Learning to teach an entrepreneurship education program – a workplace learning perspective on schoolteachers` professional learning

Abstract

Entrepreneurship has become a popular topic in education, that has gained attention internationally for its potential to inspire and nurture important life and work skills in young people. Teachers are arguably important if entrepreneurship education is to be successful, as they are responsible for carrying out such political initiatives in the classroom. The aim of this thesis was to learn more about the teachers’ experiences with entrepreneurship education. Entrepreneurship can be taught quite differently to traditional subjects in school due to its often practical and student-driven approach. Therefore, the thesis was focused how teachers experience to learn to teach entrepreneurship education, adhering to a workplace learning perspective. To do this, semi-structured interviews were carried out with teachers from primary and lower secondary schools. A global provider of entrepreneurship education is Junior Achievement, an organisation that offers ready-to-teach education programs to schools. Their program lessons focus on various topics and skills within entrepreneurship, for example financial literacy, to create work readiness in young people facing adulthood in the 21st century. The teachers in this study were teaching two such Junior Achievement programs, BizTown and Finance Park. These programs paid attention to a wide range of entrepreneurial skills, such as creativity, problem solving, and running a business. They also included financial literacy in terms of managing budgets, understanding loans and investments. The findings showed that the teachers engaged in various learning activities when learning to teach the JA programs. Most of the learning that the schoolteachers engaged in were informal, occurring at and through work. The teachers learned through getting hands-on teaching experience from teaching the program in their classes. They also valued collaborating with other teachers, and many of them engaged in knowledge sharing activities. Junior Achievement offered teacher training prior to teaching the program lessons in class, a more formal learning opportunity, but many teachers were unable to attend due to lack of time. Relating the findings to the learning environment of the workplace helped illustrate that the teachers experienced expansive and restrictive conditions that both encouraged and hindered their workplace learning.