Reflections on Interpretivist Teaching with Positivist Students

This paper reflects upon the teaching of two final year undergraduate subjects, Information Systems Policy and E Commerce, in a Management Information Systems degree program that is located in a School of Accounting and Information Systems. Both of the subjects were taught from an ‘interpretive’ standpoint, an approach that some students found to be challenging given that they were more familiar with the highly structured and positivist approach used in most of their previous subjects. Student feedback gained from informal conversations with the lecturer, an electronic meeting and through paper questionnaires as part of the normal formal evaluation process, is used to explore some of their reactions to a ‘soft’ approach and to provide a basis for consideration of future delivery patterns for the subjects.