Instilling a sustainability ethos in accounting education through the Transformative Learning pedagogy: A case-study

•Accounting education should be transformed to enable students to acquire a critical appreciation of the subject-matter.•Here the Transformative Learning pedagogy is used to introduce introducing accounting students to the sustainability ethos.•A social-critical review of the transformative literature is undertaken.•Transformative constructs are then used to evaluate the responses of graduates of an accounting-sustainability course.•Paper concludes with the implications of this pedagogy for accounting education.

This paper draws on the extended theorisation of Mezirow's (2000) psycho-critical Transformative Learning pedagogy, a form of deep-learning, to examine how accounting education could (i) challenge the unproblematic perpetuation of economic rationalism in accounting's predominately technical curriculum, and (ii) sow the seeds of a sustainability ethos. This pedagogy initiates a disorienting dilemma by contrasting accounting's economic rationalism with sustainability's ecological resilience. It then enables learners to discover deeper layers of this tension in a student-centred participatory learning environment: learners harness their emotional intelligence to critically evaluate accounting's financial perspective, and expand their consciousness of the other. A case-study on the lived-experiences and perceptions of two consecutive cohorts of accounting students sheds light on how and why this pedagogy contributed to five (of ten) graduates interviewed reconsidering their existing moral consciousness and professional identities, four graduates reinforcing their prevailing sustainability perspectives, and one graduate, with language difficulties, maintaining accounting's financial perspective.