Student Teachers’ Views on Entrepreneurship Education: Insights or Platitudes?
Keywords:
teacher education, entrepreneurial learning, entrepreneurship educationAbstract
The inclusion of entrepreneurship education at all levels of the Finnish education system has provoked strong arguments for and against. In teacher education, entrepreneurship education has a twofold role: 1) to explore and clarify the content and methods of entrepreneurship education from the perspective of basic education and 2) to train active and critical entrepreneurship educators. The views of student teachers on entrepreneurship education have been little studied, so the research question in this study was: What are the views of student teachers on entrepreneurship education? The qualitative essay data for this study was collected during two academic years (2021-2022 and 2022-2023) during the course "Entrepreneurship Education in Basic Education". During the two academic years, 132 student teachers participated in the course, 42 of whom gave permission for the study. The essays were analyzed using theory-based content analysis. In general, the student teachers had a positive attitude towards entrepreneurship education and considered entrepreneurship and the development of independent initiative as important aspects of basic education. Some felt that the main challenge was the implementation of entrepreneurship education and that more training was needed. As entrepreneurship education is not linked to any specific subject, student teachers experienced difficulties in understanding how to integrate it in the future into the delivery of the basic education curriculum and into everyday lessons. A critical perspective was represented by student teachers' expressions related to the role of entrepreneurship education in educating actors as economic decision-makers in society and business. Furthermore, entrepreneurship education was seen as supporting neoliberal, even ideological, thinking and as guiding students' thought processes in a one-way direction. Student teachers question the inclusion of entrepreneurship education in the school system if its sole aim is to produce entrepreneurs. However, participants also gained insights into entrepreneurial pedagogy and its potential to extend the application of learner-centered and learner-activated teaching methods in their own teaching. This gave a new depth to their approach to entrepreneurship education and thus to future teaching practice.
