Abstract

We acknowledge the ambiguous nature of the term ‘liberalising’ and briefly review some pertinent literature. Our argument is that liberalised accounting curricula will expose students beneficially to a broader set of perceptions of accounting and help them to develop better understandings of accounting. We adopt a novel perspective. Rather than push explicitly for mandatory infusions of broadening subject matter (such as history, philosophy, and English literature) into already constrained accounting curricula, we advocate a pedagogic pathway involving liberal approaches to learning through which liberal non-accounting subject matter will emerge serendipitously. The pathway which we recommend and illustrate encourages students to explore accounting by using one or more of the nine ‘angles of vision’ or ‘lenses’ proposed by Peshkin (2001), plus two additional lenses. We explain these ‘angles of vision’ and illustrate how they can be used effectively by accounting educators. Thus, what we propose is a more spontaneous, informal, teacher-led liberalising of accounting curricula.