Rethinking project management education : Social twists and knowledge co-production

• Projects play an important role in modern enterprises, not only as arenas for corporate renewal and capability integration, but also for the development of leadership capacity. As a consequence, the area of project management is becoming increasingly important for universities and management educators. Previous research and reports, however, have given severe critique to much of the project management education for its lack of relevance and rigor - but offered surprisingly little guidance as to what to do to deal with the problems. In this paper, our aim is to contribute to the current debate about project management education for practicing managers. We draw on more than ten years of experience from two senior-level education programs to show how educational practices can be developed to stimulate knowledge co-production between practitioners and academia. We suggest a model based on a "social twist" of experiential learning theory and discuss six learning modes of how to rejuvenate, stretch and improve project management education.

Keyword

Articulation

Education

Experiential learning theory

Knowledge theater

Learning

Project management

Social twist

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)