The Influence of Pedagogical Entrepreneurship in Teacher Education

Abstract

Pedagogical entrepreneurship is a teaching and learning approach that emphasizes means and possibilities within school subjects, in opposition to reproductive, transmissible, and goal-oriented approaches. Political and education research voices strongly argue for implementation of pedagogical entrepreneurship in all school subjects, due to its lifelong learning perspective. This implies that students of today and tomorrow must be trained in the didactic of possibilities, how to explore and investigate, and how to create value for themselves and others. This calls for an epistemological transformation of subject-specific content knowledge that allows interpretation in many ways and development of a growth mindset. Pedagogical entrepreneurship is recognized by being innovative and explorative, whether it is about economic growth, values, scientific approach, or making a difference. A narrow definition of entrepreneurship (or enterprise education) includes emphasis on establishing and running a business of some kind. Pedagogical entrepreneurship calls for a broader definition of the entrepreneurship area, since it frames priority of practical, problem-based, research-based, and lifelike activities for the students, cooperation with local businesses, organizations, and life outside school. Pedagogical entrepreneurship allows the students to gain understanding of the complex nature of real-life issues, influence teaching practices, and experience strong relevance of the learning goals, which is likely to increase students’ inner motivation and their experience of holistic learning of content knowledge. Therefore, pedagogical entrepreneurship can appear as a leader philosophy, a way to organize teaching, and specific student activities. Implementation of new approaches to teaching and learning is always associated with issues and teacher concerns and requires continuing teacher profession development, for instance through attention in teacher education programs and students’ experience with pedagogical entrepreneurship during their teacher education. A way to meet this scenario is to vitalize the broad definition of pedagogical entrepreneurship in teacher education programs in such a way that the teacher education students may operate as change agents when they start to teach after they have graduated. The development, mapping, and introduction of entrepreneurial teaching resources in teacher education will establish the foundation for a didactic of possibilities—an entrepreneurial didactic that may influence students’ motivation and in-depth learning of school subjects.