Entrepreneurship as everyday practice: towards a personalized pedagogy of enterprise education

2012

Per Blenker Signe Hedeboe Frederiksen Steffen Korsgaard Sabine Mueller Helle Neergaard Claus Thrane

Adopting the perspective of ‘entrepreneurship as an everyday practice’ in education, the authors conceptualize opportunities as arising from the everyday practice of individuals. Opportunities are thus seen as emanating from the individual entrepreneur’s ability to disclose anomalies and disharmonies in their personal life. The paper illustrates how opportunities unfold depending on regional differences, local heritage and gender, to show how entrepreneurship education must take into account differences in context, culture and circumstance. Rather than perceiving entrepreneurship education as universalistic and searching for a generally applicable teaching approach, the authors argue that there is a need to tailor entrepreneurship education to the particular. They therefore propose that the pedagogy of entrepreneurship education should be personalized and they build a conceptual framework that contrasts two opposing views of entrepreneurship education: ‘universalistic’ and ‘idiosyncratic’. Following this distinction, they explore how different elements of entrepreneurship education may be fitted to the particular needs of each individual learner. This insight is relevant for didactic reflections on single entrepreneurship courses and for the construction of an entrepreneurship education curriculum.

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