ethnographic evaluation of entrepreneurship education in higher education; a methodological...

The International Journal of Management Education xxx (2014) 1e11

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The International Journal of Management Education

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Ethnographic evaluation of entrepreneurship education inhigher education; A methodological conceptualization

Sarah Robinson a, Wesley Shumar b, *

a Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media, Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University, Denmarkb Department of Culture and Communication, College of Arts and Sciences, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 30 January 2014Received in revised form 28 April 2014Accepted 4 June 2014

Keywords:EntrepreneurshipTeachingMethodologyEthnographyEvaluation

* Corresponding author.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S. Robinson

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2014.06.0011472-8117/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: Robinsoneducation; A methodological conceptualiz10.1016/j.ijme.2014.06.001

a b s t r a c t

Ethnography is a research method that seeks to gain a detailed understanding of howinformants see their world and how they understand the problems that they confront ineveryday life. As such it is an ideal method to both study the practices that entrepre-neurship educators engage in and the discursive and cognitive shifts that learners gothrough as they seek a more entrepreneurial understanding. The paper suggests that theflexibility and rigorous nature of ethnography provides an appropriate tool for evaluatingentrepreneurship teaching in educational institutions. Entrepreneurship is a practice thathas always been of significance to economic development and is increasingly playing animportant part in many aspects of 21st century life. While the discourses that surroundentrepreneurship have been widely contested they have nevertheless seduced manynation states into searching for new ways to encourage and sustain economic growth.These discourses are evident in policies that use rhetoric about creating more entrepre-neurs through explicitly encouraging entrepreneurial behavior by teaching entrepre-neurship to students at all levels of education. The introduction of entrepreneurshipeducation into Higher Education discourses can be traced throughout the western worldover the last two decades. Whether talking about starting businesses, often the focus forAmerican universities, or encouraging enterprising behavior, the terms used in the UK andsome parts of Europe, entrepreneurship education has, using models from cognitivepsychology and social cognition theories from education gradually become established as adiscipline in Higher Education. As educational anthropologists we are interested inexploring the parameters of this new discipline. We propose that the nature of thisdiscipline lends itself to ethnography as a method for discussions about how enterprisingbehavior is nurtured, supported and evolves into entrepreneurial practices through so-cially constructed communities. A close look at the practices of entrepreneurship educatorsin a Danish Higher Education institute stimulated an analysis of what these teachers doand say they are doing in the entrepreneurship classroom.

© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Entrepreneurship is a practice that has always been of significance to economic development and is increasingly playingan important part in many aspects of 21st century life. At the grass-roots level some of the most common statements made

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, S., & Shumar, W., Ethnographic evaluation of entrepreneurship education in higheration, The International Journal of Management Education (2014), http://dx.doi.org/

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S. Robinson, W. Shumar / The International Journal of Management Education xxx (2014) 1e112

about being an entrepreneur include being able to start a business, to be one's own boss, towork with something that you arepassionate about and to earn money at the same time. At another level discourses of entrepreneurship have seduced manynation states searching for new ways to encourage and sustain economic growth. These discourses are evident in policiesacross Europe and the western world where entrepreneurship is heralded as a public ‘good’. Policies are crafted around arhetoric about providing incentives for growing entrepreneurs and encouraging entrepreneurial behavior. These in turn haveincreasingly influenced our education systems. In the past two decades entrepreneurship education has taken hold in HigherEducation institutions particularly in Europe (Cope, 2005). Following from Cope's (2005) argument we agree that the dis-courses that surround entrepreneurship education have been very different depending upon the group articulating them. Theposition of Entrepreneurship education, initially situated in the business faculty, has moved into the ‘wet’ sciences, scienceand technology and has spread to arts and humanities to a greater or lesser degree. This raises a number of questions aboutthe content and aims of entrepreneurship education. What is being offered in the different units across the university? Whatare the goals of entrepreneurship education? What should be taught? How should it be taught? How do Higher Educationinstitutions justify courses that encourage new business ventures alongside traditional forms of courses that qualify studentsfor employability in established sectors? Answering these questions requires much more space than is available in this paper.Our focus here is on one particular school of thought in Entrepreneurship education and on assessment of entrepreneurshipeducation - the methods used to measure what works and what does not. In order to do this we suggest that ethnographicevaluation provides the opportunity to understand the multiple layers of the discipline.

This paper explores the use of ethnographic evaluation in Entrepreneurship education. As such it is primarily a methodspaper focusing on the benefits that ethnography can bring to entrepreneurship education, especially around understandingwhich pedagogies are effective in teaching students to think like entrepreneurs. For our part, as educational anthropologists,ethnography is a research method that seeks to gain a detailed understanding of how informants see their world and howthey understand the problems of everyday life that they confront (Zaharlick, 1992). As such we believe it is an ideal method toboth study the practices that entrepreneurship educators engage in and to examine the discursive and cognitive shifts thatlearners go through as they seek a more entrepreneurial understanding.

While most ethnographers support the idea that ethnography is one of the very few research techniques that allow aresearcher to first hand share a set of problems that informants have and to have a direct sense of how those informantsmake sense of their worlds, there are often a number of questions that those outside of ethnography have about its validityand reliability. Herzfeld (1997), for instance, has put forth the notion of cultural intimacy as one way to talk about the waythat longer-term involvement in a community can produce an interesting form of validity even though the number ofsubjects an ethnographer works with are small. For Herzfeld, “cultural intimacy” are ideas that are central to a nation'sidentity but that might be a bit embarrassing to share with outsiders and so tend to remain very private Herzfeld (1997: 3).While Herzfeld is specifically speaking about nationhood, this principle is useful with other aspects of culture. People shareintimate knowledge that binds them together and ethnography is one of the few ways to get at this kind of knowledge. It isthis kind of knowledge that we suggest is an important part of the production of a community of practice aroundentrepreneurship.

In order to illustrate how we see ethnography being a benefit to entrepreneurship education, we reflect here on some ofthe data we have gathered through conversations with and observations of teachers of entrepreneurship in a Danish HigherEducation institute. There were two main themes of conversation. One arose from discussions about how individuals shapetheir everyday practices and create new meaning. The second focused on how individual enterprising behavior is nurtured,supported and how this in turn evolves into socially constructed entrepreneurial practices. We found the Danish model ofentrepreneurship to be a very interesting one, and its conception allows for the focus on pedagogical goals for entrepre-neurship education. In this model the teachers focus on entrepreneurship as an everyday practice, which in turn meansnurturing enterprising behavior. These interlinked foci of the definition of entrepreneurship combined with the focus oneducation being grounded in an individual's life, lends itself to ethnography which is about the way in which individuals‘make sense of the world’. Ethnography is therefore useful as a means to evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogy and whatis going on in the student teacher interaction.

2. Macro structural framing of discourses of entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is one of those terms that has become, to use the words of the British anthropologist, Turner (1967,1969), a multi-vocal symbol. It is used by policy makers, in different nation-states, who have different agendas that theyseek to advance. At the policy level, entrepreneurship is generally code for motivating economic growth through neoliberaleconomic policies. According to Gershon (2011), one of the interesting things about neoliberal ideology is there is no conceptof scale. Social actors are all of the same weight and size whether they are individuals or companies or nation-states. In thisway individuals, small companies and major corporations can all contribute to their nation's economic growth through freemarket activity supported by deregulation.

Of course in different nation-states, this process is imagined differently. In many former welfare-states, they are seeking to“marketize” many of their social institutions such as education and healthcare. The United States has already deregulated somuch of its activity, pushing its economic agenda in different parts of the world and seeking always to find new markets inuntapped social arenas. China and some other Asian nations are practicing some interesting forms of state capitalism wherethe state helps discipline workers for the neoliberal agendas of domestic and international companies (Ong, 2006).

Please cite this article in press as: Robinson, S., & Shumar, W., Ethnographic evaluation of entrepreneurship education in highereducation; A methodological conceptualization, The International Journal of Management Education (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2014.06.001

S. Robinson, W. Shumar / The International Journal of Management Education xxx (2014) 1e11 3

When we start to look at the academic fields of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education we begin to see somedifferent definitions of entrepreneurship. Primarily a widespread and general definition that many groups share aboutentrepreneurship is that it is about starting a business. The idea of entrepreneurs starting a business could be compatible withstate level policy makers' focus on the neoliberal free market, but it is also possible that this could be seen as something quitedifferent. Small businesses could be seen as a way of escaping the larger corporate world. Much contemporary entrepre-neurship espouses more communitarian values evenwhen building a profitable business. One increasingly popular areawithyoung entrepreneurs is social entrepreneurship where doing business and doing good are brought together in creativesynthesis. We will return to that later.

While many scholars agree that starting a business can be a core definition of entrepreneurship, it is often the whole focusof academics in the US. The US focus tends to be very much about producing and marketing a product as well as maximizingprofit, which make entrepreneurs more compatible with corporate capitalists. Certainly during the dot.com boom and itsaftermath, people in the tech sector see entrepreneurship as starting a company, coming up with a new product, making a lotof money, and selling to a major company like Google, Microsoft or Intel. However in the UK the focus tends to be more aboutcreating an enterprise and encouraging enterprising behavior and has therefore a broader focus. In parts of Scandinavia, forexample, the focus is even broader. Here entrepreneurship is often defined as being about creating value and value is notlimited to the economic. Value is defined in other arenas outside of the economic for example the social, bio-medical, culturaland environmental. In Denmark in particular, the definitions of entrepreneurship are often linked to ideas about encouragingand developing entrepreneurial mind-set. In one Danish Higher Education institution entrepreneurship education isfurthermore about creating value and finding potential for creating such value in everyday practices. It is in this context thatsocial entrepreneurship might have the increasing support for instance.

This, more socially ambitious and less profit focused definition of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education, hasmore in common with the values of many younger entrepreneurs and craft businesses. Many young social entrepreneursthink a lot about the ways entrepreneurship can add value to people's lives, protect the environment, etc. Likewise many craftproducers are concerned with quality of life and quality of their products. Since the rise of industrial capitalism craft pro-duction has been an important alternative that for many serves as a less alienated alternative to capitalist production andconsumption (Morris, 2010; Muthesius, 2010). Furthermore in all craft production there has been an emphasis on qualityrather than profit. Quality of product as craft producers see themselves as artisans is a key value. But craft producers also careabout the quality of their ownwork life and value the process as much as the product. Whenwe think of craft wemight thinkof artisans in the early twentieth century whomight be associated with the art nouveau or the art deco movements. But thereis a current wave of craft production and it is global and is sometimes referred to as DIY or craft production but will share thesame values as those of the early 20th century (Luvaas, 2012). These values do not have to conflict with making money, butthey usually do affect the horizons of profit because profit is not the only motive in the business and sometimes they are notthe most important motive. We currently see producers of clothing, furniture, jewelry and other things on etsy.com. Inaddition, there is a big wave of coffee, wine, beer craft production, as well as restaurants and food trucks. While some of theseconsumer industries have long been bound to craft, like local restaurants and wine, we are seeing a proliferation of thesebusinesses with an emphasis on quality of production and quality of consumption. While these forms of entrepreneurship areabout creating businesses, profit is not their top priority. They have other forms of value they hope to contribute to the world(Blenker et al., 2012).

In the US where the general media and policy focus is very much on business creation, marketing and profit, there arestill whole communities, like the Craft Beer community, that have a completely different set of values. In that community,they are wedded to the idea of creating a product that is original and of high quality. Craft brewers see themselves as ar-tisans. The product they create is labor intensive and does not benefit much from economies of scale. Therefore profit is nottheir primary concern but the value they see as adding is “quality of life.” As a result there is a good deal of sharing in thecraft beer community. Certainly there is still business competition but the culture is more humane and beer companies seemembers of other companies as colleagues and friends. Their solution to competitive or intellectual property issues is oftenforging collaboration (Smagalski, 2013). This attitude tends to exist in a number of so called “craft industries” in the US andmight even be seen as part of a growing sub-culture of people searching for more than economic value by finding othervalues that provide meaning and quality in their patterns of consumption. It is interesting that while the craft beermovement is part of that craft movement contributing other forms of value to the world, for the big two global beer pro-ducers they are seen as a threat and something to wipe out. While on the one hand this could be seen as just a normalcapitalist business practice of competition and competing with the other no matter what form it comes in. On the other handthese craft values are a real threat to a system of mass production which values quantity, and reduced cost per unit, overquality.

3. Cultural context of entrepreneurship education

As we can see from the above section on framing, there are many different interpretations of what entrepreneurship is inpractice. These are both different ideas that groups have about entrepreneurship and at times it is an ambiguous and multi-vocal terrain that is being symbolically motivated for some particular political or policy end. In the scholarly world ofentrepreneurship education these different views of what entrepreneurship is have existed side by side and scholars fromdifferent traditions seem to be able to appreciate what other groups have found.


http://etsy.com


For some time, the pedagogy around entrepreneurship education floundered not only because there were different viewsabout what entrepreneurship is, but there was also a general feeling that being entrepreneurial was something of an innatecharacteristic. One either had it, or one did not. In this way, feelings about entrepreneurship were similar to the way a lot ofteachers have felt, and some continue to feel, about mathematics. One is either good at math or one is not. People who are notgood at math can be taughtmath, but theywill never be as skilled as thosewho are good at it. These are folk theories that tendto become part of the culture and are often verbalized but rarely analyzed. Anthropologist Herzfeld (2001) argues for a way ofdoing ethnographic research that is focused on what he and others call “theoretical practice.” Theoretical practice involvesengaging in the same or similar practices that ones informants engage in, but through the reflexive lens of anthropological orsocial theory. Theory is used to make sense of the experiences one has. Herzfeld goes on to point out that all people in sociallife engage in theoretical practice. But often their theories are “folk theories” (e.g., some people are just good at math or have anatural inclination to entrepreneurship). These theories have neither been consciously reflected upon nor explored carefully.Often times we think of them as ideologies.

In entrepreneurship education, this kind of folk thinking was dramatically changed by the introduction of a cognitiveperspective from psychology and cognitive science (Cope, 2005). The cognitive perspective allowed us to understand thatenterprising thinking and attitudes involved mental categories of thought and “habits of mind” based upon the way a personcategorized the world (Collins, Greeno, & Resnick, 1992). And there were affective dimensions to this too. This was a reallyhuge shift because it did two really important things. First, it explained why some people were better at being entrepreneursthan others as they developed for whatever reasons habits of mind and ways of responding to their emotions that wereadvantageous to entrepreneurship. But it also provided a way to teach entrepreneurship through a more defined curriculum.These kinds of cognitive maps and recipes could then be taught to students. Initially this shift to a cognitive perspective was,like cognitive psychology in the beginning very focused on the individual as the locus of cognition. All cognitive activity wasseen as going on in the individual. Later, in psychology and related disciplines (education, sociology, anthropology) the focusbegan to shift toward social cognition and group cognition (e.g., Lave, 1996; Rogoff, 1995; Stahl, 2006). We see entrepre-neurship education making a similar shift to social cognition where the cognitive activities, even those that go on in theindividual, are always part of a group process. For example, the Danish school, which we will discuss below, regard entre-preneurship education as a shift in thinking for the individual in the “individual-opportunity nexus” (Blenker & Thrane,2007). But those shifts are social in at least two ways. First the educational process is a training in a practice and a world-view, which is something that is part of a community. In addition of course the “individual-opportunity nexus” is alwaysabout the individual in social context. We will make more of this later.

It is widely recognized that entrepreneurship teaching has developed into three distinct categories; ‘about’ entrepre-neurship, ‘for’ entrepreneurship and ‘through’ entrepreneurship (Robinson& Blenker, 2014). Briefly ‘about’ entails giving thestudents knowledge about the theories and requiring them to digest this knowledge and reproduce it at a later date. Thus‘about’ entrepreneurship utilizes the cognitive perspective, which fits nicely alongside the traditional modes of universityteaching. The cognitive perspective tends to focus on the achievement of the individual making input (teaching) an easilymeasurable output that equates with learning. It does however miss out on introducing students to a range of learningexperiences that would equate with entrepreneurial behavior and practices. The type of teaching included in ‘for’ entre-preneurship provides students with tools, such as a business model, financial tools, that are helpful when starting a business.These courses are typically offered in business schools and students are tested on their ability to apply these tools to cases.‘Through’ entrepreneurship requires the students to actively practice the skills in real life situations, to approach stake-holders, to research the market and to develop their ideas into prototypes and even products. Through entrepreneurship asdescribed here is achieved in for example; student growth houses, incubators and start-up weekends. This last category is theone, which in policy terms, has the potential to produce entrepreneurs. It is noteworthy that in a study of entrepreneurshipcourses Pittaway and Edwards (2012) found that approx. 50% of courses taught ‘about’ entrepreneurship, 34% taught ‘for’entrepreneurship while only 10% taught ‘through’ entrepreneurship. We will demonstrate that the Danish model of entre-preneurship education strives to achieve elements of ‘through’ while nurturing student potential from a classroom envi-ronment thereby ‘embedding’ learning.

Research shows that entrepreneurs are largely dependent on being able to establish relationships, communities andnetworks and therefore the social aspect is an important element. Groups produce meanings together using and manipu-lating symbols in subtle ways. Ethnography is well suited to examine these group dynamics, how individual thought andidentity is shaped and how communities are created and maintained. This is consistent with work in group cognition (Stahl,2006) and social cognition (Kirschner & Martin, 2010). Many thinkers are not only pointing out that learning and thinkinghappens through “practice” in social contexts, but that thinking itself is probably not an individual process (Sfard, 2010).Going all the way back to the pragmatic philosopher Peirce, Hartshorne, Weiss, and Burks (1931), who pointed out that allthought is dialogic, the idea of the lone mind thinking new thoughts is a misconception of the process. Peirce was trying topoint out that all thought was social. Even if one is working alone on ones room and working on an idea, that ideawas usuallyin response to someone else's idea. To use Peirce's terms, there is always an interlocutor.

If university teaching of entrepreneurship is to go beyond ‘about’ and ‘for’ and incorporate elements of ‘through’entrepreneurship, there has to be an articulation of how different modes of teaching and learning are integrated. Drawing onprevious work (Neergaard, Tanggaard, Krueger,& Robinson, 2012) we acknowledge that entrepreneurship education requirescombining insights from four approaches from psychology; behaviorism, social learning, situated learning and existentiallearning to nurture enterprising thinking and practice. Combining a range of opportunities for learning both inside and



outside the classroom requires rigorous planning on behalf of the teacher. Can entrepreneurship education be measuredbeyond the classroom and if so, how could this be done? For some it is a simple measurement, student achievement will bemeasured in the number of students that go on to start a business. Measuring those numbersmay be relatively easy even if wetake into account that all would-be entrepreneurs may not necessarily go out and start a business immediately after theircourses are finished. Therefore it may be difficult to account for start-ups as beingmotivated by a course taken up to five yearspreviously. The satisfaction with this response is equally short-lived however if we take into account the previous discussionabout the narrow definition of entrepreneurship education as being a business start-up. This brings us back to question: Howto measure the degree of impact of entrepreneurship teaching at the end of the course and the extent to which enterprisingbehavior is nurtured, supported and developed?

4. A case for ethnographic evaluation

Measuring output in education is critical formany reasons. There has always been a tension in themeasurement of studentachievement from compulsory schooling to university education. Questions about measuring what is taught rather thanwhathas been learned have provoked debate from the macro to the micro levels. If as Biesta (2009; 43) argues, education has threefunctions qualification, socialization and subjectification that results in us ‘valuing what we measure rather than that weengage inmeasurement of what we value’ then entrepreneurship education provides serious challenges. A quantitative focusmay work if we are interested in measuring ‘about’ and even ‘for’ entrepreneurship. However if we are moving towardsmotivating our students to engage and to practice through trial and error, where failing is an option, then quantitativeperformativity technologies are just too simplistic. Neergaard et al. (2012) suggest, that if the aim is to nurture a reinter-pretation of the individual students identity then measuring what works will not be quantifiably simple. In their paperKarlson and Moberg (2013) make a brave attempt to measure the effects of entrepreneurship teaching. They evaluate the‘change in attitudes, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and nascent entrepreneurship behavior’ making comparisons betweenentrepreneurship students and a control group (Karlson & Moberg, 2013; 2). This admirable analysis of the students dem-onstrates that there is indeed a positive effect on the entrepreneurship students, which supports us in our belief thatentrepreneurship can be taught and learned. What is not elucidated from this study is what part(s) of entrepreneurshipteaching have a positive effect on learning and what that teaching content was. What was effective and why? Therefore wewish tomake a case for ethnographic evaluation as amethod to rigorously identify andmeasurewhat has an effect andwhy inentrepreneurship teaching.

Ethnography is a qualitative research technique developed in sociology and anthropology. While it was seen as aminor method in sociology and often had to struggle against the dominant quantitative research techniques, in an-thropology it became the core method. In sociology the focus has been on participant observation, the practice ofparticipating in a culture, to the extent that one can as well as simultaneously systematically observing that culturethrough the process of keeping detailed field-notes. In anthropology participant observation has been very important too,but the focus has been a little theoretically different. Anthropologists think of ethnography as an encounter with theother, where the other is taken very seriously. The encounter with the other happens primarily through participantobservation as well, but might include other methods such as surveys, interviews, etc. Both are phenomenological in theirorientation. In sociology one of the main critiques of ethnography from its inception was its subjective position and itspotential for bias. But many ethnographers have pointed out that both objective and subjective research techniques are atrisk for bias and that we depend upon the researcher's vigilant research practice to offset potential biases (Dorr-Bremme,1985; Herzfeld, 2001). While there is always the potential for a bias of perspective on the part of the ethnographer, whatis gained by taking that risk is a detailed understanding of how the other engages in the practices that they do, and howthey make sense of the world. This is something that cannot be accomplished in as much detail through quantitativetechniques.

Ethnographic evaluation uses these ethnographic techniques to do a number of things. One, the ethnographer gets adetailed understanding of and a feel for the practices that a group of people engage in. This detailed experience with thepractices also then allows the ethnographer to see how the social world – the organization of the social, is accomplished bythe members of a particular community whose practices are under view. In addition the ethnographer gains a sense of whatall of this means for members of the community. Meaning is socially produced and collectively held and by being part of thecommunity the ethnographer begins, however imperfectly, to participate in these meanings too. Finally this leads to a deeperunderstanding of the culture, the ways of doing things, the rules the people share, the symbols people use and the under-standing they have (Dorr-Bremme, 1985; Fetterman, 1984; Fetterman & Pittman 1986; Camino, 1997). Ethnographic evalu-ation could be used in any social arena and within any institution, but in education it allows ethnographers to look at aneducational intervention and get a detailed sense of how it is taken up by thewhole community (administrators, teachers andstudents). By being able to see how the intervention fits into practice and what it means to participants, ethnographicevaluation is uniquely situated to explain why an intervention succeeded or why it failed, or why things were mixed withsome success and some failure.

It is this particular strength of ethnographic evaluation that we think is so important for the young field of entrepre-neurship education. Entrepreneurship education is about teaching people to shift their cognitive orientation and to look attheworldwith new eyes, or in other words, to identify newways of interpreting theworld. This process, however it is done, isa social process and attempts to introduce the student into a new community of entrepreneurs who look at things differently



than non-entrepreneurs. So we are talking about a process of cultural change as much as a process of individual change. Inorder to see the details of how people engage in practice and how they talk about and think about what they are doing, inother words, how they engage in “intersubjective meaning making” ethnography is a most valuable tool (Bruner, 1996;Suthers, 2006). Ethnography as a technique, allows the researcher to get to know her informant in a detailed way. Specif-ically this is about developing an intimate understanding of how people's meanings are created in social context and howthose meanings might be complex and multivalent.

In order to illustrate the argument we have been making for ethnographic evaluation, the rest of the paper will presentsome of the data from the ethnographic evaluation of a project with a Danish group of entrepreneurship educators withwhomwe have been working. The following sample of data provides an opportunity for the reader to understand the depththat ethnography brings to the field of EE. The data here is not about student work and changing student thinking but focuseson what the teachers have to say about their teaching and about what they hope their students will achieve. While studentdata would also be important, that work will be published separately.

5. Danish case study

The data for this paper is drawn from research carried out in a Business School at a Danish University. The focus was agroup of entrepreneurship researchers and teachers. One of the authors of this paper is a member of the research group whilethe other author was a visiting professor for a period of 3 weeks. Therefore there are two major sources of data. Firstly datawas gathered over the period of a year combining observations of teaching and digitally recorded interviews with threeteachers throughout each of their teaching courses. The second source of data is gathered from observational data and an-ecdotes drawn from conversations andmeetings between the visiting Professor and the core groupmembers during his threeweek stay. The insider-outsider perspective is a strength of this study providing a double lens through which the data isanalyzed.

Currently the group consists of nine members, one professor (Helen1), two associate professors (Peter and Karl), oneteaching assistant (Susan), two post docs, one assistant professor and two PhD students. There are two core researchers-cum-teachers Helen and Peter, who, over the last ten years, have moved their research focus from entrepreneurs to entrepre-neurship education. The entrepreneurship research group is distinct from other research groups in the Business school in thatnot only do they teach Business School students but they have strong connections to the other faculties at the university,Science, Engineering, and the Arts, where they also teach entrepreneurship. The group has evolved a particular method ofteaching ‘through’ entrepreneurship that combines some elements of ‘about’ and ‘for’ entrepreneurship. They regardlearning as a process, both individual and social, and therefore their teaching is primarily about activating and reflection. Thestudents will experience practical classroom exercises, group work, discussions about theory and practice, assignmentsoutside the classroom, and reflective learning logs as core elements of the course. The teaching relies heavily on the students'own motivation and engagement and is dependent on developing an ability to reflect on their own learning. The groupunderstands entrepreneurship ‘as an everyday practice’ carried out by everyone and believes that enterprising thinking(mind-set), attitudes and behavior can be fostered and nurtured.

The following Fig. 1 illustrates how the Danish model of entrepreneurship teaching is positioned relative to ‘about’, ‘for’and ‘through’ types of teaching. This Fig. 1 was constructed as a model for discussion between the teachers regarding theirunderstanding of the ‘everyday practices’ in the programmes they teach.

5.1. Understanding entrepreneurship as an everyday practice

The development of the particular understanding of entrepreneurship and the practices of teaching has evolved over anumber of years. It began when two teachers, Helen and Peter, from different departments within the Business Schooldiscovered a shared enthusiasm for teaching that was coupled with a dissatisfaction with teaching about and for entrepre-neurship. However the challenge for them was combining the strengths of academic detachment and analysis with asimplistic form of ‘through’ entrepreneurship, colloquially termed ‘just do it’ entrepreneurship where students were ex-pected to be able to develop ideas by trial and error. This kind of experience did not match with the kind of skills entre-preneurs demonstrate. For the successful entrepreneurs reflection is a large part of their work. The group wanted toincorporate ‘knowing self’ with ‘risk taking’ (without losing everything) and being able to find the drive to work frommotivation and passion, in other words finding something that you care enough about to change. This led to the idea thatentrepreneurship was about everyday practice.

We all act in enterprising ways from time to time to cope with challenges and problems in our lives, sometimes withouteven thinking about it. Their fundamental ideology is that entrepreneurship is more than just creating economic value; thereis a broader understanding that gives importance to the social, cultural, and environmental.

Currently the two teachers run a number of courses that focus on i) on promoting an entrepreneurial mind-set in theirstudents ii) fostering the potential for entrepreneurship in everyday practice through social constructions and iii) nurturingawareness about opportunities for the creation of value. For these teachers the methods they have developed provide an

1 All names are pseudonyms.


Fig. 1. : Positioning the Danish model of entrepreneurship as ‘everyday practice’.


opportunity tomove university teaching from the academic detached analytic process and return to the idea that education isan emancipatory project allowing the holistic development of individual potential (Robinson& Blenker, 2014). In practice thiskind of teaching links classroom learning and an active mimicking of entrepreneurial behavior, in other words combinesVygotsky's theory, that social interaction is fundamental to the development of the cognitive with experiential and existentiallearning in a safe and controlled environment. A detailed description and analysis of the teaching can be found in Robinsonand Blenker (2014).

5.2. Enterprising mindset and entrepreneurship courses

The Danish entrepreneurship courses are all accredited courses at Bachelors andMasters Level to a range of students fromthe Humanities and Business, some are mandatory and others are electives. Although each course deals with entrepre-neurship in some way each is taught differently depending upon its aims, the level of the students, the number of hours thecourse is taught and not least who the teacher is. It would therefore be wrong to say that there is one way of teachingentrepreneurship, just as it would to say that there is oneway to be an entrepreneur. Common to all the courses is a belief thatstudents will go through an active process, which includes reflection on the part of the student, without which learningremains at the surface level (Biggs and Tang, 2011). Each of the courses has three distinct elements. The first is usually anexploration of identity and identity construction. The second leans on the seminal work of Sarasvathy (2001) that entre-preneurs work effectually rather than causally by drawing on who they are, what they can do and who they can call on fromtheir networks to add to their resources. The third brings the students' focus on everyday practices that cause irritation orfrustration, which are identified as a disharmony. It is from working with everyday problems that the students learn toidentify where problems are shared and are therefore anomalies. It is at this point that students become aware of where thereare opportunities to create value for themselves and others. This final part draws heavily on theories from Shane andVenkataraman (2000) about the individual-opportunity nexus. Throughout the courses a range of tools are employed tosimulate and stimulate entrepreneurial ways of working. Students are active participants in learning rather than passivereceivers of knowledge. There are a number of reasons that students take these courses. For many it is the appeal of ‘doingsomething different’ with their academic knowledge together combined with the promise of having a real-life result (abusiness). Somewish to simply explore the business start-up sector. There are a growing number of students who are lookingfor a different way to learn, who are ‘tired’ of the traditional academic learning andwho are frustrated about an inability to actand cope in a fast changing world. They regard the course as an opportunity to explore their own potential and to use theiracademic knowledge in more creative, practical and interdisciplinary ways in an unpredictable world.

5.3. Introducing entrepreneurship

As expectations about the course content and aimsmay already be strongly defined by the students prior to the course theinitial meeting between the teacher and students is important. Discussing and explaining course content and method istherefore a crucial point in the course. Setting this up correctly from the start and laying out the course as being ‘untradi-tional’ is often somethingwhich students who have chosen these types of courses are attracted to. However even though theymay be attracted by the untraditional, being able to cope with new ways of learning and making assumptions that they areequipped to do so are two elements that the teachers struggle with. Legitimizing themselves as researchers of



entrepreneurship the teachers link the idea that entrepreneurship as an everyday practice requires skills which can belearned and nurtured with a belief that real learning only comes from active experience coupled with reflection. Thefollowing quote from Helen, one of the core founders of these courses, illustrates this point.

Pleaseduc10.10

This course builds on the idea that entrepreneurship is not reserved for the few who can spot opportunities in themarketplace, write a business plan and persuade investors to provide finance. It perceives entrepreneurship as ‘aneveryday practice’ focuses on individual empowerment and is directed at unleashing an enterprising potential that canbe applied in multiple walks of life and not just in starting a business. It aims at generating opportunities that originatefrom within the individual, which are therefore unique and inimitable, combining storytelling, anomaly-thinking,creativity, effectuation, bricolage and context using a variety of interventions to fine-tune ideas. It stops where mostcourses on entrepreneurship start building a business because if students do not start thinking differently about theirown competences and abilities, then they will always feel restricted. The course aims at changing the mindset fromseeing obstacles to perceiving possibilities for themselves in their future.

Helen, Entrepreneurship teacher and researcher.

The courses nurture the students to develop an entrepreneurial mind-set based in the belief that it is possible to learnentrepreneurial attitudes and behavior. The courses are built around two main concepts firstly drawing on Sarasvathy's(2001) analysis of entrepreneurs and the way they approach the world. Sarasvathy's effectuation is a theory made up offive elements that entrepreneurs use in a loop process starting with the individual and then exploring the present withouttrying to predict a future, adding new knowledge and skills and going back to reflect on the new situation. Secondly thecourses combine effectuationwith Shane and Venkataraman's (2000) seminal work on the individual-opportunity nexus; theability of the individual to create value by being alert to opportunities.

The following quote is from Susan, the graduate teaching assistant, who has herself been a student of entrepreneurship.This is the way that she talks about introducing her students to the course.

The course is, for most of the students, dramatically different from other courses, even other learning situations theyhave been in their entire life, so it becomes very important, not only for the teacher but also for the students motivation,to state, that even though this context of learning as well as the outcome of it, is very different, the studentmust not feelunsafee theywill be challenged, yes, but the teachers and the didactical framework of the course, creates a safe groundfor the process, they are about to enter.

It is explained that with this theoretical frame and the concept of “learning through entrepreneurship”, the focus andthe assessment in the end will not only be onwhat they learn, but also on how they learn e the focus of “being presentin the entrepreneurial process” and not being focused on the “examination” becomes very clear, especially as thelecture moves into the distinction between the effectual vs. the causal entrepreneurial process.

Susan, Graduate Teaching assistant.

As young people enrolled as students the reality of taking courses is to pass e get a good grade. No matter how much thestudents want to focus on reflection and the process they are in there is always the end result (grade) looming over them.What will they be measured on? What do they need to learn? What do the teachers want them to ‘know’? These goalsconstrain and create tensions for both the students and the teachers in these courses.

5.4. Student achievement and measuring learning

Students are students; which means that they will be assessed on what they achieve. Exams are the tool for steering thelearning. Therefore in entrepreneurship teaching it is important to decide what the aim of the course is and what will be‘measured’ at the end. Susan makes a point of telling the students that it is not the success of the project but rather thelearning and reflection about the entrepreneurial process that is the goal for her course. However with over a decade ofeducation behind them the students are ‘schooled’ into a culture of re-producing particular types of knowledge. This isillustrated by a quote from Helen who says:

Don't think of yourselves as baby birds with your mouths open waiting for me to feed you. You must decide foryourselves, when you are ready to leave the nest and find your own food.

Helen, Entrepreneurship teacher and researcher.

The idea that university students should be able to make choices about what they learn and how they learn is an alienconcept. Students are schooled from an early age into being ‘students’ so expecting them to behave differently and expectingthem to act ‘like entrepreneurs’ may be difficult for some.

5.5. Teaching and learning

Recognizing students' expectations and coping with these is a challenge for these teachers. Students have expectationsabout theway theywill learn even though they have actively chosen a course that proposes to be untraditional in its methods.They have expectations about what it means to ‘get an idea’ to be creative and how this is done. The course is constructed to

e cite this article in press as: Robinson, S., & Shumar, W., Ethnographic evaluation of entrepreneurship education in higheration; A methodological conceptualization, The International Journal of Management Education (2014), http://dx.doi.org/16/j.ijme.2014.06.001


include familiar elements, the lecture, reading of literature, discussion but it also means that students will be put in situationsthat they feel are uncomfortable. Peter makes this comment about the positioning of the lecture as a tool to legitimizelearning that takes place in the non-traditional settings.

Pleaseduc10.10

In the sense that in traditional teaching, the lecture or the content of the lecture is very much the purpose in itself, inthat the students are supposed to sort of understand the content of the lecture, but this, as I see it, is not the case in thisparticular form of learning because the central part of the learning doesn't actually take place in the lecture, the centralpart of the learning is what takes place when they are doing the assignment or when they are using the logic of thecourse into their own projects. That is sort of the pedagogic logic of it. And then my point is that the lecture has toreflect that and therefore the lecture has to be a preparation for the assignment.

Peter, entrepreneurship teacher and researcher.

Peter talks about ‘unlearning’ when he says:

Most of the students I believe have preferred way of being innovative before they enter the course. Some of the largepart of the learning in the course has to do with unlearning that particular thing which they like in advance.

Peter, entrepreneurship teacher and researcher.

Sowhat we have seen from the Danish School is that there are several foci for entrepreneurship teaching. First the teachersregard the classroom environment as an opportunity to immerse the students into entrepreneurial practice where experi-mentation and experience are essential elements and are not typical of Danish University classes. Second, students areactively engaging in exercises that are used for reflection andwhich result in a cognitive re-orientation (learning). Through anexploration of identity construction, and work with their own resources, competences and skills these students areencouraged to come to new understandings about their experiences and to re-interpret things that might, in the past be seenas negative experiences. By combining learning about themselves, their resources and networks with a focus on a disharmony(problem) the individual realizes their potential for creating value for themselves and others. The teachers ensure a controlledand safe environment throughout the process and that there is continual reflection throughout that culminates in the stu-dents achieving an understanding about how they are equipped to deal with everyday practices in real life.

6. Discussion

From the data we have gathered from our discussions with the instructors in the Danish program we can see there areseveral key features to their vision of teaching and learning entrepreneurship. Most of these features are about personaltransformation. First and foremost their model is a “learning by mimicking”model. Their students learn entrepreneurship bymimicking entrepreneurial behavior, which means that classes need to be hands on, immersing students in, not just class-room exercises, but real world problems and situations.

A central concept for the team in this process is the concept of effectuation. Effectuation requires the individual to drawupon their social worlds, their networks and not only work effectively but also practically. This work draws individual identityinto the entrepreneurial process. The individual is drawing on their sense of theworld, their social network and attempting tobuild value in this way. As the students formulate their understanding of themselves and the world around them theynaturally reiterate the loop process that Sarasvathy describes in her effectuation model. Students draw upon their ownpersonal disharmonies and qualify them in order to understand how these might be not just moments of discomfort but arepotentially opportunities for entrepreneurship. To do that one has to move from one's personal experience to questioninghow that experience connects with other people's experience and whether there is something of broader value that could becreated to deal with this anomalous situation. Students, who may be budding entrepreneurs, exploring their world and theopportunities for entrepreneurship take their starting point in everyday practices and therefore are not ‘looking for the bigidea.’ This is a process that is of interest to the individual nascent entrepreneur, but that entrepreneur must also be able toconnect to other people's interests and motivations as well drawing them into the project and gaining their commitment e adouble articulation of interest and motivation which is cyclical in practice.

As we can see from the data we have gathered from these instructors, this is a complex process of drawing on personalsymbols, and then connecting those personal symbols to a broader set of symbols that might be shared in the culture. In aprocess, similar to Lakoff and Johnson's (2003) notion of metaphorical extension new knowledge is created to address thispersonal/collective situation. That new knowledge might be in the form of products, tools, technologies, services or really anyother form of value.

7. Conclusion

We have seen in the data above that the Danish model of entrepreneurship education is a personalized process that isrooted in practice and involves personal transformation. Such teaching must be student centered with the teacher acting as afacilitator. It is essential that there is alignment between student expectations and the content and methods of the courses.This kind of teaching incorporates creativity, problem-solving, learning professional and communication skills andworking inteams and being able to reflect and learn from experience. The combination of these experiences and competences are what

e cite this article in press as: Robinson, S., & Shumar, W., Ethnographic evaluation of entrepreneurship education in higheration; A methodological conceptualization, The International Journal of Management Education (2014), http://dx.doi.org/16/j.ijme.2014.06.001


Biggs and Tang (2011; 13) specify as the vision for university teaching in the 21st century. Perhaps we are seeing a newmovement in university teaching, which brings about a (re)-turn to the idea that education is an emancipatory project.

Earlier in the paper we asked what could be measured in order to assess the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education.Certainly it would be interesting to measure long-term change and to see how many students became entrepreneurs orincorporated entrepreneurshippractices into their lives. But this kindof longitudinalworkwouldneed to bedoneat a later point.

For now the point we have tried to emphasize through the data and the discussion above is that the Danish model ofentrepreneurship education involves complex personal transformation through the rethinking of one's personal experienceand how that experience can connect to other people's experiences and lead to opportunities to create new forms of value. Inorder to understand how well a person has done with this process it would be necessary to get a very detailed look at theirlearning process. How did they understand the tasks that the teaching team is asking them to take on? Which tasks changedtheir understanding of themselves and the world around them? Did they experience resistances to this process? If yes whereand what happened? Did they begin to think about themselves and the problems they faced differently?

This is not an exhaustive list of questions but one can see how intimate and detailed these questions are. It is onlywhenwebegin to ask questions such as these that we can be sure that our teaching is matching learning. Ethnography, with itstradition of encountering the other, taking the other very seriously and then making sense of the other problems and ex-periences, is very well suited to the kind of evaluation that is required in entrepreneurship education, especially as entre-preneurship education moves from traditional teaching methods to methods that involve a greater personal involvement ofthe student. While traditional evaluation questionnaires can still be useful too, the grounded sense of what the student isexperiencing, and how the student is making sense of that experience is critical to the growth and development of entre-preneurship education.

Acknowledgment

The research reported in this paper is part of a larger study over four years (2012e2016) into ‘Promoting a Culture ofEntrepreneurship’ (PACE) a project that has beenmade possible by funding from the Danish Strategic Research Council.(Grantref. no. 11-115735).

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