Putting value creation to use in educational practice – “how”

Having defined the proposed educational philosophy in terms of what to do, this section describes how to do it. It follows recommendations in instructional design theory to distinguish between preparations, process and outcome (Smith and Ragan, 1999), and to articulate a provisional specification of an educational idea allowing for it to be tested by teachers in practice (Stenhouse, 1975). Preparations consist of articulating an entrepreneurial task and providing students with entrepreneurial inputs. The process is an entrepreneurial process with its characteristic stakeholder interactions, uncertainty, risk for failure and emotional ownership for students. The output is divided into a dual short-term entrepreneurial output and a more long-term entrepreneurial impact. These aspects are shown in Figure 10 as well as in text below.

Figure 10. How to do learning-through-creating-value-for-others. The figure leans on instructional

design theory to show how entrepreneurial task, entrepreneurial inputs, entrepreneurial process, entrepreneurial output and entrepreneurial impact are related.

5.2.1 Entrepreneurial task

A value creation assignment starts with outlining the task for the students. The students are given the task to use their competencies (current or future) to create something of value to someone else. Who is responsible for defining which competencies to use could vary; it could be the teacher completely dictating which competencies to use, it could be up to the student, or a combination thereof. Relating to the issue of what is “entrepreneurial” in entrepreneurial education, I draw on Bruyat (1993) to posit that the task outlined here is by definition entrepreneurial.

5.2.2 Entrepreneurial inputs

The next step is that the teacher puts students into teams using any pairing mechanism deemed suitable for the task. The teacher also supplies the students with some entrepreneurial tools, heuristics and questions that they can, or perhaps should, use. Inspiration for which ones to use can be taken from the field of entrepreneurship (see appended papers 4 and 5 for examples). At

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this stage, students could benefit from teachers discussing what is considered to be an entrepreneurial mindset. Here, it is primarily the tools and methods that are inherently “entrepreneurial”, given that they were developed from what could plausibly be stated to be part of entrepreneurship theory and practice.

5.2.3 Entrepreneurial process

The value creation process is the core of an assignment in line with the educational philosophy proposed in this thesis. The purpose here is to let the students learn experientially by going through an actual entrepreneurial process of creating value to others. It is important to give students enough time to allow for multiple iterations in their value creation attempts. There should be enough time to imagine a desirable future as well as to learn from past attempts to create value. Here, uncertainty can be managed through iteratively trying over and over again. Time is also required to establish intersubjective relations with external stakeholders.

Teachers can assess the process based on emotional events such as sufficient number of external interactions per student, sufficient amount of teamwork interaction in terms of for example time or meeting frequency, sufficient opportunity for each student to present the resulting artifact that they create for outside stakeholders, or based on other events that empirically have shown to result in developed entrepreneurial competencies. Students need continuous formative assessment and feedback from teacher, peers and / or external stakeholders. A useful assessment format is to let students reflect around the emotional events they have experienced. These reflections can be read by the teacher and / or by peer students, who can then provide feedback. Here, students should always be required to connect their personal experiences to the theoretical knowledge and skills that constituted the starting point of the value creation process, as well as to key questions posed by the entrepreneurship methods applied. If this is not done, the teacher risks committing some of the usual faults that traditionally have been attributed to progressive education, see section 2.3.4.

5.2.4 Entrepreneurial output

The task, input and process outlined above lead up to an immediate dual output. The output of interest to the teacher is naturally the student learning, and is an output that can be expected to be produced more or less every time the process has been executed in reasonable accordance with the above given recommendations. But there is also an output in terms of value created for external stakeholders, which is much less certain to be produced but constitutes the inherently “entrepreneurial” dimension here. For the student this could be perceived as the main output, and an absence of it could trigger significant frustration and disappointment. This should however not be interpreted as a negative output for the teacher, since learning from failure has proven to be very powerful (see section 2.1.7). The teacher could need to explain this to the students, over and over again. It could also lead to low ratings given by the student in written evaluations of the educational intervention in question. This could pose a problem in the increasingly performativity oriented educational institutions of today (cf. Ball, 2003).

5.2.5 Entrepreneurial impact

The more long-term impact of applying the educational philosophy articulated here is more motivated and engaged students that also develop their entrepreneurial competencies. The

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VCPs outlined in appended papers 1 and 2 illustrate these effects to a large extent, and give accounts of the causal mechanisms responsible for producing such impact. Appended paper 3 shows that similar effects can be expected also on other levels of education, and gives accounts of similar mechanisms at play. Based on these empirical studies, the generic logic seems to be that interactions with external stakeholders involving student value creation trigger a wide variety of emotional events, highly positive as well as highly negative, which in turn leads to a number of effects such as increased energy input, deeper learning, repeated efforts from the students and developed entrepreneurial competencies as well as more cognitive and curricular competencies. At its best, the proposed educational philosophy can trigger a positive and self- reinforcing cycle of deep learning, see appended papers 2,3 and 5. The inherently “entrepreneurial” aspect here is primarily the development of entrepreneurial competencies, given that many other methods could probably also produce powerful learning and reinforcing cycles of deep learning.