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Addressing the Pre/Post-university Pedagogy of Entrepreneurship Coherent with Learning Theories

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Entrepreneurship Education

Part of the book series: Contributions to Management Science ((MANAGEMENT SC.))

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education has been initiated in higher education, especially Business Schools, as part of the curriculum but it is currently expanding to both pre- and post-university settings. It also encounters a split from academic environments to informal ones. At the crossroads of materializing educational needs in modern socioeconomic environments, this chapter aims to compare entrepreneurial teaching paradigms at different levels of the learner’s lifecycle. Once learning theories are important in supporting educators to precisely develop the pedagogy, compatibility between different theories and different levels of education underpins the systematic provision of entrepreneurial programmes across the learner’s lifecycle with consistent outcomes and evaluations. Drawing upon Illeris’s classification, this chapter addresses a selection of relevant learning theories to entrepreneurship: Dewey’s learning-by-doing, Kolb’s experiential learning, Lave and Wenger’s communities of practice, Engeström’s expansive learning and Mezirow’s transformative learning. From a lifelong learning perspective, the chapter discusses which educational theories are better suited to the school level where the entrepreneurial programmes are implemented. Thus, the chapter contributes to the pedagogical perspective of entrepreneurship, for which research has been limited.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The present study confronts EE throughout the learner lifecycle and thus, it does not consider the learning areas of organizational learning or action learning (cf. Marsick and O’Neil 1999).

  2. 2.

    Elkjaer (2018, p. 75) stresses that “experience is a series of connected situations (organic circles) and even if all situations are connected to other situations, every situation has its own unique character”.

  3. 3.

    A concept that will be also used in the ‘transformative learning’ section.

  4. 4.

    Elkjaer (2018, p. 70) refers to experience as a ‘knowledge-affair’.

  5. 5.

    As Elkjaer (2018, p. 73) explains reproducing the 1896 critique of Dewey on the reflex arc, Kolb’s theory is more aligned with the ‘orthodox’ concept of experience (Table 5.1, p. 76).

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  1. University of Peloponnese, Tripolis, Greece

    Alexandros Kakouris

  2. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Daniele Morselli

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  1. International Centre for Transformational Entrepreneurship, Faculty of Business and Law, Coventry University, Coventry, UK

    Sukanlaya Sawang

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Kakouris, A., Morselli, D. (2020). Addressing the Pre/Post-university Pedagogy of Entrepreneurship Coherent with Learning Theories. In: Sawang, S. (eds) Entrepreneurship Education. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48802-4_3

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