The Research Hypothesis

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates that for the effectiveness of entrepreneurship to be realised, the teachers must model initiative and be entrepreneurial themselves, so their students can acquire this skill. It starts by outlining A New Skills Agenda, with the European Commission launching a revision of the key competences with a special focus on to the promotion of entrepreneurial and innovation-oriented mindset. There is currently a need for a broader view of entrepreneurship beyond business creation. A sense of initiative and entrepreneurship represents a European key competence. It is part of a mindset for turning ideas into action which is transferrable to many contexts as well as being a lifelong learning perspective. Given the polysemy of entrepreneurship, the chapter defines the terms closely related to it: entrepreneurial education, entrepreneurship education, enterprise education, and a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship. Although entrepreneurship can be learned, research about how teachers should be trained and how they can teach in an entrepreneurial way is an underdeveloped area. Among the learning theories used in research to support entrepreneurial education, the theory of experiential learning has been the most extensively used. However, expansive learning is a learning theory of innovation and collective change of practices that is most suitable for entrepreneurial education. The Change Laboratory is a type of formative intervention useful to promote cycles of expansive learning, and it was challenged in the context of an Italian secondary school with a course in surveying that had been suffering a dramatic loss of enrolments after 2008. This study explores the extent with which a Change Laboratory as inservice training can be useful to promote a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship in the teaching staff. Keywords Entrepreneurial education • Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship Research hypothesys • Change Laboratory • A New Skills Agenda The first section shows the European policy agenda with a renewed interest in entrepreneurial education. Within the policy paper A New Skills Agenda, the European Commission launched a revision of key competences with a special focus on to the promotion of entrepreneurial and innovation-oriented mindset. While psychological research has failed to find specific personality traits characterising the