Teachers implementing entrepreneurship education: classroom practices

Abstract

Purpose -This study aims to highlight the entrepreneurship education practices teachers use in their work. Another target is to analyze how these practices differ based on a number of background factors. Design/methodology/approach -This article presents a quantitative analysis of 521 teachers and other entrepreneurship education actors. The paper first examines the overall picture of entrepreneurship education practices. Then, after a factor analysis, the paper builds new sum measures of entrepreneurship education practices. Finally, the paper studies the teachers' background information to further analyze the entrepreneurship education practices.Findings -The findings provide information on which methods appear to be used the most frequently in basic and upper secondary education, and how these practices vary between different school levels. The results also indicate that the perception teachers have of their own entrepreneurship education skills is closely connected to the implementation of entrepreneurship education. Moreover, the findings present the connection between teacher training and the implementation of entrepreneurship education. Originality/value -Teachers' entrepreneurship education practices and related teaching and working methods are important in many respects. As research has primarily focused on higher education where the transferability of the results to basic and upper secondary education seems vague, this paper concentrates on the teachers' role and especially their practices in lower education. The authors consider that their article has a special value in exploring and opening dialogue in this area.

How do Italian vocational teachers educate for a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship? Development and initial application of the SIE questionnaire

“…Previous research (Hytti and O'Gorman, 2004;Béchard and Grégoire, 2005;Solomon, 2007;Ruskovaara and Pihkala, 2013) suggests that entrepreneurial teaching consists in the ET readiness of teachers to stimulate, maintain and lead students' entrepreneurial learning processes. These studies indicate that in order to do this, teaching staff have to become entrepreneurial themselves (Peltonen, 2015).…”

“…Hytti and O'Gorman (2004) suggest that training the trainers is crucial to developing effective programs in enterprise education. In empirical research carried out by Ruskovaara and Pihkala (2013), teacher training was found to be key to explaining teachers' entrepreneurial education practices in compulsory education. Peltonen (2015) concluded that, seen from teachers' point of view, entrepreneurial education is also a matter professional development and pedagogical renewal, meaning that teachers should be considered entrepreneurial agents rather than mere executors of policy recommendations.…”

“…In compulsory education, teachers play a leading role in understanding what it means to be entrepreneurial in the school context, and in transforming this understanding into teaching practices that will make students entrepreneurial in the long term (Fiet, 2001a;Deakins et al, 2005;Gibb, 2008;Ruskovaara and Pihkala, 2013;Ruskovaara and Pihkala, 2015;Sagar, 2015;Seikkula-Leino et al, 2015). However, entrepreneurial education research has tended to be focused on learning outcomes, with little attention being paid to teachers' perspectives (Fayolle, 2008;Jones and Iredale, 2010;Peltonen, 2015).…”

“…There is a need both for better exploration of how educators interpret entrepreneurial education (Hoare and Ruskovaara, 2015;Peltonen, 2015), and for tools that support teachers to develop their entrepreneurial teaching skills (Ruskovaara and Pihkala, 2013). A range of scholars have drawn both on the educational sciences and on entrepreneurship to propose conceptual frameworks for entrepreneurial education (Fiet, 2001b;Béchard and Grégoire, 2005;Solomon, 2007;Lackéus et al, 2016;Macht and Ball, 2016); however, pedagogical practices are very often dictated by experience rather than by systematic approaches (Fayolle and Gailly, 2008;Fayolle, 2013).…”

“…The question educators, policy makers and researchers have been considering is how to embed entrepreneurship teaching at all levels of education (Lackeus, 2015). However, most studies of entrepreneurship education have focused on higher education (Ruskovaara and Pihkala, 2013;Hietanen and Järvi, 2015), and research into entrepreneurial education in compulsory education is underdeveloped in terms both of literature and of the agencies governing and supporting secondary education Johansen and Schanke, 2013;Penaluna and Penaluna, 2015).…”