Teaching Business Ethics to International Students: Nineteen Years of Learning to See

The researcher’s story, told as analytical data

I am writing this page as a scholar and as someone who became the data she was studying. The findings of this dissertation include two parallel strands: participant testimony and researcher testimony. Blended witnessing holds them in productive tension through protective divergence, a deliberate analytical separation that prevents appropriation while enabling solidarity. Participant testimony will be shared following the doctoral defence. This is the researcher’s strand.

Nineteen Years of Learning to See

For nineteen years I taught organizational behaviour, business ethics, leadership, and diversity at Thompson Rivers University to predominantly international student populations. I believed I was doing it well. My evaluations were strong. Students came back to tell me years later that the class had mattered to them. I received the Faculty Council Teaching Award in May 2025, the same month I was laid off.

What I understand now, sitting with what four participants showed me through their photographs, is that I was teaching well inside a broken container. I was careful about the classroom. I was attentive to individual students. I was committed to equitable assessment. And I was teaching a curriculum that rendered the very knowledge my students carried structurally illegitimate, semester after semester, while believing myself to be an inclusive educator.

That recognition is what drives this dissertation forward. The problem this study investigates was present in my classroom the entire time I was teaching it.

The Grandmother’s Question

In September 2022, a student in my Business Ethics class raised her hand during a case study analysis and asked where her grandmother’s business wisdom fit. Her grandmother had operated a successful textile enterprise in their home village in India for decades, employing women from the community and sustaining operations through political upheavals that the Anglo-American business cases I was teaching had never imagined. The frameworks I had handed her, the matrices, the models, the ethical decision trees drawn from Western corporate contexts, had no room for grandmother’s wisdom.

The student’s question was precise and generous. She was giving me an opportunity to expand the curriculum in real time. I had no adequate answer. I told her it was a good question. I moved on.

That moment became this dissertation. The question she asked was a hermeneutical one in the most literal sense: the curriculum had withheld from her the conceptual resources she needed to make her grandmother’s knowledge legible within the academic frame. That withholding is what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls hermeneutical injustice. I committed it without knowing I was doing it, which is precisely how hermeneutical injustice operates. The curriculum’s assumptions are so deeply embedded that their operation is invisible until someone asks the right question.

The Precarity I Was Teaching Inside

For nineteen of my twenty-five years at TRU, I taught on contract. My position was renewed semester by semester at the institution’s discretion. I understood precarity the way you understand weather when you live outside: as the condition that shapes what you are able to plan.

I prepared my classes knowing my contract might end. I invested in student relationships knowing I might be gone by the following September. I served on committees and contributed to curriculum development as a non-regular faculty member, which meant my contributions carried no institutional weight in governance and left no trace in the institutional record. I built a professional identity on ground that was structurally designed to remain insecure.

I say this here because my precarity is part of the findings. It is the ground on which asymmetrical precarity stands as a theoretical concept. I lived a version of what my participants were living, and I lived it for long enough that I recognized what I was seeing when they showed it to me. The recognition is what makes the analysis possible. The asymmetry is what keeps it honest.

The Month of Two Documents

In May 2025, two documents arrived within weeks of each other. One was a letter from the Faculty Council informing me that I had received the Teaching Award. The other was a layoff notice, effective at the end of the semester.

Two logics. Two entirely separate bureaucratic pathways that had never spoken to each other. The institution declared me exemplary and expendable in the same breath and encountered no institutional contradiction in doing so because the two systems, the recognition system and the employment system, are designed to operate in parallel rather than in conversation. Excellence in teaching is rewarded with a plaque. Employment is managed through a budget spreadsheet. These are different departments. They produce different documents. They make different decisions. The person standing at the intersection of those two decisions becomes ghost data: erased from the active institutional record while the work they produced continues to circulate.

I became, in that month, the concept I had theorized.

What This Means Analytically

Scholarly Personal Narrative requires that I bring my story into the analysis with the same rigour I apply to participant testimony. That means I cannot treat my own experience as merely illustrative. It is data, coded through protective divergence, held alongside participant accounts rather than in front of them, and examined for what it illuminates and what it might obscure.

What my experience illuminates is the structural machinery behind what participants were photographing. When a participant documented the ATM in the Campus Activity Centre, the machine where students access overnight shift wages to deposit toward tuition between classes, I understood the transaction it represented from the inside rather than as an outside observer. This is the analytical value of asymmetrical precarity: it names the connection without collapsing it. My understanding deepens the interpretation. My privilege means the stakes are categorically different. Both are true simultaneously.

What my experience might obscure is the specific texture of navigating an institution across a visa condition rather than a contract condition. The fear that shapes a student’s silence in a seminar is different in kind from the calculation that shapes a contract faculty member’s silence in a faculty meeting. Both are produced by the same structural logic. They feel categorically different from the inside. I hold that difference as an analytical obligation rather than a disclaimer.

The Teaching This Research Has Produced

I left the classroom in May 2025. I carry the classroom with me.

nineteen years of teaching business ethics to international students at TRU taught me that the ethics of an institution are visible in its budget model, its spatial design, and its curriculum, long before they appear in any policy document. It taught me that the most important questions students ask are often the ones the curriculum has no framework for answering. It taught me that inclusive teaching inside an extractive institution is necessary and insufficient: necessary because the classroom is one of the few spaces in the institution where a different set of rules can apply, insufficient because the walls of the classroom are still inside the building.

This dissertation is an attempt to document what the building actually looks like from the inside, from the perspective of the people the institution most extracts from. The teaching made the research possible. The research makes the teaching visible for what it was: one educator doing careful work inside a container that was designed to limit what careful work could produce.

References

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Nash, R. J., & Bradley, D. L. (2011). Me-search and re-search: A guide for writing scholarly personal narrative manuscripts. Information Age Publishing.