Cindi Fukami: The Case of the Curious Cat in the Classroom

Cindi Fukami is the recipient of the 2025 David L. Bradford Outstanding Educator Award, which recognizes her significant contributions to management education through innovative practice and sustained management education leadership. This interview features Cindi’s reflections on her journey as an academic, from conversing about work at the dinner table to bringing workplace practices into the classroom. Embracing her identity as both researcher and teacher, Cindi has shown tremendous courage in rejecting the divide between research and teaching. Throughout her career, she has effectively demonstrated how research and teaching can be brought together through the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Her work as a researcher, teacher, and management education scholar is underpinned by rigor and a curiosity of the world. She encourages others to view teaching as legitimate scholarship when it is theoretically informed, evidence based, and peer reviewed. Cindi opens the eyes of those in the Academy to the living laboratories of the everyday and asserts the enduring impact of scholarly teaching on people and organizations. For management educators around the world, her career poses a challenge and an invitation: Be curious. Be rigorous. Be public. And practice what you preach.