Session Information
27 SES 11 B, Didactics and Teacher Professional Developement
Paper Session
Contribution
Enterprise education and entrepreneurship education have been current themes of debate in the European field of education for the past few decades. From the transnational level, for instance the EU and OECD, educational policies stressing enterprise and entrepreneurship have found their way in to national education policies and curriculums across Europe. On an international policy level, schools have been criticised for not being able to adapt to the societal changes and public education has been criticised for resting on a teacher-centred and subject-centred view of learning by the OECD, amongst others. Entrepreneurship education and enterprise education have been suggested as solutions to the problem. Entrepreneurship education and enterprise education are to some extent problematic concepts. Although they are used and discussed from both an educational and economic perspective, there is no clear and consistent use of these concepts in either field of research. Jones & Iredale (2010) however suggest a definition where enterprise education involves fostering a proactive and self-reliant attitude towards life in general, while entrepreneurship education is more clearly targeted at promoting future self-employment, business and economy. In a Finnish context, enterprise education has been present in the national core curricula for basic education since 1994. Enterprise and entrepreneurship education emerge as a cross curricular theme to be implemented in the specific shool subjects. Enterprise education is thus a concern for all teachers. The implementation has however varied largely and different surveys suggest that it has not become a significant part of teaching. Research suggests that though many teachers have a basically positive attitude towards enterprise education, they find it elusive and challenging to turn in to educational practice. There is thus a need for reaserch inverigating the meeting between this transnationally relevnat educational theme and the practice of education and teaching at the classroom level. This paper addresses the challenge that teachers face in attempting to turn enterprise education into teaching practice.It is the result of an action research project conducted in 2014 in a primary school in the city of Vaasa in Finland. The project aimed to explore how the ambition to develop the enterprising mind-set of pupils in Grade Three can be turned into teaching practice. The project involved the entire Grade Three of the primary school, consisting of three parallel classes, three class teachers, the headmaster and the researcher. During the course of the project, the teachers and headmaster, in cooperation with the researcher, planned and realised a four-week teaching programme focusing on integrating enterprise education in teaching. This paper explores the teachers’ thoughts and experiences regarding the benefits and the challenges of implementing this enterprise education programme. Though the research project itself i conducted in a Finnish context it adresses an important question on an European level, namely; how the practice of teaching and education can be effected by transnational educational policies. The project serves as a concrete example of how a transnational policy can be turned in to teaching practice, focusing on the teachers reflections on the benefits and challenges of this process.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Elo, J. 2015. Företagsamhet i skola och utbildning. Lärares tankar om förutsättningarna att nå målen i temaområdet Deltagande, demokrati och entreprenörskap [Enterprise in school and education. Teachers thoughts on the preconditions for reaching the goals of the cross-curricular theme Participatory citizenship and entrepreneurship]. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Falk-Lundqvist, Å., P-G. Hallberg, E. Leffler and G. Svedberg, 2011. Entreprenöriell pedagogik i skolan - Drivkrafter för elevers lärande [Entrepreneurial pedagogy in shool – incentives for students’ learning]. Stockholm: Liber. Jones, B., and N. Iredale. 2010. “Enterprise Education as Pedagogy.” Education + Training 52 (1): 7–19. Kemmis, S., R. McTaggart, and R. Nixon. 2014. The Action Research Planner – Doing Critical Participatory Action Research. London: Springer. Mahieu, R. 2006. Agents of Change and Policies of Scale: A Policy Study of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise in Education. Umeå: Umeå University. Ministry of Education. 2009. Guidelines for Entrepreneurship Education. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Røe-Ødegård, I. K. 2003 Læreprosesser i pedagogisk entreprenørskap. Å lære i dilemma og kaos [Learning processes in pedagogic entrepreneurship. To learn in dilemma and chaos]. Kristiansand: Norwegian Academic Press.
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