Issues in Accounting Education
Reflecting on the Domain of Accounting Education

CALL FOR PAPERS

To most accounting academics, the elements of the discipline are obvious, intuitive, and seldom questioned. The accounting curriculum that existed when today's faculty were students is largely still in place. The changes that have occurred are largely invisible because they are internal to the curricular structure that emerged long ago. Thus, accounting education has accommodated the proliferation of financial accounting standards, the burgeoning tax code, and the occasional new audit technique within a rather stable and unified understanding of our community of practice.

However, there have been several exogenous shocks to this system over the last quarter century. The accounting practice world is periodically rocked by large and noisy scandals that call into question the methods that corporate accounting practitioners use. Audit failures cause similar crises of faith. Periodically, practitioners articulate demands for better educational practices in support of their objectives. These events have occurred against a background of expansive information digitization that has altered the delivery possibilities for education.

Although it has been suggested many times before, there is reason to believe that we are at a crossroad in accounting education. A few specific crosscurrents in the mix include:

1. External parties who increasingly express their perceived right to stipulate the content of accounting education.
2. The crisis in corporate governance and reporting which has resulted in increased demands for accountability, transparency, and assurance.
3. The demise of major players in the public accounting profession which has caused tighter regulation from outside the profession.
4. Distributed information technologies that seamlessly span geographic and political borders and have revolutionized the way business processes and business relationships are designed, executed, managed, and reported.

Many years have passed since any effort has been made to reflect upon the theory of accounting education. Younger faculty probably remember none of these efforts. At this time, the fundamental question "What is the proper domain of accounting education?" needs to be asked. What is the core of the pedagogy that underpins our profession? How can that core be strengthened, made more central to the experience of students, or broadened so that it could be shared by a larger percentage of the next generation of accountants? Responses to this inquiry might embed issues of accounting professionalism, the role of the academy in modern capitalism or the incorporation of the new technological world order. In other words, what should we teach and why? We have a good concept of what we do teach — look if you will at the amazing similarity of content across the textbooks in the field, or of courses offered in any school. What makes this curriculum sufficient, or even necessary? If we were to take out a blank piece of paper, and were thus freed from our history, what would we teach our students? These are the types of questions that must be posed in unequivocal ways, whether they entail recapturing the past or marking out a new territory.

Issues in Accounting Education, in conjunction with the Teaching & Curriculum Section of the AAA has asked me to edit a dedicated forum with an expected publication date of Spring 2006. I would like to extend an opportunity to accounting educators to submit essays for this issue. Proposed pieces for inclusion should be 25 pages (double spaced) or less. Submissions will be peer-reviewed with an emphasis on clarity and strength of ideas. The deadline for the first drafts is March 1, 2005. There would also be an opportunity to discuss these ideas in a CPE session at the AAA meeting in San Francisco.

Tim Fogarty
Special Forum Editor