Making sense of management knowledge as relational achievement

Reflective narratives in Japanese undergraduate seminar courses

抄録

In this article, we explore how management educators can design courses that enable their students to link their classroom learning to real business environments. We focus on a reflective narrative-based storytelling process in which students make sense of management knowledge from their Japanese undergraduate seminar courses, called “zemi.” It is a learning environment as well as a community where students experience “here-now” cases on an ongoing basis. This research collected narratives from students in a zemi facilitated by the second author. We analyze the students’ reflective narratives on learning from their experiences and demonstrate that their sensemaking processes are situated in their learning relations. Our findings show that when the learning process is linked closely to one’s self-exploration and relational maturity, the students can make broader interpretations of knowledge. Specifically, they become able to make sense of management knowledge as relational achievement.