Abstract
Research on entrepreneurship education (EE) emphasizes the role of learning environments, contexts and pedagogical choices in developing students’ entrepreneurial competences. EE has assumed that it solely carries the task of improving entrepreneurial competences. Yet, the objectives, content and methods of teaching vary, and hence non-entrepreneurship teachers’ classrooms can also provide a learning environment for entrepreneurial competences. However, whether or not this kind of unintentional teaching of entrepreneurial competences takes place has not been widely addressed. In this study, the authors investigate how business school non-entrepreneurship teachers’ teaching methods unintentionally match the known framework of entrepreneurial competences. The findings indicate that non-entrepreneurship teachers do unintentionally expose their students to entrepreneurial competences such as creativity, learning from experience and financial literacy. However, competences such as opportunity recognition, perseverance and mobilizing resources do not receive similar attention. The findings indicate that some entrepreneurial competences are not solely owned by EE, but can be embedded in non-entrepreneurship education. Accordingly, the study extends the current understanding of EE and which “niche” competences should be emphasized in it, but also demonstrates how non-entrepreneurship teachers can expose students to entrepreneurial competences while teaching in their own subject areas.
Highlights
Even if the studied teachers were not aware that their teaching had anything to do with entrepreneurial competences, our findings reveal that supporting entrepreneurial competences is more a question of pedagogical choice (Blenker et al, 2012; Neck and Greene, 2011; Yamakawa et al, 2016) than of subject alignment
It is logical that some of the teaching methods we identified could induce the development of different entrepreneurial competences
Our findings suggest that various pedagogical choices can support different entrepreneurial competences, even if the teaching itself is not about entrepreneurship
Summary
We assume that the development of entrepreneurial competencies can be supported through teaching methods that support students to, for instance, take initiative in the learning situation (Jones, 2019). The interviews were jointly conducted by two researchers, which contributes to the internal consistency of the data collection (Powell et al, 2010) Both interviewers were familiar with the respondents from previous work, which supported the development of trust and understanding between interviewers and interviewees. The third area, into action, consists of competences that are often achieved through active teaching methods or learned through experience (Fox et al, 2018). We searched for descriptions of activities that we interpreted as requiring teamwork (supporting entrepreneurial competences such as working with others and ethical thinking as defined in the EntreComp framework), working with external stakeholders (supporting, e.g. mobilizing resources and learning through experience), conducting real-life projects outside the classroom (supporting, e.g. taking initiative), analyzing customer needs The coded activities were categorized in result tables, which enabled us to identify the teaching methods that supported the development of entrepreneurial competences in non-entrepreneurship teaching
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