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This paper aims to explore methods of teaching sustainability and business ethics, relevant to the modern demand for student’s skills and knowledge. The study explores the challenges of teaching a business school undergraduate-level course and argues that a constructivist pedagogy is a suitable epistemological approach for designing a course unit concerning sustainability and ethics.

The paper presents case study findings drawn upon course feedback and course reflections aimed at making sense of what the most effective pedagogic approaches were that influenced students’ learning.

Results indicate that students appreciate active forms of learning via practical assignments and discussions. As knowledge of sustainability and business ethics is important for the student’s future career path, students need to develop skills of applying conceptual knowledge to practice via constructive pedagogical methods.

This empirical study contributes to the literature of constructivist pedagogics, which is explored in the context of sustainable development and business ethics teaching. Practically, it contributes to the analysis of teaching methods and frameworks applied in the course emphasizing the necessity of engaging in interactive and personalized learning and teaching processes.

Issues of teaching ethics and sustainable development are known concerns, but they have to be addressed systematically because of the changing business environment. This study explores the constructivist pedagogy based on empirical evidence and highlights its value in the educational process.

This study examines the perceptions of accounting faculties toward ethics education, the extent of ethics coverage and reasons why ethics should (or should not) be taught in Japanese tertiary schools. Data for this research was collected from faculties that primarily teach accounting in Japanese tertiary schools in 2009. The results indicate that over 90% of accounting faculties believe that ethics should be taught within the accounting curriculum. In terms of how ethics should be delivered survey participants believed in a more holistic approach, which would encompass the benefits of teaching it as both a stand-alone course and integrating it with other relevant courses. This outcome is in direct contrast to the results obtained from previous studies undertaken outside of Japan. Of particular interest was the fact that the current survey revealed that only 55.2% of respondents actually intend to incorporate ethics into their accounting courses in the foreseeable future. This research successfully adds value to the shortage of literature existing on the perceptions of ethics education among Japanese accounting faculties.

The early twenty-first century saw a rise in corporate scandals with Enron and WorldCom grabbing the newspaper headlines. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools in Business realized the significance of imparting education in ethics mainly to the students studying business management and thus a task force was established to examine and report on the current status of ethics education in business schools (Waples, Antes, Murphy, Connelly, & Mumford, 2009). The task force published a report that strongly advocated a course in business ethics that will help business management students cope with ethical dilemmas in their decision-making process. In Eastern Africa, Business Ethics as a subject of teaching and research has expanded at a significant level mainly in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. This chapter presents an evaluation and critical discussion of current business ethics education in St Lawrence University in Uganda. The chapter will discuss issues related to teaching business ethics in an African context and the relevance of the subject to the current students enrolled in business courses and how it can contribute to promoting social responsibility through higher education.

Teaching ethical decision making can be distinguished from teaching decision making in other settings by its juxtaposition of students’ affect with their intellect (Gaudine & Thorne, 2001); as Griseri (2002, p. 374) aptly points out, “effective business ethics teaching should involve a combination of…two aspects of ethical situations – their emotional and intellectual elements.” To engage students’ affect, research suggests the use of multiple teaching modalities (e.g., films, case studies, journals, and role-play) (McPhail, 2001). To develop students’ ethical intellect, research recommends using appropriate, individual-specific cognitive stimulation (Massey & Thorne, 2006). Yet, in designing courses, faculty typically preselect course teaching methods independently of the particular students who enroll in the course, often teaching their courses using methods that are consistent with their own personal learning styles (Thompson, 1997) even though those methods may not be effective for (m)any students in their classes. Nonetheless, investigating each student’s preferred learning style and tailoring the course accordingly is impractical (cf., Montgomery & Groat, 1988). Thus, as highlighted in the ethics literature (McPhail, 2001) and suggested in the education literature (Nilson, 2010a), faculty should utilize a variety of approaches to effectively teach ethics to their accounting students. To facilitate these efforts, this paper presents and evaluates various strategies accounting faculty can use to teach accounting ethics in ways that correspond to students’ varying learning preferences. As such, the strategies this paper provides can be used to create an accounting ethics course that affectively impacts and cognitively stimulates a diverse student body that, in turn, can lead to improved ethical reasoning skills.

This study is an exploratory examination of cultural differences in accounting educators’ epistemological beliefs of accounting ethics education. It is motivated by a renewed global interest in accounting ethics in recent years following the reported breaches of ethical conducts by individuals from different cultures. In Pratt’s model, conceptions of teaching should be an interdependent and internally consistent trilogy of beliefs, intentions and actions. The purpose of this empirical study is to sketch an outline of how accounting ethics education is broadly understood by accounting educators from three different cultural backgrounds, the Anglo‐influenced Australian, the Chinese and the Moslem‐dominated Malaysian. It explores the cross‐cultural variations in their epistemological beliefs of what to teach, objectives to achieve, the ethics educator, and the learning process. Results suggest that Australian and Malaysian accounting educators differed significantly in their epistemological beliefs on the source of knowledge as well as the acquisition of knowledge. Interestingly, there were no significant statistical differences in the epistemological beliefs held by participants in this study concerning other issues in accounting ethics education, i.e. the delivery of ethics education, transferability, goals of ethics education, separate course, and qualification.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how ethics is currently taught to trainee auditors and to evaluate whether some ethical instruction techniques can be assessed as more effective than others.

Two separate cohorts of auditing students (262) provided responses to audit/accounting ethical scenarios. Each cohort was then subject to three separate ethics teaching techniques (either active or passive), from the two different teaching methodologies (active v. passive) over a semester. Their ethical attitudes to the scenarios were then re‐assessed and the teaching techniques evaluated.

Both methodologies were found to impact positively, as both cohorts selected more ethical responses to the scenarios post instruction. Some evidence of active techniques having more effect than passive techniques, on ethical decision making was revealed.

More research is needed into the impact of active and passive teaching methodologies on trainee auditors, in the ethics area.

Teaching ethics to the audit practitioners of tomorrow is critical. If the optimum mix of ethical teaching methodologies can be assessed, it will result in more effective ethical instruction. This study's results imply careful consideration must be taken in designing ethical training programs for trainee auditors.

Improvement in the ethical behaviour of auditors will provide more confidence for users of accounting information in the business environment.

This paper is original in that it evaluates the impact of a series of ethical instruction methods, as opposed to a single teaching method (the focus of many previous papers) on ethical training. The tentative finding of active methods proving more effective than passive methods is significant, and paves the way for future research.

Undergraduate accounting program at Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia is a unique case. The program includes 147 credit hours of which 28 credit hours are religious courses. This study aims to examine the effect of teaching these religious courses on students’ ethical perceptions and decisions.

A survey was conducted for a sample of accounting students at Umm Al-Qura University. The sample was divided into two groups; the first group includes students who did not study religious courses, while the second group includes students who study religious courses. The questionnaire contained three groups of questions that aimed to explore students’ perceptions of ethics in general, students’ perceptions of business ethics and explored their ethical attitudes regarding some accounting decisions that involve ethical dilemmas. Independent two-sample t-test and multiple regression analysis were used to determine whether the responses of the two groups were significantly different.

The findings of the study revealed that teaching religious courses led to an improvement in students’ perception of business ethics and an improvement in students’ ethical decision-making. However, the results of the independent sample t-test showed that this improvement was not significant. The results of the study also revealed that male students tend to make less ethical decisions than female students.

The findings offer an indication for those responsible for managing the accounting program at Umm Al-Qura University to start developing the program so that some of the general religious courses are replaced with specialized courses in accounting ethics that focus directly on ethical dilemmas faced by the accountant when practicing the accounting profession.

This study contributes to the current literature related to examining the effect of teaching ethics courses on the ethical perception of accounting students by focusing on accounting students in Saudi Arabia as a context that has not been examined before.

In the early 1990s while working on my PhD in ethical green marketing, I was approached by my then Deputy Head of Department to write a module with a similar title. His argument was that current research should feed into current teaching. I was delighted with this request and prepared the module called ‘Marketing Ethics’. It was offered to the final-year students of under-graduate courses and proved to be a popular option especially amongst the law cohorts. At the time we had a flourishing business and law school that attracted large numbers of students locally, nationally as well as internationally. The module was later taught by me and a colleague with a keen interest in philosophy and as such the syllabus was modified to include philosophical as well as marketing aspects of ethics. However, the balance was maintained whenever possible. While on that particular subject, Schlegelmilch and Oberseder (2000) refer to almost 50 years of research into marketing ethics in their paper. With reference to the 1990s which coincides with the teaching of the above mentioned subject, they discovered 239 marketing ethics articles in 58 journals. That decade interestingly witnessed a move away from general marketing ethics topics to a focus on perhaps more specialist areas such as marketing education (e.g. Lane, 1995; Shannon & Berl, 1997), promotion (e.g. La Tour & Henthoren, 1994) and so forth. This at a glance highlights the growing importance of ethics in different shapes, forms and guises.

This chapter highlights the perspectives, examples, and applications on the current trend in teaching and learning counseling ethics education in a more effective way. The trend utilizes inquiry-based learning concept and educational activities to foster counselor education training programs fast-forward in meeting the social demands and global challenges. The discussion is based on the theme emerged from an interpretive case study research conducted by the authors, in addition to the insightful literature authored by the profound educators and counseling researchers, globally. Teaching and learning counseling ethics education is an integrative effort and is more than just content acquisition from textbooks. In addition, the inquiry-based teaching and learning approach can be a tool in finding solutions for authentic problems through in-depth investigations while learning counseling ethics education. This chapter hopefully will improve counselor educators’ ability, strengthen counselor education training programs’ capability, and expand counseling students ethical competency; for creating innovations and adaptations in teaching and learning counseling ethics education, utilizing inquiry-based learning toward enhanced professional ethical practice in counseling realm.