Educating Students in Transformative Accountability

In considering the role critical accounting educators can play in social movements, this paper proposes an approach for engaging students in transformative accountability education grounded in community organising methodology and practice. Community organising seeks to build civil society’s relational power for collective action that holds power to account. In this paper, we outline the experiential practices through which we have engaged students in community organising, fostering deep and sustained engagement with transformative accountability. By collaborating with students and community partners on campaigns, we demonstrate how accounting and accountability can be taught differently and how we, as critical educators, can increase the civic impact of the business school and the university by contributing meaningfully to social movements. In this paper, we reflect on our experience developing and delivering community organising education and share the lessons learned for critical accounting education, including the value of co-creating accountability with students, and the impact of adopting a dialogic, practice-based approach to education.