Teaching for Wonder: Pedagogical Openings for Epistemic Change in the Climate Crisis

Abstract The accelerating climate crisis demands profound changes in how management learning and education prepares students to engage with uncertainty and ecological interdependence. While recent scholarship calls for epistemic transformation in business schools, there is limited understanding of how pedagogy might cultivate the orientations required for such change. This paper advances wonder as a critical yet under‐theorized pedagogical orientation for climate‐responsive management education. We conceptualize wonder as an epistemic–affective orientation of attentional widening and humility in response to the more‐than‐known, capable of disrupting instrumental habits of knowing and sustaining openness to uncertainty. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative study of an arts‐based pedagogical collaboration with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, we develop a processual framework comprising five interrelated moments: encounter, suspension, engagement, refiguration and return. Together, these moments show how wonder reshapes students’ relationships to knowledge, enabling them to engage with complexity beyond instrumental frames. In doing so, the paper provides an empirically grounded theorization of wonder as a pedagogical mechanism for epistemic transformation and advances debates on what climate‐responsive management education could look like.