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Ethnographic evaluation of entrepreneurship education in higher education; A methodological conceptualization
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Ethnographic evaluation of entrepreneurship education in higher education; A methodological conceptualization

Sarah Robinson and Wesley Shumar
The international journal of management education, v 12(3), pp 422-432
Nov 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2014.06.001
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
url
https://pure.au.dk/portal/da/publications/ethnographic-evaluation-of-entrepreneurship-education-in-higher-education(16be6ee0-cd59-4c4f-abbd-373a389f6ddb).htmlView
SubmittedOpen Access (License Unspecified),  Open
url
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2014.06.001View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

Entrepreneurship Ethnography Evaluation Methodology Teaching
Ethnography is a research method that seeks to gain a detailed understanding of how informants see their world and how they understand the problems that they confront in everyday life. As such it is an ideal method to both study the practices that entrepreneurship educators engage in and the discursive and cognitive shifts that learners go through as they seek a more entrepreneurial understanding. The paper suggests that the flexibility and rigorous nature of ethnography provides an appropriate tool for evaluating entrepreneurship teaching in educational institutions. Entrepreneurship is a practice that has always been of significance to economic development and is increasingly playing an important part in many aspects of 21st century life. While the discourses that surround entrepreneurship have been widely contested they have nevertheless seduced many nation states into searching for new ways to encourage and sustain economic growth. These discourses are evident in policies that use rhetoric about creating more entrepreneurs through explicitly encouraging entrepreneurial behavior by teaching entrepreneurship to students at all levels of education. The introduction of entrepreneurship education into Higher Education discourses can be traced throughout the western world over the last two decades. Whether talking about starting businesses, often the focus for American universities, or encouraging enterprising behavior, the terms used in the UK and some parts of Europe, entrepreneurship education has, using models from cognitive psychology and social cognition theories from education gradually become established as a discipline in Higher Education. As educational anthropologists we are interested in exploring the parameters of this new discipline. We propose that the nature of this discipline lends itself to ethnography as a method for discussions about how enterprising behavior is nurtured, supported and evolves into entrepreneurial practices through socially constructed communities. A close look at the practices of entrepreneurship educators in a Danish Higher Education institute stimulated an analysis of what these teachers do and say they are doing in the entrepreneurship classroom. •A methods paper focusing on ethnographic evaluation in entrepreneurship teaching.•Ethnography provides a method to evaluate “through” entrepreneurship teaching.•Ethnography explains minute changes in student's thinking about their worlds.•Ethnography captures the nuances of the ways students perceive problems.

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22 citations in Web of Science
31 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#1 No Poverty
#9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
#5 Gender Equality

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Business
Education & Educational Research
Management
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