Teachers discuss entrepreneurship education

Authors

• Maija Korhonen Itä-Suomen yliopisto
• Katri Komulainen Itä-Suomen yliopisto
• Hannu Räty

Abstract

In the 2000s there have been major policy efforts for strengthening entrepreneurship education in Finnish education. The article explores the micro-level, discursive reception of entrepreneurship education in schools by analyzing how a group of comprehensive school teachers construct the aims of entrepreneurship education in their interviews. The analysis shows that the teachers negotiate the aims of entrepreneurship education through and in relation to the historically produced discourses of schooling. Within the school context, entrepreneurship education appears as an ideologically dilemmatic phenomenon because new discourses and ideals are made intelligible by considering them within the well-established, value-based discourses of schooling. When the teachers argue for and against the aims of entrepreneurship education they produce normative statements concerning equality, competition, and the abilities of individuals. Thus, they make sense of the aims of entrepreneurship education by reflecting the same contentious issues and questions that have historically been in the core of the school debate.