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This case study deals with the financial accounting fraud at Sunbeam Corporation during the time “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap was the company’s CEO. This was a very pervasive fraud, involving improper revenue recognition, understatements of the reserves for sales returns and bad debts, abuse of the rules governing consignment sales, and other manipulations. While the amounts involved seem insignificant when compared to those of Enron and WorldCom, the study of Sunbeam is illuminating. Many of the problems at Sunbeam were caused by an abusive and egotistical CEO. In addition, Sunbeam’s external auditor during the period of the fraud was Arthur Andersen. Sunbeam can be viewed as being part of a continuum of audit failures extending from Waste Management to WorldCom. This case is designed in part to serve as an antidote to the coverage found in typical accounting by exposing students to a real situation in which people knowingly violated GAAP, and still received a clean audit opinion, and the company was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy.

This chapter highlights the underlying complexities of the concept of “curriculum” in recent decades and the different definitions given to the concept in curriculum studies by scholars of education in general and ISATT members in particular. After describing the fuzziness of the curriculum concept and seeking to resolve fragmentation through returning to its value and avoiding misunderstandings, this work briefly addresses the “curriculum design” concept and presents some recent developments in ISATT research – “curriculum making” and “vertical curriculum” – that reevaluate the role of teachers. The outcomes of the such investigations converge around teachers' roles as “curriculum makers” and not as mere “implementers”; specifically, they allow explorations of teacher's “best-loved self,” through narratives and metaphors to reaffirm principles – such as decision-making and collegiality – which are necessary for teachers' practices and teaching and teacher education research.