You are here

Ontological conceptions of EE teachers in schools at the basic education level

20 April, 2016 - 16:59

At the basic education level, EE teachers typically view entrepreneurship as business-related functions and entrepreneurs as opportunity discoverers as well as persons with certain characteristics or traits. Thus, EE teachers at schools share the traditional conceptions of entrepreneurship with university teachers. However, unlike university-teachers who base their teaching on behaviorism, school teachers tend to follow the social constructionist perspective in their teaching, with only some of the older teachers being exceptions. Therefore, there is a mismatch between their conceptions of entrepreneurship and education. In practice, this means that school teachers acknowledge students’ active roles in learning and their own roles as facilitators and co-learners. Nevertheless, their conception of entrepreneurship is based on traditional discovery theory, which makes it difficult for them to use their advanced educational backgrounds. Figure 13.3 shows EE teachers’ typical ontological conceptions at the basic education level.

media/image10.png
Figure 13.3 Ontological conceptions of EE teachers in schools at the basic education level 

Both the European Commission and the Finnish National Board of Education consider promotion of entrepreneurial behavior as a general goal for European schools. As such, this goal is in line with social constructionism. Nevertheless, a concept that includes the term entrepreneur but is outside of business context may cause further confusion about the meaning of entrepreneurship, as teachers typically understand entrepreneurship in a business context according to discovery theory, which is not in line with social constructionism.