Beyond the Lecture: Creative Pedagogy for Responsible Management Education in an AI-Capable World
As business schools navigate growing expectations to develop graduates capable of addressing complex social, environmental and organisational challenges, questions about how we teach have become as important as questions about what we teach. The ambitions of responsible management education extend beyond the transmission of knowledge, requiring learning environments that help students develop judgement, navigate uncertainty and engage with competing stakeholder interests. Yet many programmes continue to rely on forms of teaching and assessment that may be insufficient for these aims.
In this blog, the authors draw on insights from their recent paper, Beyond the Lecture: Creative and Innovative Pedagogies in Management Education – An Integrative Conceptual Review, to explore how a diverse range of creative pedagogies can contribute to these challenges. Bringing together previously disconnected literatures, they examine what simulations, games, arts-based approaches, design pedagogy, problem-based learning and student-generated artefacts reveal about learner agency, reflection, assessment and the future of management education in an era increasingly shaped by generative AI.
by: Dr Michael P. O’Brien, Dr Matthew Daniels and Dr Annmarie Ryan, Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick, Ireland
Management education has long faced a tension between the capabilities business schools say they want to develop and the ways in which students are often taught and assessed. Leading organisations, working with ambiguity, exercising judgement and responding to complex social and environmental challenges require more than the reproduction of disciplinary knowledge. These capabilities are also central to the wider ambitions of the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), where the challenge is not simply to teach students about responsibility, sustainability and ethics, but to develop their capacity to exercise judgement in situations where interests conflict, information is incomplete and consequences extend beyond the immediate organisation.
Our recent paper, Beyond the Lecture: Creative and Innovative Pedagogies in Management Education – An Integrative Conceptual Review, published in The International Journal of Management Education, examines what a diverse body of creative and innovative pedagogies might contribute to that challenge. Rather than advocating one particular teaching method, the paper asks what becomes visible when a range of pedagogical traditions are considered together, and what this might mean for the future of management education.
Bringing separate pedagogical traditions together
Creative approaches to management education have proliferated over recent years. Simulations allow students to experience the consequences of decisions; games introduce interaction, uncertainty and experimentation; arts-based approaches engage aesthetic, emotional and embodied ways of knowing; design-based pedagogies foreground making, visualisation and iterative inquiry; problem-based learning organises learning around complex problems; and student-generated media and artefacts place students in the position of creating representations of their own understanding.
These approaches have, however, largely developed within separate scholarly conversations. Research on simulation rarely intersects with arts-based management education; game-based learning has developed largely apart from design pedagogy; and student-generated artefacts constitute another distinct literature. Our starting point was therefore to ask what could be learned by examining these traditions together rather than continuing to treat them as separate forms of pedagogical innovation.
The review deliberately uses creative pedagogy as an analytical umbrella rather than assuming that it already exists as a coherent field. Through an integrative conceptual review of literature published principally between 2013 and 2026, alongside earlier foundational work, we compared pedagogical approaches according to their purpose, the activity required of students, the theoretical traditions on which they draw and the forms of assessment with which they are commonly associated. This produced six overlapping clusters: experiential and simulation-based learning; game-based and gamified approaches; arts-based methods; design-based pedagogies; problem-based learning; and student-generated multimodal artefacts.
Engagement is important, but it is not the same as durable learning
One of the clearest findings from the review concerns the strength of the evidence. Across the six clusters, there is relatively strong evidence for engagement, motivation, participation and learning within the immediate educational setting. Students often respond positively when they are required to make decisions, solve problems, experiment, create artefacts or engage with authentic and simulated situations.
The evidence becomes considerably thinner when the question shifts to longer-term competence development or transfer into subsequent professional practice. It is much harder to establish whether judgement demonstrated in a simulation persists into later managerial practice, whether the benefits of an arts-based intervention endure, or whether gains in areas such as ambiguity tolerance, empathy or creative confidence transfer beyond the course in which they were developed. This distinction matters because some of the strongest claims made for creative pedagogies concern precisely these longer-term developmental effects.
For responsible management education, this is an important caution. Memorable and engaging learning experiences are valuable, but engagement should not automatically be treated as evidence that durable capability has been developed. If business schools claim that their pedagogies develop responsible leaders, ethical judgement, systems thinking or the capacity to deal with complexity, stronger evidence is needed about whether those capabilities persist and are transferred into new contexts.
Learner agency and the exercise of judgement
A first theme that recurs across the literature is learner agency. Creative pedagogies frequently move students away from reproducing predetermined answers and towards situations in which they must make consequential choices. Students may have to decide how to respond to a changing market within a simulation, frame an ambiguous organisational problem, develop and revise a prototype, design a game, create a multimedia artefact or defend a proposed course of action.
The important issue is not whether the activity looks innovative or creative. It is the extent to which students are genuinely required to exercise judgement. An activity can be highly interactive while leaving very little meaningful decision-making with the learner, just as a relatively simple task can create considerable agency if students must choose among alternatives, accept the consequences of those choices and explain why they acted as they did.
This has particular relevance to responsible management education. Responsible decisions rarely involve applying a framework mechanically to a neatly defined problem. They more often require managers to weigh competing interests, recognise uncertainty, consider consequences for different stakeholders and justify a decision that may remain contestable. Pedagogies that create space for this kind of judgement therefore offer an important complement to more transmission-oriented forms of learning.
Experience needs reflection
A second recurring theme is structured reflection. Across experiential learning, simulations, arts-based methods, design and problem-based learning, the literature repeatedly suggests that experience does not automatically become transferable learning. Students need opportunities to examine what happened, question their assumptions, connect experience to concepts and consider what they might do differently in another context.
This is particularly evident in simulation and experiential learning, where debriefing is often described as the mechanism through which activity becomes learning. Similar processes are visible in design through critique and iteration, and in arts-based approaches through interpretation and reflection. The terminology differs across traditions, but the underlying idea is consistent: students need structured opportunities to make meaning from what they have experienced.
At the same time, reflective work is particularly vulnerable when time and resources are constrained. The activity itself is usually visible, engaging and easy to describe, while the debrief or reflective discussion can appear less productive in the moment. One practical implication is therefore that reflection should be designed as part of the learning encounter rather than treated as an optional addition at the end.
Pedagogical innovation is also an institutional question
The third theme moves beyond individual teaching practice. Creative approaches can flourish within particular modules while remaining difficult to integrate at programme level. Simulations require facilitation and time; open-ended student work can create questions about assessment consistency; arts-based approaches may not fit familiar assumptions about what counts as legitimate management knowledge; and large cohorts make some forms of experiential and creative learning difficult to scale.
Assessment regulations, faculty workload, staff development, accreditation requirements and the demand for scalable and readily measurable educational outcomes all influence which forms of pedagogy become established. Pedagogical innovation is therefore not simply a question of persuading individual educators to teach differently. It is also an organisational question concerning the conditions institutions create for different forms of teaching and learning.
This point connects strongly with the ambitions of responsible management education. The PRME Chapter UK & Ireland brings together institutions committed to strengthening responsible management education, but meaningful pedagogical change cannot depend solely on isolated examples of innovative teaching. If responsibility, sustainability and ethical judgement are programme-level ambitions, it is worth asking whether the design of the programme as a whole gives students repeated opportunities to exercise those capabilities.
Looking beyond individual methods
To support this programme-level perspective, the review proposes a typology organised around two dimensions. The first concerns who does the creating, ranging from predominantly instructor-designed learning encounters to those in which students themselves generate decisions, artefacts or solutions. The second concerns how students engage, ranging from predominantly analytical engagement to aesthetic and embodied forms of knowing.
These dimensions create four broad configurations. The purpose is not to identify one ideal form of pedagogy, because each configuration enables particular kinds of learning while bringing its own demands and trade-offs. Instructor-designed analytical activities may offer structure, reliability and scalability, for example, while more student-generated or aesthetic forms of learning may provide greater agency and openness but present more difficult questions around facilitation, assessment and equity.
The typology is therefore intended as a diagnostic rather than prescriptive tool. Programme teams might use it to consider whether students experience a sufficiently varied range of learning encounters, whether responsibility for judgement increases as students progress through a programme, and whether creative or experiential learning is concentrated within isolated modules rather than deliberately sequenced across a curriculum. For institutions seeking to contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through management education, these programme-level questions may be more useful than asking whether a particular innovative method is present.
Generative AI makes the issue more pressing
Generative artificial intelligence adds new urgency to these questions because it changes some of the conditions under which learning is demonstrated. AI can already produce polished summaries, structured analysis, applications of familiar frameworks and increasingly sophisticated multimedia outputs. As a result, the relationship between the quality of a finished product and the learning that produced it has become less certain.
Our argument is not that generative AI makes conventional teaching obsolete, or that creative forms of assessment are somehow immune from AI. Students can use AI to generate text, images, video, design concepts and other artefacts just as readily as they can use it to produce an essay. The more significant issue is that AI directs attention towards aspects of learning that have sometimes been obscured by the final product: how students framed the problem, how they considered alternatives, how they used or questioned AI-generated material, how they responded to feedback, and how they explain and defend the choices they made.
This has implications for assessment in responsible management education. A consulting report, simulation outcome, prototype, video or game may become more educationally meaningful when assessment also attends to the process through which it was produced. Evidence of iteration, decision-making, reflection, justification and oral defence can help shift attention away from polished output alone and towards the exercise of judgement that management education claims to develop.
Questions for responsible management educators
Rather than suggesting that every class should become a simulation, design studio or creative exercise, the review invites programme teams to consider a different set of questions:
Where in the curriculum do students genuinely make consequential choices?
Where must they explain and defend those choices?
How deliberately is reflection built into experiential and creative learning?
Do students encounter different modes of inquiry and ways of knowing?
Are opportunities for agency and judgement distributed across a programme or concentrated in isolated modules?
Does assessment capture process and judgement as well as final output?
What institutional conditions support or constrain educators who want to work differently?
These questions are particularly relevant where institutions make claims about developing responsible leaders. They encourage attention not simply to curriculum content, but to the kinds of learning encounters through which students practise responsibility, judgement and reflection.
Beyond the lecture, but not against it
The title of our paper is deliberately Beyond the Lecture rather than Against the Lecture.
Lectures, case studies and structured analytical work continue to have an important place in management education. The issue is whether they are sufficient for all of the capabilities we increasingly claim management programmes will develop.
Our central argument is that creativity in management education is better understood as a feature of the learning encounter than as a characteristic of a particular teaching method. It emerges when students are required to make, decide, interpret, create, reflect and revise, and when educators provide the facilitation and structure needed to turn those experiences into learning.
There remains much we do not know. Better longitudinal evidence is needed on whether learning transfers into later professional practice; equity and access require considerably more attention; facilitation deserves greater recognition as a scholarly practice; and more research is needed at programme rather than solely module level. Generative AI adds further questions about how learning and assessment should be designed when polished output can no longer be treated as straightforward evidence of learning.
These gaps provide an agenda for research, but they also invite a broader conversation across the PRME community. If responsible management education seeks to develop graduates capable of exercising judgement in complex, uncertain and contested situations, then the design of the learning environments in which that judgement is practised deserves as much attention as the content we ask students to learn.
Further reading
O’Brien, M. P., Daniels, M. and Ryan, A. (2027), Beyond the Lecture: Creative and Innovative Pedagogies in Management Education – An Integrative Conceptual Review, The International Journal of Management Education, 25(1), Article 101545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2026.101545
