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How can we teach entrepreneurship? – A student perspective

 

 

Description

Theme under which project submitted:

• Education for sustainable development

This project is based on a current undergraduate module ‘Graduate Enterprise’, which we intend to develop further and to offer also to postgraduate students.

Within this module, students set up and run a real-life business for the duration of one academic year. In addition to that hands-on experience, students are supported by lectures about entrepreneurship theory and by sessions delivered by various guest speakers sharing their experiences of business start-up and other entrepreneurial topics.

Our intention is to evaluate the suitability and appropriateness of these approaches to entrepreneurship teaching from the students’ perspective. The understandings thus gained will be used to improve the undergraduate module and to develop the postgraduate module.

In the domain of entrepreneurship education, “there is an on-going debate [...] about whether we can actually teach students to be entrepreneurs” (Fiet, 2000a, p. 1).

While it is clear that the functional skills of entrepreneurship, such as marketing or finance, can be taught in business school contexts, it is contested whether and how other aspects of entrepreneurship can be taught (Henry et al., 2005). Furthermore, it is unclear how entrepreneurship students prefer to learn (Henry et al., 2005).

Therefore, we do not know how entrepreneurship might be taught most effectively. With the student experience being emphasised more and more (McClung and Werner, 2008), the importance of listening to students about how they prefer to learn a difficult-to-teach subject should be stressed.

This project involves interviewing students (approximately 15), who are currently enrolled in the before-mentioned undergraduate entrepreneurship module. The interviews are intended to uncover the students’ own perceptions of how they prefer to be taught in an entrepreneurship module. Interviews will take place twice during the academic year 2009/2010 – at the beginning of the year to gauge students’ expectations about entrepreneurship teaching and towards the end of the first semester in order to establish the students’ attitudes towards the current teaching approaches, as well as their perceptions of how their entrepreneurship learning could be improved.

Preliminary fieldwork with the current cohort of enterprise students indicated that theoretical lectures are useful to learn about entrepreneurship, but that to learn entrepreneurship itself, there is a need for practical, hands-on activity, in combination with learning from real entrepreneurs’ experiences and life stories; for the latter, students particularly valued guest speakers who disclosed their own experiences and mistakes in the entrepreneurial context. 

 

 

Related documents/URLs

 

Start date

2009-09-01

End date

2010-05-28