and 29 in Barcelona and aims to be of special appeal for three main audience groups:
- professors and any kind of university teacher
- researchers, Ph.D. students, or business students
- business and economics teachers in high schools or vocational schools.
None of these three target groups need to have prior knowledge on conscious business – as sharing this knowledge is the main topic of the conference. Essential is that all of them teach business-related topics. The conference aims to provide knowledge to enrich these educators and help transform what they teach.
What was fascinating to see was how the team applied methods to further developing the conference agenda, which are in themselves highly conscious. The agenda now includes delivering parts of a class to the audience in an experiential way, and introducing the audience to mindfulness exercises and tools. At the LTT meeting, there was great focus on this “conscious spice” – an appealing term for “what makes the CBE courses unique”. Indeed, the goal is not only to innovate what we teach, but also how we teach it.
So far, so good.
Over the next few weeks, the CBE partners will be busy preparing the first BIG event in Barcelona. At the CBE Mulitplier Event, participants from Spain and the rest of Europe are expected, but also some from as far away as Latin America. Are you also interested in joining? Then simply register here.
You are interested in economics and want to acquire in-depth business know-how?
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