Afterthought and mirroring in the entrepreneurial classroom

Abstract

While student reflections is considered one of the key components in entrepreneurship education the term reflection is often widely perceived. Using Illeris we analyze data from two planned reflective “Pit Stop” workshops in an entrepreneurship course where the students reflected on the realization of ideas, educational settings and socio-cultural meanings. The results show how these reflections can be distinctively understood as an interplay of more immediate experiences and as “afterthought” and “mirroring”. Afterthought makes us see an external scale in the entrepreneurial process, for instance the functional side of an idea, while mirroring directs us to see when a personal, internal scale is used reflectively. These distinctions challenge reflection as a more general applied term and it unfolds learning gains and difficulties practicing reflection in a more detailed light when moving from the immediateness of ideas to afterthought and mirroring in a wider societal perspective. The reflective practice from the Pit Stop proposes another way to have reflective conversations with students about assumptions and norms in relation to the entrepreneurial setting and the wider sociocultural interplay they are engaged in. Our findings address the current gap on how students develop and explicate reflective thinking in their entrepreneurial learning process.