Session Information
ERG SES C 11, Context and Content in Education
Paper Session
Contribution
The purpose of the current phenomenographic study was to examine what kind of conceptions of learning entrepreneurship engineering students expressed in an entrepreneurship course that was integrated into their study program.
The data was collected on an entrepreneurship course organised for 4th year engineering students in an University of Applied Sciences in Estonia using video recorded group interviews (N=48) immediately after the entrepreneurship course and individually held in-depth interviews (N=16) a few months after the course.
As a result of the phenomenographic analysis four qualitatively distinctive conceptions of learning entrepreneurship were discerned. Learning entrepreneurship was seen as 1) applying entrepreneurial issues into engineering, 2) developing personal meaning through entrepreneurial issues, 3) acquiring and developing new perspectives, and 4) self-realising through a collective effort. These qualitatively distinct categories differed from each other in six dimensions of variation: goals, barriers and triggers of learning, core processes, motivation, and experienced outcomes.
Identified categories show that entrepreneurial learning within engineering studies can be understood and experienced in qualitatively different ways. The categories resulting from the present study show the shift in conceptions of learning that calls for further research on learning conceptions across different settings of higher education contexts.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
The Commission (2008). The Best Procedure Project: “Entrepreneurship in Higher Education, Especially in Non-Business Studies”. Final Report of the Expert Group http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/entrepreneurship/support_measures/training_education/index.htm Gibb, A. (2002). In pursuit of a new ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ paradigm for learning: creative destruction, new values, new ways of doing things and new combinations of knowledge. International Journal of Management Review, 4(3), 233-269. Gibb, A. (2005). The future of entrepreneurship education – Determining the basis for coherent policy and practice? The Dynamics of Learning Entrepreneurship in a Cross-Cultural University Context. Edited by Paula Kyrö and Camille Carrier, pp. 44-68. Gibb, A. (2011). Concepts into practice: meeting the challenge of development of entrepreneurship educators around an innovative paradigm. The case of the International Entrepreneurship Educators’ Programme (IEEP). International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research, Vol. 17 (2), 146-165. Marton, F. (1981). Phenomenography: Describing conceptions of the world around us. Instructional Science, 10, 177–200. Marton, F. (1986). Phenomenography: A research approach to investigating different Understandings of reality. Journal of Thought, 21, 28–49. Marton, F., and Booth, S. (1997). ”Learning and Awareness”. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Marton, F., Dall’Alba, G., & Beaty, E. (1993). Conceptions in learning. International Journal of Educational Research, 19, 277-300. Marton, F., and Pong, Y. W. (2005). On the unit of description in phenomenography. Higher Education Research & Development, 24(4), 335-348. Pittaway, L. and Cope, J., (2007a). Simulating entrepreneurial learning: integrating experiential and collaborative approaches to learning, Management Learning, 38(2): 211-233. Pittaway, L. and Cope, J., (2007b). Entrepreneurship education – a systematic review of the evidence, International Small Business Journal, 25(5): 477-506.
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