Areti Chavale, University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Business School 

The Little Mermaid flickr photo by auntie rain shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Introduction 

The importance of decolonising the curriculum is being increasingly recognised by universities across the UK and elsewhere. What this means for universities is that the teaching content across different disciplines needs to be re-evaluated, in order to offer a more global and inclusive perspective to students. Gopal (2021, p.875) defines decolonisation as “the decentering of Eurocentric knowledge production, the overhaul of the hierarchy of European ideologies and the reappraisal of whitewashed history”. Among other things, decolonisation addresses issues to do with race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, class and domination of the ‘west’. When one examines the bibliography and examples used for the teaching of business and management courses, we observe a very western perspective which does not serve the students who will be working across the world. Even the students who will work in Western countries will invariably be dealing with people from different places, buying and selling products. This case study offers an alternative option, as educators can decolonise while keeping some of the existing content the same. 

The case background 

The Disney case study in question was applied to a Marketing Management course as part of the Professional Pathways program, which is a postgraduate programme aimed at students with no previous business study experience. The Marketing Management course comprised of lectures to a large group of students (around 150), predominantly international, who would break into smaller groups (around 20) for tutorials. There were two tutorials, each lasting two hours, where students were provided with a case study to read before their lesson. The Disney case study was provided by the course coordinator, which was about Disney as a company and the different products it offers, as well as information on the different Disney markets, its products and advertising strategy. The suggested questions for discussion were about Disney’s marketing strategy.   

During the academic year 2021-2022, I delivered two tutorials for this course using the Disney case. I noticed that the students struggled to engage with the case questions, which surprised me as I had assumed they would be familiar with Disney as a company and its products. When I enquired about this, some Chinese students explained to me that the majority of Chinese children watch Japanese Manga cartoons, rather than Disney cartoons, and therefore did not know who the otherwise popular Disney characters of Cinderella or Snow White were! Only then did I realise that my assumption that the current international and diverse cohort would be familiar with Disney and its products was wrong. 

Applying the change 

In the following academic year, I taught the same course tutorials this time without the assumption that all students would be familiar with Disney and its products/characters. While I kept the case study structure the same, I changed the questions for discussion to the subject of decolonisation, diversity and inclusion, drawing from my previous experience of the same tutorials.

I started the lesson plan by asking students whether they were familiar with Disney as a company and with its products and about what kind of cartoons they watch in their respective countries. Opening with this question sets the tone of the lesson as students realised that there would be no assumptions about their knowledge and no western centred approach to their learning. More importantly, this allowed students to discover different perspectives on the subject by students from other countries. 

            During the tutorials I followed an active learning approach, where students were encouraged to participate in discussion. I offered a flipped classroom experience, where students prepared before class by reading the suggested case study and discuss what they had learned in class. The structure of the tutorials was to pose questions to students and asking them to discuss their answers in groups, followed by presenting their findings to the class.  

To design the new questions, I drew inspiration from the case study content, and in particular the connection between Disney’s heritage and its relevance to modern audiences. While using information from the same case study, the changed questions addressed different aspects of the company’s marketing strategy. Before deciding on the new questions, I considered the positionality of the students and myself and looked at the Disney company from a global, rather than a western perspective. Naturally, this led to questions about the relevance of Disney’s products and characters in different countries and representation of different cultures. 

            The first question was “Do you think that the products offered by Disney are diverse enough?”, using Disney movies and characters as an example. This question resulted in a debate between students who sometimes offered contradicting opinions on their experience and view of diversity in Disney. The next question was “Do you think that ‘The Little Mermaid’ movie of 2023 (fig 1), where Ariel is portrayed by a black actress and is an adaptation of the original 1989 movie, shows that the company is making an effort to be more diverse or not?”. 

Figure 1: The Little Mermaid circa 1989, on the left and The Little Mermaid circa 2023, on the right, © Disney. 

Based on the answers I received from the students, I then shifted their focus to the board of directors, and we discussed whether it is representative of the diverse market they were targeting and how a lack of diversity in leadership could affect a successful attempt to achieve diverse products. I was glad to note the balanced discussion with different views being exchanged, with rigour and respect for different points of view. Finally, I finished the lesson by asking students “Can you think of suggestions on how the company could improve its efforts on diversity and inclusion?”.  

Conclusion 

This was a creative exercise which increased engagement and participation, as students were able to use critical analysis skills to construct meaningful arguments on diversity and inclusion for a major corporation such as Disney. Designing such discussions with appropriate questions that students can relate to will engage students meaningfully in active and deeper learning as well as develop essential skills such as making arguments that are convincing and clear. I will continue to use this teaching practice in other courses too. 

References 

Gopal, P. (2021). On decolonisation and the university. Textual Practice, 35(6), 873-899. 

Winter, J., Webb, O., & Turner, R. (2024). Decolonising the curriculum: A survey of current practice in a modern UK university. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 61(1), 181-192.