Re-imaging Entrepreneurship Education and Research
This moment of connected isolation has changed everyone’s plans from cancellations to postponements. We have re-envisioned and amended our preconceived ideas about learning, teaching, working, and producing. It has only been through acceptance of our new normal that we have found the encouragement and creativity necessary to critically reflect, in a way that allows us to reimagine our current capacities, capabilities, and preconceived pedagogies.
In thinking about entrepreneurship and innovation during this changing time, educators, researchers, practitioners, and learners must decide what needs to be amended in our current pedagogies of entrepreneurship that will eventually allow us to appropriately create more prepared entrepreneurs. That is those ready to learn and adapt to the world’s pressing and ever-changing challenges.
The Essence of Entrepreneurial Education
Thinking about entrepreneurship as a contact sport, the game starts with engagement, a general desire to play; however after, students need to understand the language, tools, concepts, and theories that underlie the rules of the game. We can start to demonstrate, then, that it takes more than just an entrepreneurial mindset. The skills to act on our ideas and passions, in addition to the guidance to respond appropriately to the demands of creation and innovation are essential.
In clarifying the true essence of an entrepreneurial educator, the focus moves from the possibility of teaching someone to be an entrepreneur to if the entrepreneur is open to learning. The idea is that educators are not creating the passion for their students, but rather they are fueling it and guiding it.
Embracing Limitation
In looking at the California Entrepreneurship Educators Conference, one understands the embodiment of entrepreneurial spirit. Initially this conference would be cancelled because of the travel limitations put in place due to the current pandemic. However by recognizing the strengths that this crisis has created, for example, the public’s newly-found, general comfort in engaging online, we can reimagine a conference that is not only transmitted online, but that is enhanced upon. In setting limits on entrepreneurs, we are only giving them a greater opportunity to create and innovate.
As Dr. Alex DeNoble and Dr. Ayman El Tarabishy converse, they challenge each other to further develop upon their initial responses. By recognizing the strengths of their communities and of others’, this conversation acts as a predecessor to the conversations that will be available at the 2020 California Entrepreneurship Educator Conference.