IO5. What can an Entrepreneurship Education Ecosystem for Initial Primary Teacher Education look like?
Analyses of European policy documents reveal an increasing priority of entrepreneurship education over the past two decades. However, the implementation of EE varies significantly within European countries, especially when it comes to primary schools and primary teacher education. In the course of the EIPTE project, pre-service primary teachers from six different countries participated in different intensive weeks. To ensure that more future primary teachers with EE competences will follow, even after the project completion, we need to understand the ecosystem for their education. Therefore, we firstly analyzed theories for university-based entrepreneurship education ecosystems and their usability for (primary) teacher education. Secondly, based on interviews with EE experts from six different countries, who were all involved in the EIPTE project, we gave an overview of the different stages of ecosystems in six different countries and provided a series of first recommendations for the development of a comprehensive ecosystem for EE in initial primary teacher education.
IO7. Report for Policy-Makers on EE competences in Initial Primary Teacher Education
In the Eurydice Report on Entrepreneurship Education in Europe (2016) all the efforts on entrepreneurship education (EE) of European countries are listed. Many countries, like Lithuania, have included EE in their strategies, which also cover primary education, yet an explicit integration in the curriculum of primary schools and in initial teacher education for primary schools is lacking. This situation can be found in many European countries.
This report for Policy makers is a result of the exchange of experiences in six different European countries: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Lithuania, Spain, and Sweden. It sums up the experiences of those HEI and NGO’s during the EIPTE project in regard to the necessary local, regional or national strategies for effective EE in Initial Primary Teacher Education.
It includes a few parts: 1) the reasoning for EE in HEI with initial primary teacher education; 2) suggests entrepreneurship competences for the educators in higher education institutions to work with and learning outcomes for students to be developed through their studies; 3) guidelines for policy makers.
The overall work on this report consisted of two main phases:
1 – the analysis of the contemporary policy situation of EE in ITE in partner countries (including the latest EURYDICE and GEM reports). This analysis came from the close cooperation of the partners within this Strategic Partnership, since it was be possible to get a deeper understanding of the development of policies in each participating country.
2 – preparation of the report for policy makers on the possible improvement of the existing regulation on Entrepreneurship Education in ITE.
The recommendations were developed by partner institutions and suggestions from a broader circle, not only from existing papers but also from the experiences with students and educators from 6 participating countries together with a number of other participants – including teachers, teacher educators, policy makers, etc. – from other countries (during the Multiplier event in Vilnius).
IO8. Mobile App on STE(A)M topics as an innovative case of entrepreneneurship
Every year, the AP University of Applied Sciences organises an international semester in which students from various study programmes take part in an international multidisciplinary project. In the academic years 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 the focus was on designing an educational app for UGent Volkssterrenwacht Armand Pien. They had already designed a teaching package in which children aged 8 -12 could get acquainted with the solar system and lunar travel and landings. In this way they try to get children excited about more scientific professions at a young age. However, the classical teaching package does not sufficiently fit in with the world of children in which digital media brings about a lot of learning and/or is a motivating factor. That is why the students were commissioned to develop an educational tool in line with the curriculum. This project led to many opportunities for our students to further develop their entrepreneurial skills, resulting in a satisfied external partner, an educational app to promote STE(A)M and strong entrepreneurial students. Here you have the case study presentation:
IO9. Research paper on students’ competences pre and post entrepreneurship education.
This paper is based on a practitioner research and systematic inquiry into students’ evaluation of their entrepreneurship skills before and after participation in a curriculum based module taking place three times (2018-20). The results of a preliminary studies of the first two modules were used to improve the third module. The participants were Erasmus students from different European countries and Danish students and along the way they revealed rather different understandings of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education.
The development of entrepreneurial skills and mindset is one of eight key objectives for lifelong learning defined by the European Commission in 2006, and since then, the EU member states have been working on implementation of innovation and entrepreneurship into the national education systems, but so far no common understanding of the concepts has been developed. Some member states focused on students’ adaptation to a dominant socio-economic logic in society by targeting on entrepreneurship aimed at a commercial market, while other countries have focused more on entrepreneurship as creating social and cultural values for others. In these modules, the students mostly operated within the latter approach.