In this research, we develop, document, and analyze a narrative approach for students’ identity integration in the context of social & sustainable entrepreneurship course. Based on the analysis of narrative logs and interviews, we explore to what extent the proposed approach is conducive for students’ identity integration and how negative (and positive) emotions shape the process. Doing so, we address a gap in the social entrepreneurship education (SEE) literature and, more broadly, educational research. While identity integration is a key challenge in education (Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang 2015) and a focus of SEE in particular (Zhu, Rooney et al. 2016), few researches directly address identity integration, its drivers and possible obstacles (Jensen 2014).     

Social entrepreneurship education (SEE) is not just about developing bridging skills and dealing with competing logics. It is also about questioning students’ personal intentions and moral value in relationship with their project and helping students in integrating those as part of their social entrepreneur’s identity. However, identity integration is far from easy as competing logics might trigger identity threats, conflicts and shifts. As an example, Pache and Chowdhury (2012) encourage students to adopt the norms and values that best fit with their personal views while acknowledging that bridging skills are likely to trigger identity conflicts. They suggest that students might face peer pressure, the initial expectations of their family, societal expectations and even their own doubts when managing the various norms and values that coexist in business schools. According to Plaskoff (2012), such negative feelings can be associated with identity threats, which students sometimes tackle by shifting from the proposed SE identity to a ‘decidedly commercial identity’ (Zhu et al. 2016, p. 612).

Addressing this challenge, Zhu et al. (2016) suggest methods – such as dialogues and narratives – that would sustain students’ identity integration by helping them reflect, alone or with others, about what one has learned and experienced. It echoes Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang (2015)’s call for conversational learning (CEL) practices in education for identity integration. Like Petriglieri and Petriglieri (2010), Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang (2015) suggest that students’ identity is at the heart of their learning process and that educators should facilitate conversations (Baker, Jensen, & Kolb, 2002) for students to discuss and reflect upon the transformational aspects of learning.

In spite of its promises, CEL is only emerging in SE education (see for instance Hockerts 2018). In this research, we design a CEL-based narrative teaching device (individual and collective narrative logs, narrative murals, narrative feedbacks) for students in a social entrepreneurship course. Through the teaching devices (logs) as well as interviews, we documented the identity integration process at stake in the course. Then, we analyzed the collected data in order to better understand the process, its emotional drivers and obstacles.   

In this research, we explore “how collective narrative practices can help our students engage in an identity integration process” and “to what extent emotions contribute to this process”. The overall research strategy is the case study , as we focus on a specific social & sustainable entrepreneurship course offered in March 2020 at the master level and as part of a sustainable management major in a Belgian Business school. The methods consisted in four main steps: (1) the development of teaching tools such as narrative log questions, narrative murals as well as narrative feedback questions; (2) the collection of written qualitative data about students’ reflection through the narrative logs all long the six weeks of the social & sustainable entrepreneurship course; (3) the collection of qualitative data from interviews with 20 students one year after the course; (4) the analysis of the qualitative data (logs and interviews) through an abductive process. When developing the teaching tools, we draw on Lawrence & Mailis (2012) who suggest that ‘caring’ collective narrative practices (White and Epston 1990, Denborough 2008) are powerful reflexive tools. According to Lawrence and Maitlis (2012), narrative practices allow members of a collective to re-tell histories of sparkling moments, to contextualize their struggles, and to co-create polyphonic future-oriented stories. This is especially important in SE education, where the capacity to listen to different voices might help when elaborating the project as a team (Pache and Chowdhury 2012) and even later when scaling the organization (André and Pache 2016). While some authors have use collective narrative practices as both a theoretical framework and a methodological approach (see Berg 2010), we consider them (or at least their implementation in the course) as part of the phenomenon under investigation. In terms of research data, we combine the content of the narrative logs for the whole class (71 students) with in-depth interview for a subsample of 20 students. Using content analysis, we explore the way students re-tell their sparkling and struggling moments and identify the emotions that were salient in those moments. We use an abductive process (Van Maanen, Sørensen et al. 2007) of iteration between the CEL framework (Baker, Jensen et al. 2005), the emotion in education literature (Pekrun, Goetz et al. 2002, Uitto, Lutovac et al. 2018, Vogl, Pekrun et al. 2020) and our qualitative set. Through this process we derive principles for identity integration through collective narrative practices.

We show how conversations – sustained through ’caring’ narrative practices – provide students with opportunities to question and foster their personal value and moral intentions through team engagement but also by partly integrating their team’s vision and intention. This “identity tacking” - from the self to others within teams and even broader communities - facilitates the perception of the self as a team member as well as of the team as the recipient of a salient identity, i.e., organizational identity. Furthermore, we identify key (positive and negative) emotion that emerged through identity questioning and – for some students– transformation. We show how negative emotions such as anger (linked to injustice) as well as hopelessness (linked to the complexity of the societal challenges) can turn into hope for the future and an enhanced sense of social entrepreneurial self-efficacy when the students explicitly address their negative emotions inside their team. By contrast, hopelessness remains when students did not take opportunity of their team conversation to address the source of anger. While this abstract is based on our preliminary result, the full paper and ignite talk will describe in more depth the emotional trajectories of our students in the joint stories.

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