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The questions at the origin of this chapter are: Are children aged 5 years able to become involved in a critical thinking process, which implies a certain degree of abstraction and decentering? To what extent can an approach centered on philosophical dialogue among peers contribute to this development? The chapter describes a study of the exchanges in two groups of children aged 5 years. One group had experience with the philosophical dialogue tool, the Philosophy for Children approach, while the other group had no such experience. The analysis grid was the operationalized model of the developmental process of dialogical critical thinking, as revisited by Daniel and Gagnon, which includes four thinking modes (logical, creative, responsible, and metacognitive) and six epistemological perspectives (egocentricity, post-egocentricity, pre-relativism, relativism, post-relativism, intersubjectivity). Results of the analysis showed that 65% of the experimental group's interventions were situated in relativistic perspectives and 35% in egocentric perspectives, whereas 60% of the control group's interventions were situated in egocentric perspectives and 40% in relativistic perspectives.

We revisit the problem of redesigning the Master in Business Administration (MBA) program, curriculum, and pedagogy, focusing on understanding and seeking to tame its “wicked problems,” as an intrinsic part and challenge of the MBA program venture, and to render it more realistic and relevant to address major problems and their consequences. We briefly review the theory of wicked problems and methods of dealing with their consequences from multiple perspectives. Most characterization of problems classifies them as simple (problems that have known formulations and solutions), complex (where formulations are known but not their resolutions), unstructured problems (where formulations are unknown, but solutions are estimated), and “wicked” (where both problem formulations and their resolutions are unknown but eventually partially tamable). Uncertainty, unpredictability, randomness, and ambiguity increase from simple to complex to unstructured to wicked problems. A redesigned MBA program should therefore address them effectively through the four semesters in two years. Most of these problems are real and affect life and economies, and hence, business schools cannot but incorporate them into their critical, ethical, and moral thinking.

This paper aims to outline the motivation for this Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ) Special Issue, providing an overview of the six selected papers. This study seeks to inspire further ethnographic research on accountability.

The authors reflect on why ethnographic investigation is essential to accountability research and the boundaries that constrained and enabled both this Special Issue and which occur in ethnographic research.

The contents of this issue do not merely describe or analyse one or more “accounts”, but also consider how the accounted for reflects its surroundings and its role in the social world. The authors argue that such research should progress from ethnographic descriptive data to infer meaningful conclusions and move from the everyday natural settings of behaviour to examine inter-relatedness. This requires the researcher to maintain their intra-relatedness. These boundaries, inherent to human existence, are actively created and operate at different aggregation levels to include and exclude.

In this introduction and the papers selected for this AAAJ special issue, with few exceptions, accountability shifts from the researched to the researcher as research accounts are produced. Yet, ethnographies of accountability are epistemologically and ontologically weighted towards accepting the possibility of shared social meaning requiring researchers to manage the interactions, relationalities and presuppositions between these places. The authors urge future researchers to experiment more explicitly than has often been the case with published accounts of these demands.

This AAAJ Special Issue provides a set of original empirical and theoretical contributions to support and advance further ethnographic research into accountability which acknowledges the boundaries that may include and exclude.

David Brody serves as Academic Dean and Chair of the Early Childhood Department at the Efrata College of Education in Jerusalem where he teaches and conducts his research. His research interests include men in early childhood, professional development among teacher educators, thinking education, and how early childhood educators cope with emotionally charged issues. He taught preschool for 15 years in the United States before immigrating to Israel where he has engaged in teacher education for 20 years.

This paper aims to report findings for the following question, “What is the nature of high school students’ identity exploration as a result of exploring the role-possible selves of an environmental scientist and urban planner in a play-based course?” Projective reflection (PR) is served as a theoretical and methodological framework for facilitating learning as identity exploration in play-based environments.

From 2016-2017, 54 high school freshmen students engaged in virtual city planning, an iteratively refined course that provided systematic and personally relevant opportunities for play, curricular, reflection and discussion activities in Philadelphia Land Science, a virtual learning environment (VLE) and in an associated curriculum enacted in a science museum classroom. Participants’ identity exploration was anchored in targeted role-possible selves in science, technology, engineering and mathematics: environmental science and urban planning through in-game and in-class activities. This role-playing was made intentional by scaffolding students’ reflection on what they wanted to be in the future while thinking of their current selves and exploring novel role-possible selves.

In-game logged data and in-class student data were examined using quantitative ethnography (QE) techniques such as epistemic network analysis. Whole-group statistical significance and an illustrative case study revealed visual and interpretive patterns of change in students’ identity exploration. The change was reflected in their knowledge, interest and valuing, self-organization and self-control and self-perception and self-definition (KIVSSSS) in relation to the roles explored from the start of the intervention (starting self), during (exploring role-possible selves) and the end (new self). The paper concludes with directions to advance research on leveraging role-playing as a mechanism for fostering identity exploration in play-based digital and non-digital environments.

This paper leveraged VLEs such as games as forms of play-based environments that can present players with opportunities for self-transformation (Foster, 2014) and enculturation (Gee 2003; Shaffer, 2006) to support learner agency and participation in a constantly changing society (Thomas and Brown 2011). The authors introduce and apply novel theoretical and methodological approaches to the design and assessment of play-based environments and address pertinent gaps in the emergent area of learning and identity in VLEs

Global interest in early care and education has been growing. The Association for Childhood Education International has declared 2012–2022 the Decade for Childhood. They call for an increased focus on childhood from many disciplines and agents. Large research studies are also being conducted that are focused on early childhood education in many different contexts. In 2010, Education International published Early Childhood Education: A Global Scenario. This study examined early childhood policies from 17 countries. In looking at early childhood globally they found that in many countries early care is fragmented, that ECE teaching staff are overwhelmingly female, less trained, and have poorer working conditions than educators working with older children. Access to early education is more limited in developing countries especially in rural areas.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to discussions about engagement in social and environmental accounting, drawing on dialogic theory and philosophy. A dialogic approach, building on existing critical inquiries, is introduced to derive principles to inform “on the ground” engagements. Applying dialogic thinking to social and environmental accounting encourages the development of dialogic forms of accountability, more authentic engagements and is more likely to contribute to sustainable social and environmental change.

Contains a synthesis of literature from within and beyond social and environmental accounting to shed light on the issues addressed by the special issue.

Research engagements in social and environmental accounting need not be taken in a haphazard manner uninformed by theory. In particular, the “learning turn” in social sciences has generated a large body of theorizing (informed by concrete engagement activities) that can be used to shape, guide and support engagement.

The principles developed can be used to inform future research design, with the aim of increasing the likelihood that such engagements will yield outcomes of “value” usually defined as emancipatory changes.

This paper develops a new (to accounting) theoretical perspective.

The purpose of this study is to examine how dialogic spaces were co-constituted (opened, broadened and deepened) between students engaged in divergent and convergent collaborative learning tasks, orchestrated by teachers in Finnish primary and secondary schools. The concept of dialogic space refers to a dynamic, shared resource of ideas in dialogue and has come to represent an ideal form of educational interaction, in the contexts of collaborative learning, joint creative work and shared knowledge-building.

A socio-cultural discourse analysis of video-observed classroom dialogue, entailing the development of a new analytic typology, was undertaken to explore the co-constitution of dialogic space. The data are derived from two qualitative studies, one examining dialogue to co-create fictive video stories in primary-school classrooms (divergent task), the other investigating collaborative knowledge building in secondary-school health education (convergent task).

Dialogic spaces were opened through group settings and by the students’ selection of topics. In the divergent task, the broadening of dialogic space derived from the heterogeneous group settings, whereas in the convergent task, from the multiple and various information sources involved. As regards the deepening of dialogic space, explicit reflective talk remained scarce; instead the norms deriving from the school-context tasks and requirements guided the group dialogue.

This study lays the groundwork for subsequent research regarding the orchestration of dialogic space in divergent and convergent tasks by offering a typology to operationalise dialogic space for further, more systematic, comparisons and aiding the understandings of the processes implicated in intercreating and interthinking. This in turn is of significance for the development of dialogic pedagogies.