The Entrepreneurial Learning Journey and Back Again: Conversations with Entrepreneurship Educators from around the World

By Birgitte Wraae

Did you know that only 9 percent of all students who attend entrepreneurship classes intend to be an entrepreneur immediately following graduation?

Some may hear that and think something is wrong, not knowing that this is simply a part of the journey. The goal of entrepreneurship education shouldn't be to push groups of studen

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637308684

Book preview

The Entrepreneurial Learning Journey and Back Again

The Entrepreneurial Learning Journey and Back Again

Conversations with Entrepreneurship Educators from Around the World

Birgitte Wraae

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Birgitte Wraae

All rights reserved.

The Entrepreneurial Learning Journey and Back Again

Conversations with Entrepreneurship Educators from Around the World

ISBN

978-1-63730-664-2 Paperback

978-1-63730-753-3 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-868-4 Ebook

This book is based on conversations with entrepreneurship educators, and they often use different terminologies for the same term, for example, skills and competencies. While I recognize the distinctions and the debates surrounding those terminologies, the purpose of this book is not to engage in them but to focus on the conversations from each educator’s classroom.

To Max, Magnus, Caroline Ariane, and Clara Rose ♡

Contents

Introduction

Part 1. Preparing to Meet Our Students

CHAPTER 1: The Purpose of Entrepreneurship Education

CHAPTER 2: The Concepts of the Personal Development Journey

A Written Reflection from Lonnie—Student on a Full Entrepreneurship Study

Part 2. The Known World

CHAPTER 3: From the Known World to the Entrepreneurial Classroom

CHAPTER 4: The Echoes from the Ordinary World

CHAPTER 5: Entrepreneurial Learning

Reflections from a Team

Part 3. The Unknown World of Entrepreneurship Education

CHAPTER 6: Into the Unknown World of Entrepreneurship

CHAPTER 7: Entrepreneurial Competencies and Skills

CHAPTER 8: The Process of Starting a Growth Mindset

CHAPTER 9: Meeting the Abyss

A Written Reflection from Therese—a Second Semester Student

Part 4. The Role of the Educator

CHAPTER 10: The Educator—Student Relationship

CHAPTER 11: Our Roles as Educators

Video Reflection from Henriette

Part 5. The Return

CHAPTER 12: The Good Stories

CHAPTER 13: Assessment of the Journey

CHAPTER 14: The Importance of Reflection to Transform

Video Clip Reflection from Lene

Part 6. The Challenges Ahead

CHAPTER 15: The Dark Sides of Entrepreneurship Education

CHAPTER 16: Becoming More Employable as a Part of the Journey

CHAPTER 17: The Future of Entrepreneurship Education

Letter from Heidi Awhile after Participating in My Entrepreneurial Course

CONCLUSION: Reflections on Teaching Entrepreneurship

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction

The sky is the limit!

That is the motto in my classroom.

I tell it to my students all the time. In fact, I have repeated the motto so many times I sometimes forget it—until I meet the students at their exam where they remind me that what they have learned most of all in the past weeks is that the sky is the limit. More than one student informs me that at the beginning of the entrepreneurial course they feared whether they would be able to pull through. But now that fear has given way to a deeper understanding of who they are and what they are capable of.

As one student recently told me, I can, if I want to—the sky is the limit, remember?

This is exactly the paradox of entrepreneurship education. Many students sign up for the course despite believing that entrepreneurial success is only reserved for extraordinary people. They picture a heroic entrepreneur who starts a business and succeeds.

In my personal experience, however, success can be many things and really depends on how you measure it. To me, entrepreneurship education is much more than creating an enterprise. It is about using the classroom to create students who understand and believe in their own resources. To me, this is about creating change agents: students who know how to act, to make decisions, to handle insecurity, and to take responsibility because, as I tell my students, it is more fun to be playing than to sit out on the bench and wait.

Something happens in the entrepreneurial classroom—something I have not seen when teaching in traditional subjects, something that happens when we set our students free and ask them to create value with something of their own interest. It is not without challenges—entrepreneurship rarely is—but as educators we are firsthand witnesses to how our students conquer those challenges and leave our classroom with a new way of perceiving themselves.

As I taught entrepreneurship over the years, I had a nagging sense that there was something I missed. Something I could not quite put my finger on. I had a sense that something was happening in the classroom that I could not describe.

At some point I discovered Professor Joseph John Campbell’s model of The Hero’s Journey and something clicked in my mind. I have watched my students take the hero’s journey during my time with them. They started out expecting a normal classroom experience but instead they were thrown into this wild netherworld where they could not just do as they used to. There was an initial feeling of desperation and verging on the brink of tears. They found the experience frustrating but with time they acknowledged that stepping into the entrepreneurial classroom was one of the most transformational and defining moments of their lives. It changed how they saw the world and their own place in it. They were the heroes of their own journeys.

This book is inspired by the thoughts of Professor Joseph John Campbell on how to make students self-responsible and develop courage in their own lives rather than seeking and asking for approval. We start by meeting our students in the known and safe world of education and we make a call for them to take a step into the unknown world of entrepreneurship and to engage. In this unknown world of entrepreneurship, each student must step up and make decisions. This book focuses on how we as educators can influence this journey by giving the students the skills to be able to conquer.

Societal expectations.

In 1947 the first class in entrepreneurship began at Harvard University (Katz, 2003). Since then, the field has expanded rapidly and is now taught at more than three thousand institutions worldwide (Morris and Liguori, 2016). Entrepreneurship is all the rage, and it is not only the educational institutions that are talking about entrepreneurship. On the macro level governments view entrepreneurship as an economical booster, a tale that influences all our societal levels. No doubt we as educators are in the middle of the hurricane of expectations, teaching a topic that receives much focus in terms of both purpose and outcome.

The current discussions in entrepreneurship education are related to the speed of growth, which means that we might have lost the whats and the hows of what to teach and how to measure it. Students often think of entrepreneurship through a picture of business success. But what if the purpose of offering entrepreneurial courses spreads wider than creating more start-ups and offers personal development as another vital successful outcome?

To me, entrepreneurship education should include the development of our students into self-responsible human beings, and empowered future entrepreneurs and employees. Offering skills for both venture creation and the development of self-responsible students is possible.

Reactivation of the students.

Our students have become too dependent on waiting for external answers and approval before they act. They seem to lack the courage and inclination to question the existing frames they are a part of. They are waiting for someone to tell them what to do—getting allowance to do whatever it is they need to do. Least not because the focus is on the grade more than anything else. We need to give the students their voices back in their classroom and let them be cocreators in their education with the hope that they become more self-responsible individuals. The entrepreneurial classroom offers students a unique possibility to do so. It allows them to act on their own while working within their interests—something meaningful to them.

I have seen students feel intimidated by the thought of becoming entrepreneurs who nevertheless have chosen to be present in my classroom. I have seen students who almost gave up on their first day in class become the ones with the best presented opportunities, and I have had students telling me that they never thought they could do it—that their own understanding of themselves and what they were capable of in the ordinary world of education has changed rapidly. They leave my classroom feeling capable of making decisions in relation to their own lives by using entrepreneurial thinking.

Any student can harness it. When they enter our entrepreneurial classrooms, they do not realize their own potential. In the end, they leave our classroom more powerful than before because they have (re)found it. Imagine what the students can accomplish with that knowledge. We know of the relationship between education and entrepreneurial intentions, but what about the intrapreneurial intentions and using those skills in an already existing organization? Imagine those students’ employability.

My own learning journey.

This book is inspired by my own experience teaching entrepreneurship. I have been teaching entrepreneurship for undergraduates for more than ten years and have done in-depth research on entrepreneurship education since 2015 when I began my doctoral journey. I have vast experience in developing both studies and entrepreneurial courses in innovation and entrepreneurship, and I have witnessed the change in our focus when teaching entrepreneurship—from a narrow-business-plan focus to an acceptance and acknowledgment that entrepreneurship education contains more potential than evident at first glance.

Inspired by my own teaching and walking in the footsteps of our students’ entrepreneurial journeys, I interviewed nineteen experienced fellow entrepreneurship educators from all over the world to understand what could take place as a part of this journey. These conversations paint a picture of the potential of entrepreneurship education—a potential to let students own their own processes through cocreated learning approaches, and the potential of setting the students free.

To me, this book shows the passion of entrepreneurship educators. We teach entrepreneurship because we believe in its ability to make a difference in each of our students. It is also a journey into the many challenges we are facing when teaching entrepreneurship. We are on our own learning journey as well.

This book isn’t a step-by-step how-to guide in entrepreneurship education; it is a transformational tool that will inspire you to change the lives and outlooks of students via entrepreneurship education—both as an external journey where students see the world in a new light, and also as an internal journey that changes how the students see themselves.

This book is for all interested in how to turn your entrepreneurial classroom into a space where students’ conceptions of themselves are being transformed as a part of the entrepreneurial learning journey. It is a story about how we might need to put aside our traditional understanding of what teaching is and use the entrepreneurial classroom as a platform for developing students.

I hope to offer insight into entrepreneurship education and how it should be taught. If you, as a reader, are looking for a conclusive answer on how to develop your students’ entrepreneurial mindset, then this might not be the book for you because no such answer exists. Good teaching is a cocreated thing where educators and students engage in a learning journey. This book offers suggestions and inspiration for how to lead your students through the unknown world of entrepreneurship.

Book structure.

Comparing the hero’s journey with the educational journey is not a new idea. Indeed, in 1999 John L. Brown and Cerylle A. Moffett published a book on how educators could transform schools and improve learning by using the hero’s journey to describe the journey of the educator (Brown and Moffett, 1999). In this context it is the other way around; this is about the learning journey of the students. Recall how Frodo in The Lord of the Rings faced so many challenges. With persistence, a great network, and Gandalf as a mentor he overcame the struggles and returned a hero. While our students are not Frodo, and we are not Gandalf, we must nevertheless support and salute our students for venturing out on their own entrepreneurial journeys.

The world of entrepreneurship education is a call for adventure—something that summons the students to make a change.

Inspired by the hero’s journey, this book is structured into six overall parts:

Part 1: Preparing to Meet Our Students

This book starts with an introduction to entrepreneurship education and its many purposes before our students even enter the classroom. We will then look at personal development, introducing the concepts of agency, self-efficacy, empowerment, and the entrepreneurial mindset.

Part 2: The Known World

The focus of part two is to get to know your students. They each enter the classroom with different backgrounds, skills, capabilities, and competences brought from the known world into the entrepreneurial classroom. Further, this is where the students commit to taking the journey.

Part 3: The Unknown World of Entrepreneurship Education

This part of the book focuses on the skills needed for the journey ahead as well as how to learn them. This is where we invite our students to cocreate their education and try to change their mindsets to make them see how they can use their own resources to overcome future challenges.

Part 4: The Role of the Entrepreneurship Educator

While the students are conquering the world, this part of the book focuses on the role of the entrepreneurship educator and the commitments we face to transform the students. This section offers a discussion of the many roles we as educators have to undertake to support our students.

Part 5: The Return

This theme focuses on how the journey has transformed each student and how they leave the entrepreneurial classroom with a new understanding of their own powers. This is illustrated by relating stories from the classroom but also discussing how we assess that change.

Part 6: The Challenges Ahead

The challenges are not over yet; there are some dark sides of entrepreneurship education that need to be addressed. This section offers a discussion of our students’ employability and offers a look into the future of entrepreneurship education.

Like Frodo, students need to find powers they did not know they possessed or have simply forgotten. Every time they meet a challenge, they face a decision about how to proceed. The students cannot do it alone; they need help from their team and community of students all working toward a goal. They meet a mentor—the old wizard disguised as an educator—that helps them on their way and keeps them on the right track.

Acting on entrepreneurship is not as easy as it might sound. Students are expected to come up with an idea, test it, and figure out whether to move on or perhaps rethink. This is like riding a roller coaster. As