Parental engagement in social entrepreneurship by participatory action research at school of Nepal

Abstract

School education has immense role for the better future of a country. However, schools such as in a developing, country like Nepal face many barriers in demand creation as well as quality in classroom delivery. Students enter the school with mental stress and family problems. This restricts the educational outcome of schooling. Social entrepreneurship (SE) is an alien idea still in most schools in Nepal. By this venture, School social entrepreneurship can help the students and society to detect the skill of life which changes their life standard in future. It helps students to be regular in school, improve their health and ultimately bring change in overall educational achievement. In contrary to this, because of students poor economic condition they are neither able to have proper breakfast nor lunch which leads to sleepiness and inability to concentrate in the class room. Hence their learning outcome is poor. Following a Participatory Action Research (PAR) paradigm, the first author spent more than a year with rigorous field engagement in Janajivan Secondary school at Chitwan district of Nepal in order to understand the context and real need of SE. The school has own building and enough land where opportunity to develop entrepreneurship activities with the concept of 'supporting livelihood of parents through SE' approach. To dig out the reasons, We used informal talk, focused group discussion, observation and interview with teachers, students, community members, school management committee and parents. The study finding indicates that lack of time, teacher's fear of commercialism, impeding educational structures and sustainability were some of the challenges integrating SE in school. Experiential earning and learning based activities can be practiced in school outside the classroom. Having SE at school with parental involvement can be innovative pedagogical approach in school education of Nepal. Key messages Entrepreneurship linking with health education. Promote livelihood with entrepreneurship by participatory action research.