Conference:
ECER 2009
Format:
Paper
Session Information
Contribution
The objective of the study is to question the meaning of entrepreneurship as a learning challenge and form of agency. The paper examines the case of Pyhäjoki High School in Finland, founded 20 years ago. The school was from the beginning built to provide a learning environment which supports the formation of entrepreneurship and agency among the students by means of community oriented projects such as annual municipal fairs organized by the students. The study examines learning at two levels: (1) How have the community and its different actors learned to construct and maintain a new type of school? (2) What kinds of learning processes have take place among the students and teachers as they have dealt with the challenges of conducting entrepreneurship projects.
Method
The study uses and develops cultural-historical activity theory in analyzing agency as object-oriented collective achievement, and entrepreneurship as a particular historical form of agency. I divide the historical development of the school into five phases, each characterized by particular changes in the object and in the network of involved activity systems and actors. The data consist of historical documents, interviews with central actors of the school, the municipality and local entrepreneurs, videotapes and ethnographic fieldnotes covering students' work in organizing the municipal fairs from 2004 to 2006, and students’ written reports. This paper will focus on how agency and responsibility emerge in entrepreneurial situations and how the students report on their experiences.
Expected Outcomes
The detailed analysis of the paper will show how students’ agency emerges as an internally contradictory and conflict-ridden formation when they are simultaneously acting in the role of student in classroom and in the role of student entrepreneur responsible for organizing a municipal fair. Students’ written reports of their experiences will be used as focal data. The contradictions of student agency found in the analysis are interpreted against the broader historical background of the learning process at the level of the local community.
References
Nothing yet
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.