A Holistic Design Perspective on Entrepreneurship Education

Entrepreneurship has revealed a new way of considering learning in educational institutions; but it presents a challenge to most schools. Entrepreneurial learning is asking the teachers to allow pupils to see new possibilities, take initiatives and be self-directed. However, this is difficult for teachers, since they are used to being in control of the teaching and are fixated on conventional curricula, teaching methods, use of knowledge, teaching styles, teacher-student relations, culture, habitat and assessments [1]. In entrepreneurship education, we tend to have a single focus, e.g. ‘motivation’, ‘self-directed learning’, ‘learning goals’ etc., but maybe we need to broaden our focus and look at the bigger picture. The main question in this paper is: how can we understand the challenge that entrepreneurial learning poses to the teacher’s role and the learning culture in schools and additionally, how can we develop entrepreneurial education that meets these challenges? The paper refers to our research in a public school. Based on this research and additional literature review [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] we suggest adding a design approach to entrepreneurship education. Additionally, we present a design approach that also takes the student’s personal and inner focus into account