The ‘why’ experience: using student’s family experience as a lens to teach business courses

Abstract: An undergraduate student without an organizational past gets puzzled in class. As we know, we learn more from doing; teaching and learning become an issue if students do not find an avenue to apply their learning. Questions on what managers do and how organizations behave would only make students create hypothetical scenarios, which may not reflect organizational settings. To ask students to reflect requires them to have experiences to which they can think, relate, and apply their learning. These experiences need to be their own. Using their family experiences, we provide students an avenue to engage in conversation to make sense of the theoretical ideas discussed in class. Without their experiences becoming a central point of discussion, learning may remain incomplete. In this paper, I use my class examples to show how students’ family experiences help them understand what organizations do, providing an alternative approach to reflective teaching and learning.