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Call for Papers on Innovative Pedagogies for Disruptive Times: Rethinking Management Education for Impact and Radical Change

Special issue of the CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation
Call for Papers on Innovative Pedagogies for Disruptive Times: Rethinking Management Education for Impact and Radical Change

Submission Deadline: 30 October 2026

 

Special Issue Editors

 

About the Special Issue

In the scientific spirit of CERN, this Call for Papers emphasizes the urgent need to innovate pedagogies that prepare learners to lead, innovate, and act responsibly amid ongoing disruptions.

Ecological crisis, geopolitical instability, digital transformation, AI advancement, social inequality, and shifting work paradigms are changing the conditions under which management is taught and practiced. These disruptions require pedagogies that move beyond the transmission of established theories and instead cultivate systems thinking, ethical judgment, reflexivity, creativity, resilience, and responsible action. In this sense, the classroom becomes a laboratory for experimentation, organizational transformation, and societal impact.

This Special Issue invites contributions that rethink management education through innovative, inclusive, and impact-oriented pedagogical approaches. We are particularly interested in work that connects pedagogical experimentation with broader debates in experiential learning (Kolb, 1984), reflective practice (Allen et al., 2019), transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991), critical management (Banerjee, 2021), sustainability competencies (Brundiers et al., 2021), and education for sustainable development (UNESCO, 2017).

We welcome papers that examine how educators, institutions, and learners are redesigning curricula, assessment formats, learning environments, and leadership development practices to foster an innovation mindset. Contributions may address project-based and challenge-led learning, real-time simulations, co-created learning with business and societal partners, arts-based and embodied pedagogies, futures literacy, interdisciplinary teaching, decolonial and Indigenous perspectives, and AI-enhanced learning. Such approaches align with the track proposal’s ambition to develop responsible, adaptive, entrepreneurial, and systems-thinking leaders for societal transformation. At the same time, this Special Issue encourages critical engagement. Digital technologies and AI may support personalization, accessibility, assessment, and feedback, but they also raise ethical concerns around bias, surveillance, dependency, and the possible dehumanization of learning (Selwyn, 2022; Zawacki-Richter et al., 2019). Similarly, sustainability-oriented curricula may promise transformation, yet their impact must be examined carefully in relation to learners’ capabilities, values, decisions, and actions (Sterling, 2001; Brundiers et al., 2021). We therefore seek contributions that combine pedagogical imagination with theoretical, empirical, methodological, or reflective rigor.

 

Why This Topic Matters Now

Management education is at a critical turning point. The challenges facing students today are not neatly bounded business problems; they are complex, interconnected, and often morally ambiguous, which demand leadership that is adaptive, collaborative, ethically grounded, and capable of working across systems. This means that management education must evolve from teaching students about disruption to helping them question their assumptions to increase their impact (Dieleman et al., 2022; Eloranta et al., 2024).

Pedagogical innovation is a strategic imperative for innovative and critical management because how we teach shapes how future leaders shape their environment. This insight resonates with long-standing educational theories that emphasize learning as active, situated, reflective, and experiential rather than passive reception (PRME, 2023). If learners are expected to address uncertainty, complexity, and societal transformation, then they need learning environments that allow them to experiment, fail productively, reflect critically, and act collaboratively.

This topic also matters because business schools and management educators are increasingly expected to contribute to sustainable development and responsible innovation. Sustainability, climate justice, gender equality, social equity, responsible consumption, and partnerships across sectors cannot remain peripheral themes or “add-on” modules. They need to be integrated into the core of curricula, pedagogy, assessment, and institutional practice (Sterling, 2001; UNESCO, 2017). 

AI and digital learning technologies add another layer of urgency. Generative AI, learning analytics, hybrid education, and immersive technologies are already reshaping how students learn, how educators teach, and how institutions evaluate performance. These tools may enable new forms of personalization, accessibility, and experimentation, but they also require careful attention to academic integrity, equity, data ethics, bias, and the preservation of human connection in learning (Selwyn, 2022; Zawacki-Richter et al., 2019). The question is therefore not simply whether management educators should use AI, but how they can use it responsibly, critically, and pedagogically well.

This Special Issue responds to the need for pedagogies that are not only innovative but also meaningful, inclusive, and societally relevant. We seek work that explores how management education can cultivate futures literacy, systems thinking, emotional intelligence, ethical decision-making, and transformative competence. In short, if disruptive times are the “high waters” through which future leaders must navigate, then management education needs to do more than hand students a map. It must help them build the boat, read the currents, question the destination, and maybe—when necessary—redesign the whole harbor.

 

Possible Topics Include (But Are Not Limited To)

  • Pedagogical innovation as strategic and organizational innovation
  • Experiential, challenge-led, and co-created learning
  • Responsible management education and transformative learning frameworks
  • AI, digital, hybrid, and immersive learning technologies
  • Systems thinking, interdisciplinarity, and complexity navigation
  • Creative, arts-based, embodied, and experiential methods
  • Sustainability, climate justice, and social equity in curricula
  • Futures-oriented and speculative pedagogies
  • Critical, Indigenous, marginal, feminist, and decolonial perspectives
  • Pedagogical experimentation in practice
  • Impact of innovative pedagogies

 

Types of Contributions

We welcome:

  • empirical studies,
  • conceptual papers,
  • design science research,
  • experimental studies,
  • methodological papers,
  • educational case studies,
  • interdisciplinary perspectives,
  • reflective practitioner accounts,
  • and provocative essays that stimulate future research and experimentation.

Interdisciplinary and unconventional contributions are particularly encouraged.

 

Why the CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation (CIJ)?

The CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation is an interdisciplinary, double-blind, peer-reviewed journal seeking to advance both theoretical and practical understanding of how to turn new knowledge into use for society. It’s a diamond open-access journal that occupies a highly distinctive position within the academic landscape. Unlike many conventional journals constrained by disciplinary boundaries, CIJ was created in the spirit of CERN and CERN IdeaSquare as an experimental, interdisciplinary, and intellectually provocative platform for high-risk, high-gain research. This makes CIJ particularly suitable for a Special Issue dedicated to educational transformation under conditions of uncertainty and complexity.

 

The journal’s manifesto emphasizes:

  • BOLD research,
  • INTEGRATIVE thinking,
  • EXPERIMENTAL methodologies,
  • OPEN science,
  • and MISFIT ideas that do not comfortably fit within existing academic categories.

 

We therefore especially encourage submissions between 3.-5.000 words in the template format of the journal that are:

  • intellectually courageous,
  • interdisciplinary,
  • experimental,
  • critically reflective,
  • and societally relevant.

More information about the journal can be found at https://e-publishing.cern.ch/index.php/CIJ/about

 

Submission Procedure

Submitted manuscripts should follow the CIJ guidelines and use the CIJ template:

CIJ Author Guidelines

 

Please select the dedicated section:

Submission to the Special Issue: Innovative Pedagogies for Disruptive Times

 

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