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1 Introduction

More than 30 years have passed since Seymour Papert minted the term constructionism, a way of building knowledge through the construction of artifacts in social and reflective contexts (Papert & Harel, 1991). While once a radical stance, constructionism has become commonplace in educational settings. Entrepreneurship education has embraced the idea of learning by making in social contexts primarily by providing scaffolding for students who are creating new ventures. These courses foster learning by giving students experiences that approximate the actions of founders. Socially informed acts of prototyping and pivoting, for example, are often significant aspects of the curriculum (Roy et al., 2020). Students intent upon starting ventures can find immediate benefits from such educational experiences. However, students who do not see themselves in entrepreneurial careers may not enroll and may miss out on the opportunity to discover and develop their entrepreneurial abilities.

The Accelerator Rap course differs from most entrepreneurship courses. This course, which won the Academy of Management Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy award in 2020, attracts undergraduates who are more interested in the arts, liberal arts, and education than they are in entrepreneurship. The course guides these undergrads in the construction of educational media designed to help 8–12-year-old girls and children of color see themselves in innovative entrepreneurial careers. The students learn about entrepreneurial practices and the demographics of the entrepreneurial ecosystem while working on the fundamentals of educational media, animation, and beat-making. They demonstrate their mastery of entrepreneurial concepts by developing short, educational, animated, music videos for children. In the process, the students learn about entrepreneurial practices, and they recognize that they, too, could embark on innovative entrepreneurial careers. In addition, the inclusive media works that they have created are offered as open-source learning materials for K-12 settings.

As the creator of the Accelerator Rap course, I start this chapter by describing the rationale for the course before highlighting the pedagogical anchors for it. After presenting an overview of the course, the chapter suggests several ways to re-envision the structure and content of other entrepreneurship courses in order to promote greater diversity in entrepreneurship. It concludes by underscoring the value of constructionist learning opportunities in entrepreneurship.

2 Rationale Behind the Accelerator Rap Course

Entrepreneurship is gendered and racialized (Jones & Warhuus, 2017). It also is discipline-specific, with the tightest alignments existing with business and engineering (Huang-Saad et al., 2020). These broader societal and cultural cues about the gender, race, and primary interests of entrepreneurs together form a discourse of entrepreneurship that can be a barrier to some students (Sarasvathy, 2004). Some entrepreneurship coursework is a part of this discourse that inhibits students outside of the dominant group(s) from participating in entrepreneurship education.

Entrepreneurship education has evolved since the 1990s when very few universities offered either formal or informal entrepreneurial learning opportunities. It has transformed from teaching how to start a business by writing a mostly fictional business plan in a classroom setting to cultivating entrepreneurial skills in experiential settings (Ferreira et al., 2018; Kickul et al., 2018; Nowinski et al., 2019). Experiential learning opportunities that approximate the tasks and practices of entrepreneurial work are considered especially efficacious (Honig, 2004; Brush et al., 2015). Despite the changes, entrepreneurship education primarily aims to prepare students to start ventures. This is a boon for students who are aspiring founders, but it is a barrier for students who do not resonate with the cultural discourse about entrepreneurship.

Designing a course that embraces all students requires meeting students where they are (Bartolome, 1994) and providing ways for students to exercise the skills that they want to develop while exposing them to entrepreneurial essentials. Such a course needs a classroom environment that enables learners to build new insights about entrepreneurship while engaging in projects that overlap with their core interests. These learning activities necessitate a project-based approach that connects the conceptual learning of individuals with a diverse community of learners (who may or may not resonate with the dominant identities of entrepreneurship). Constructionism (Papert, 1993) offers a theory of learning and a strategy for education that invites people to build personally meaningful artifacts in conversation with a wider community.

3 Pedagogical Anchors for the Accelerator Rap Course

Constructionism’s main idea is that the most effective leaning experiences include the active creation of meaningful artifacts, interactions with others, and reflections on one’s own learning and thinking. In other words, conceptual learning occurs when learners construct personally meaningful artifacts that are shareable within a community of reflective learners (Papert, 1993). Constructionist learning, then, is deeply situated, practical, and dynamic (Ackermann, 2001). As Papert (Papert & Harel, 1991) put it: “Constructionism—the N word as opposed to the V word— shares Constructivism’s view of learning as ‘building knowledge structures’ through progressive internalization of actions… It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.”

Unlike Piaget’s constructivism, which places learning in the mind, Papert’s constructionism prioritizes the concepts of engagement and externalization (Papert & Harel, 1991). Constructionism is not just experiential learning or learning by doing. It involves conscious engagement, personal and communal reflection on activities and insights. Both the creation process and the artifacts created need to be embedded in practices of social sharing and review. The possibilities for the artifacts, or “public entities,” are bounded only by the creativity of the learners. They only need to have personal meaning for the learners. In many entrepreneurship courses, the public entities under construction are ventures, but these are only meaningful for students who yearn to be founders. The artifacts under construction can take many forms, including media works. The purpose of these artifacts is to give students “objects-to-think-with” – “objects in which there is an intersection of cultural presence, embedded knowledge and the possibility for personal identification” (Papert, 1980) that catalyze new insights and knowledge for the student.

Constructionism prioritizes student-centered, discovery-based learning where students use their existing interests and knowledge to build new insights and abilities. Learning happens as students engage in project-based activities that help them make connections between different ideas. While these connections are developed in the mind of an individual learner, they are dependent upon interactions with others, including peers, teachers, and people in the wider community. Consequently, constructionism is not only a means for an individual to build knowledge by creating artifacts; it also is a way to cultivate a social context (Ackermann, 2001).

Because interactions within a social setting forge a sense of belonging and create a community of learners (Papert, 1980), the role of the constructionist teacher is more facilitator than lecturer. As a kind of coach, a teacher helps students consider challenges in fresh ways and learn how to productively critique and support each other’s work. Teachers need to accommodate different learning styles, paces, and ways of presenting knowledge (Turkle & Papert, 1991) as students bring an array of abilities and interests to a project. Constructionist teachers create a productive context for learning and look for teachable moments. They orchestrate opportunities for students to discuss, share, and interactionally collaborate on the formation of new ideas while working on their projects (Resnick, 1996).

Projects that use media as artifacts to learn with are well aligned with constructionist priorities. People engage deeply with core topics in order to craft media that communicate key points. This process of engagement leads to a strong understanding of the subject (Jonassen et al., 1999). By creating media (as opposed to just consuming prepared media), students actively communicate their new ideas and insights as they develop visual and audible content. The media also can be shared with others and discussed in an iterative cycle of design and learning. As students represent their new understanding in multiple forms and over a few iterations, they develop metacognitive, reflective, and communication skills (Chen & McGrath, 2003; Garthwait, 2007).

Whether students construct media or a different artifact, the main principles of constructionism (Papert, 1990) apply:

  • Student learning is optimized when learning activities are connected with something each leaner finds relevant and meaningful.

  • The artifacts that students construct are dynamic materials (or technologies) that invite interaction, reflection, and discovery.

  • Projects are designed to be intrinsically enjoyable for learners in order to inspire the sustained concentration required.

  • Projects are organized to help students learn how to learn.

  • Teachers serve as facilitators of self-directed learning rather than as instructors.

  • Mistakes are occasions for learning over time.

  • Competence with technologies and communication skills are fundamental abilities.

The complexity of constructionist projects means that students will be engaged in the work over an expanse of time. Given the self-directed nature of the learning process, students need to have or develop time management skills. They also need to have or develop a perspective that any mistakes or false starts are simply occasions for learning, for gaining a richer perspective. Fluency with digital technologies and with communication are essential, and students will build their abilities in these areas during the project.

Using media as the artifact under construction is rare in entrepreneurship education. However, this approach is central in the Accelerator Rap course. The next section describes how media creation organizes the constructionist nature of the course.

4 Structure and Flow of the Accelerator Rap Course

The Accelerator Rap course is orientated around constructionism (Papert & Harel, 1991; Papert, 1993). Students create short educational animated music videos designed to teach entrepreneurial concepts to 8–12-year-old children in inclusive ways. As such, the course attracts undergraduates who want to render animations or make beats and may not be interested in innovative entrepreneurship. The curriculum encourages students to examine their assumptions about founders and to consider aspects of diversity in entrepreneurship while they explore entrepreneurial cases and concepts. Students reflect on their ideas about entrepreneurship as well as about race, gender, and age as they render the videos for the course project. The course concludes with a public showing of the completed works.

Each session of the class over the arc of a semester begins with students engaging in a thinking routine (Ritchhart & Perkins, 2008) designed to help students synthesize knowledge. They are given a prompt (e.g., what are you sure you know about entrepreneurial work right now, and what would you like to know more about?) and 2 min to record their private responses. Students are expected to keep their responses to these exercises in a single paper notebook or a single digital file across the entire semester. At the midpoint of the semester and in the next-to-last class session, students reflect on the development of their thinking and share pivotal moments in the development of their ideas with classmates.

After completing the thinking routine, a typical class session includes a section focused on discussing relevant topics and a section focused on developing relevant content. Students arrive in class having watched or read content, shared reactions to that content in an online forum for the class, and responded to each other’s contributions. In the class session, we pick up the conversation and grapple together with puzzles that the students have identified. On occasion, a guest expert joins the class session to bring additional perspectives or to offer advice on the development of the students’ media projects.

Class sessions call on students to bring their full focus to the time together. While parts of the class have students seated around a table, every session also gets them in motion. Some activities have everyone at the whiteboard or moving in a circle around the room. These embodied exercises often ask students to tap into creative forms of expression. For example, they quickly draw a tableau or write a short rhyme related to our entrepreneurial topic on the whiteboard. The time limits prevent students from over-investing in the improvised exercise, and they enjoy rotating to another student’s quickly-rendered work where they add to it, again within tight time limits. The group then discusses what surprises they found in each other’s work and how these different interpretations will help them construct their formal media projects.

Some class sessions are held in contexts outside of the usual classroom. We would visit the campus accelerator and discuss matters of entrepreneurship and diversity with the person who runs it. We would visit the university’s media commons and learn about the concept of rapid prototyping by using robotics kits in teams. We would visit an on-campus recording studio and workshop beats and lyrics with an expert in music composition and recording. The final minutes of each of these miniature field trips are devoted to reflecting on the experience and articulating how it could contribute to each student’s educational animated music video.

Class sessions also are devoted to the development of students’ formal media projects. In these sessions, students could ask each other for guidance and critiques. The interactions from these sessions inform a class-designed rubric that students use to evaluate their own and other students’ media works.

The final class session is designed to be a public showcase. Faculty, friends, and even members of the local media are invited to see the media pieces designed by the students. With each student positioned at their own large screen around the room, they take turns describing the learning that they have done over the semester and present their videos to the guests.

While the content and guest experts change from semester to semester, the flow of the course remains constant. Whether the topics we explore are lean startup, lead user innovation, or some other entrepreneurial practice, the students are challenged with creating inclusive media pieces that can help children see themselves in innovative entrepreneurial careers. In addition to introducing entrepreneurship to undergraduate students who had little interest in entrepreneurship at the start of the semester, the Accelerator Rap course also generates artifacts that can be used to inspire girls and children of color. The next section builds on these possibilities for impact.

5 Extended Impact of the Course

The constructionist orientation of the Accelerator Rap course enables it to influence the diversity of the innovative entrepreneurial ecosystem in three ways. First, it brings students into a course about innovative entrepreneurship who would otherwise not take such a course. Second, it helps these undergraduates recognize misperceptions that they have been holding about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial work. This means that students can begin to identify with innovative entrepreneurship and see the ways that their skills could contribute. And finally, the inclusive animated music videos that the students create are made available as open-source learning materials for K-12 settings, after-school programs, and families.

Undergraduate students can receive credit in Art, Education, English, Music, or the Entrepreneurship Minor in Communications by taking the Accelerator Rap course. This ensures that students from diverse disciplines enroll in the course. Consequently, many students may be more interested in the artful nature of the course project than the topic of entrepreneurship. Some are motivated to have a polished media piece in their portfolio before graduation to show off their creative ability to future employers, for example. Nevertheless, these students who are not initially very interested in entrepreneurship begin to see themselves as potential innovative entrepreneurs as the semester unfolds.

At the beginning of the course, students are asked to describe who entrepreneurs are and what entrepreneurs do. This exercise reveals that many students come to the class with preconceived ideas based on popular culture and common myths. For example, some students think that an entrepreneur is “sunglasses-wearing guy with an attitude in a nice office” or that entrepreneurship is “only about making money” or “telling people what to do.” When students at the start of class are asked to name innovative entrepreneurs, they tend to name only white American men (e.g., Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc.). The course actively challenges these perceptions of entrepreneurship and builds cultural consciousness by asking students to begin to recognize the limitations of their own assumptions. It also exposes them to examples of successful innovative entrepreneurs who represent nondominant population groups.

Over the arc of the semester, students share that they had once thought only people majoring in business or engineering could start innovative ventures or lead companies. Entrepreneurship in their academic homes tends to be focused on self-employment (i.e., making money as a freelancer). Only through the construction of the educational animated music videos designed to help 8–12-year-old girls and children of color see themselves in innovative entrepreneurship do some of the undergraduates recognize their own capacity to become innovative entrepreneurs.

The media artifacts that the students create are made freely available to the wider public. Students who wish to share their videos can place them in an online gallery that is promoted to K-12 teachers. Entrepreneurship education in the United States starts in elementary schools in some states (Junior Achievement USA, 2015), and inclusive learning materials are needed. Today’s 8–12-year-olds are familiar with electronic devices such as smart phones and digital services such as YouTube for Kids. Even 5–8-year-olds (in pre-pandemic conditions) spend an average of 3 hours a day looking at a screen of some kind (CommonSense Media, 2021). Having online entrepreneurial learning materials that represent female founders and founders of color is important.

The artifacts also lend themselves to research. Studies are in design phases to examine the impact the artifacts have on children’s impressions of entrepreneurial identifies and entrepreneurial work. Special interest lies with the ways that the videos may influence the ways that girls and children of color, in particular, think about entrepreneurship.

While the Accelerator Rap course models several ways that entrepreneurship education, and in particular, constructionist entrepreneurship education, can address the lack of diversity in innovative entrepreneurship, it is just one course. Other constructionist contexts also can spark this kind of deep learning and cultural change. The next section explores additional ways that entrepreneurship education can embrace constructionism and help more learners discover innovative entrepreneurship.

6 Reinventing Courses to Promote Greater Diversity in Entrepreneurship

The Accelerator Rap course is based on several key ideas about learning:

  • Knowledge and competence are created by students as they develop new and situated ways of understanding entrepreneurship.

  • Ideas, information, and insights are made meaningful as students integrate them into their existing frames of knowing and communicate them in the media projects.

  • Learning is a social process that involves explanation, (re)negotiation, sharing, and evaluation in many forms.

As students craft their educational animated music videos about entrepreneurship, they conceptually and practically (re)organize their ideas about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial work. As they share their emerging and then finished artifacts with peers and others, they yet again need to reflect on and make sense of their learning process and project. An essential feature of the course is that the learning is connected to the interdisciplinary and social creation of the videos. However, the artifact under construction does not need to be an animated music video. It can be nearly anything that requires the practices and skills of disciplines beyond business.

An important challenge for educators who orchestrate constructionist learning contexts is the identification of artifacts for students to craft. Depending on the departments within a particular university, the artifact could call on students to choreograph a ballet or other forms of dance to convey an entrepreneurial concept. Alternatively, the artifact could require students to design a board game or a video game based on an entrepreneurial case. Or the artifact could focus students on writing a play or shooting a movie (documentary or fact-based fiction) about entrepreneurship. In each of these options, the final session for the course could be a public display of the artifacts through a performance, a community game event, or a screening.

Related to this challenge of defining the artifact is the need for the educator to identify the tools and structures that can support students as they engage in the construction of their artifacts. Faculty members across the university and community members with relevant expertise can be part of the coaching team. They can speak in class or react to emerging artifacts with constructive feedback. Various student services available on campus – such as a recording studio or a media commons, in the case of Accelerator Rap – provide physical tools and software that contribute to the construction of the artifacts.

Because constructionist educators are facilitators more than instructors, each class session needs to be designed as a workshop or lab. Lectures have a role, but only as a way of framing discussions. Similarly, assignments between classes need to be structured in ways that prime in-class discussions and ideally include interactions between students in advance of class sessions. Students actually can participate in the creation of assignments; they can be asked to find learning materials to critique and discuss. Such assignments can tap into students’ sincere interests and help them render their unique artifacts.

One of the tenants of constructionism is the importance of learning how to learn, and reflection offers a way to encourage this. Reflection can come from introspective thought and private journaling (Schön, 1987). It also can emerge from reflective dialogue in person or in online contexts. Using learning routines in class sessions and structuring assignments to include reflective dialogue give students ways to synthesize information while both individual and group learning. However, that is just one option. Educators must design learning experiences and assignments that guide students to reflect on knowledge, activities, puzzles, and discoveries while communicating ideas and feedback with each other.

By working across disciplines and constructing inclusive artifacts designed to be consumed by others, constructionist entrepreneurship courses are poised to make the entrepreneurial ecosystem more diverse. They offer a welcoming on ramp for undergraduates to explore entrepreneurship who are based outside of business or engineering. The artifacts reach others in the wider community and, again, serve to attract more people from more diverse backgrounds to entrepreneurship.

7 Looking Forward

The lack of diversity in the innovative entrepreneurial ecosystem is a recognized problem. Simply making more opportunities for people to experience traditional entrepreneurship education does not necessarily engage women, people of color, and other people who are underrepresented in innovative entrepreneurship. Instead of offering more instances to teach traditional courses, we need to design and facilitate different learning experiences.

Constructionist courses promise a path to greater diversity throughout the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Such courses leverage the different skills and real-world experiences of students. Because they build on the interests and abilities that students prioritize, constructionist courses attract new students to entrepreneurship. The range of perspectives, needs, and experiences that these new students bring to the course make the learning experience richer for everyone, including the educator.

The educator’s role in constructionist courses is to help students learn how to learn – and discover how their authentic interests and skills are aligned with innovative entrepreneurial work (Papert & Harel, 1991). Students can participate in the creation of assignments and evaluations. The learning experience emerges through in an ongoing conversation, online and in person, and in exhibitions of student thinking through the creation of artifacts.

In the Accelerator Rap course, students gain a working understanding of innovative entrepreneurship and develop skills they had hoped to polish as well as some they never expected to have. This was the result of a bringing constructionist approach to entrepreneurship education. The course attracted new and different students to entrepreneurship. It also offered sufficient learning materials, support structures, interactional opportunities, and reflection prompts to help students to learn how to learn and to see themselves as future founders. The Accelerator Rap course demonstrates one way to embrace constructionism in contexts for entrepreneurship education that value diversity. However, the ways that entrepreneurship education can make use of constructionism are limitless.

Note: More detailed information about the Accelerator Rap course has been available at https://sites.psu.edu/cape and https://sites.psu.edu/challenge.