International business students from Haiti, Malaysia, Mongolia, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, USA, and Vietnam created original artwork as metaphors for business management concepts.
Students were able to widen their capacity to make sense, deepen their knowledge of core course content, and improve their ability to engage in extemporaneous English speaking. A 23-item survey of student responses demonstrates the positive benefits derived by using multimodal teaching techniques and an arts-based methodology. Art-as-metaphor provides an enriching complementary approach to ways of knowing, making sense, and verbally expressing oneself in a foreign language. It is a proven methodology to the otherwise standard, traditional teaching method - one that is largely teacher-directed, and bound by logic and rationality.
