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Nadine de Gannes
Faculty Director
Ivey Business School’s Honours Business Administration (HBA) Program
Western University

The Experimental Educator

There is a reason we are in higher education. The educator in each of us made a choice somewhere along the way – whether consciously or not – to teach humans on the cusp of their adult lives; on the verge of productive labour; on the brink of life’s great adventures. In our heart of hearts, we wish for them to emerge from our institutions as positively contributing members of society.

It is a privilege to engage with their future-making. It is also our responsibility to do so. After all, we collectively share the Future.

Yet, for many of us, the changes to our campuses and classrooms have been dizzying and disconcerting. Generative AI, climate change, wars and armed conflict, shape the arc of campus discourse. Our students’ needs can feel insurmountable at times. We can feel ill-equipped to attend to them.

As we grapple with these seismic shifts, we seldom have an opportunity to consider what we as educators need. If we are to inspire our students to be agents of change, then we must be inspired ourselves, and inspired enough to overcome our fear of failure, our fear of uncertainty and our fear of the unknown.

In this address, we will (re)imagine the space in which we play. Yes, play! Goals as lofty as transformation and reimagination are bolstered and invigorated when we approach them as playing with ideas, with possibility, and with our own potential to enact change. 

Transformation does not occur all at once. In this address, we will explore the experimental practices, pilots and projects that amass to a transformed and transformational curriculum and classroom.

From the Day 1 intro slides to the 10-minute in-class thoughts experiments, through to the student onboarding culture and inclusion modules embedded in core curriculum; I will share what worked and what didn’t work in my accounting and governance courses, and in the program level initiatives. I will share what my colleagues and I learned from our pilots, how we pivoted, and how we scaled our culture-building work at a programmatic and institutional level in service of celebrating intellectual curiosity and motivating critical thinking, while always aspiring to plurality in our learning environments.

Biography

Nadine de Gannes is Faculty Director of Ivey Business School’s Honours Business Administration (HBA) Program at Western University. Nadine is also a faculty member in Accounting and Sustainability, and a member of Ivey’s EDI Advisory Council. She holds a Masters and PhD in Accounting from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an HBA from Ivey Business School.

In taking a sociological approach to accounting and governance research and pedagogy, Nadine centres responsibility and accountability as critically important expectations and outcomes of students’ learning journeys in higher education. Translating and infusing these principles into inclusive curriculum design and delivery as well as classroom and cohort culture-building is vital in every topic she teaches.

In collaboration with Dr. Erin Huner and always in coalition with students, Nadine has co-created, curated and integrated culture and inclusion modules and sessions into the core of the HBA curriculum. These learning opportunities focus on the positions from which we speak, the ways we show up in our learning, and the responsibilities we hold in restoring what has been lost in a learning environment. ‘We’ being students, staff, faculty, alumni; for where there is a relationship, there is a responsibility.