Critical Accounting Education Reform: A Note on Teaching Teams and Prefigurative Experimentation

Calls to reform accounting education often target advanced or elective courses, leaving core curricula largely untouched. Yet, researchers working on introductory courses may find opportunities for meaningful change. This study argues that team-teaching in core accounting courses is an underutilized site for critical reform, particularly when approached through prefigurative experimentation, or small-scale, iterative efforts to enact alternative futures within present constraints. Using an action research methodology, we examine the reform of an introductory financial accounting course at a French business school. The teaching team adopted an ‘accounting as a language’ (AAL) approach (Graham [2013]. Teaching accounting as a language. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 24, no. 2: 120–6.), leveraging differences between Francophone and Anglophone accounting systems to provoke student engagement with the interpretive and political nature of accounting. While student responses were mixed, the teaching team itself became a space for pedagogical transformation and sustained reflection. Our findings contribute to critical accounting literature by (1) positioning team-teaching on core courses as a vehicle for reform, (2) advancing empirical insights into the application of AAL, and (3) reframing educational change as adaptive and process-driven. Ultimately, we argue that by maintaining openness to collaboration and experimentation, team teaching on a core course can overcome personnel and institutional challenges to enact reforms.