Eva Leffler

The Many Faces of Entrepreneurship: A Discursive Battle for the School Arena.

Entrepreneurship and enterprise in schools are concepts that are appearing more and more frequently in local curricula for the compulsory nine-year school system in Sweden. The meanings of the concepts of entrepreneurship and enterprise in schools vary, however. Over the last few years, the concept of entrepreneurship has started to appear in contexts other than economic ones, and economic authorities are now expressing a need for a widening of the concept of entrepreneurship to include all sectors of society. This article further problematizes entrepreneurship and enterprise by discussing the following issues: the broader application of the perspective of entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial perspective that focuses on a business orientation, and the enterprise perspective concerning the development of an individuals inherent abilities. The results show that teachers are still wrestling with the contribution of entrepreneurship in school activities.

Educational approaches to entrepreneurship in higher education : a view from the Swedish horizon

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present and develop models of educational approaches to entrepreneurship that can provide complementary analytical structures to better study, enact and ref ...

Fostering an entrepreneurial attitude : challenges in the leadership of school principals

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to uncover the meaning of entrepreneurship in schools and a school leadership which aims to nurture an entrepreneurial attitude. The authors will also discuss ...

Research on pedagogical entrepreneurship : A literature review based on studies from Finland, Iceland and Sweden

Strategies for entrepreneurship in the educational system are present not only in the Nordic countries, but also in the majority of other Western countries. Linked to these strategies different research efforts have been made. Although the research efforts have a common origin in supranational policies on entrepreneurship, there has been little research analysing the similarities and differences in how the topic is addressed by researchers in different countries. Being able to relate to both the policy and the available research in a nuanced way is important especially in the context of teacher education. The purpose of this article is to review the most recent research in pedagogical entrepreneurship from three countries: Finland, Iceland and Sweden. The aim is to discover whether the common phenomena of entrepreneurship in an educational context are approached differently in these three countries. The review of 21 articles in all, covering aim, method, concepts, references and results, draws a rather fragmented picture of the research. The main results are that the reviewed research was mostly qualitative and covered the entire spectrum from theoretical research to practice-oriented research. A variety of concepts were used. The analysis of the use of references uncovered a need to be more aware of including research from neighbouring regions. The research field seems to be quite lively and is still developing. However, it would benefit from a better dialogue between researchers in order to strengthen the contribution of Nordic research on pedagogical entrepreneurship.

What about Students’ Right to the “Right” Education? An Entrepreneurial Attitude to Teaching and Learning

What about Students’ Right to the “Right” Education? : An Entrepreneurial Attitude to Teaching and Learning

Entrepreneurship in Schools and the Invisible of Gender: A Swedish Context

For a long time entrepreneurship has been of great importance for society. Consequently its role in society has been of great interest. It is significant for the research in this area that it is multidisciplinary and there has been a struggle finding an explicit definition of the concept of ‘entrepreneurship’. Now, entrepreneurship has made its entrance to more arenas than the economic ones and has become a concern for schools and education as is evident from national as well as international policies. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the concept of ‘entrepreneurship’ has been an item on the agenda of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as well as the European Commission. The report Towards an ‘Enterprising’ Culture: a challenge for education and training states that schools should ‘go in for an enterprising culture’ and that, at the same time, this implies a challenge for education (OECD, 1989, pp. 21-22). The European Commission also states the need for developing enterprising people and the importance of starting at early ages and to be a natural part of the whole school system. Children and young people are supposed to acquire an entrepreneurial attitude through teaching and learning. In this way entrepreneurship has more and more become a concern for schools and education. Schools have therefore a big responsibility for fostering and developing young people’s enterprising abilities (European Commission, 2002, 2004).