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  • Teachers hold the key to entrepreneurial learning

    Teachers must come onboard if the entrepreneurial learning agenda is to move forward according to participants a symposium on promoting entrepreneurship in teacher training organised by the European Training Foundation in Istanbul in July.

  • The question of how to do this occupied the minds of policymakers and teacher training specialists alike as they worked hard to come up with a set of policy principles which could guide the process in Turkey, the Western Balkans and the Southern Mediterranean. “How can we get teachers in our busy schools ready for the entrepreneurial agenda without overstretching scarce resources?” asked Anthony Gribben, project leader for enterprise and entrepreneurship at the ETF, kicking off the meeting.

    ‘Early start’

    The entrepreneurial learning process requires an ‘early start,’ said Simone Baldassari of the European Commission’s enterprise directorate. ‘We need to ensure that from the first day at school we work towards creating inquisitive minds, problem solving skills, opportunity identification, risk-taking and team working. Teaching and learning processes should generate these core entrepreneurial traits,’ he advised.

    Dragica Karaić, Head of EU programmes at the Croatian economy ministry provided examples of how young children in her country were encouraged to problem solve in groups – a team work approach. In one such example, a class of six year olds was asked how they would go about measuring the height of a skyscraper. After a morning’s brainstorming, they came up with the following simple but elegant solution: take a lift to the top, drop a ball of string over the side, measure the piece of string!

  • Agents of change

  • What became clear as the two-day event developed is that there are several reasons why teacher training should take priority. First and foremost this is because teachers are the most important agents of change in education systems and if we want them to be active proponents of education for entrepreneurship, they will need all our encouragement and support.

    Lamis Al-Alami, Minister of Education and Higher Education in the occupied Palestinian territory pointed out that there is a lot of entrepreneurial learning activity taking place in the non-formal sector, but the question is – how do we get it mainstreamed?

    Involving the business sector is essential, through initiatives such as teacher placements in companies and businessmen and women contributing to the teaching and learning process within schools. At the heart of the matter is the need to develop new relationships between schools and companies; and it is not

  • about funding. “Education systems should not be seen as beggars always asking for money,” said Rósa Gunnarsdóttir, an adviser at the Icelandic Ministry of Education Science and Culture, “we want to work with business on an equal footing and we are interested in their cooperation not their money.”

    “teachers are the most important agents of change in education systems”

  • “We are not talking about bringing the market into the classroom, we are talking about something which is much more inclusive”

  • Preparing for uncertainty

  • It also became clear that advocates of entrepreneurial learning might have to work hard to dispel myths and misunderstandings about what entrepreneurship in the education system actually means and who it can benefit. For many it is solely about business and as some delegates underlined, the notion of the dishonest entrepreneur is something that needs to be addressed if entrepreneurship is to be accepted into the school environment.

    Others stated that teachers, and certainly teacher trade unions, might equate the idea of entrepreneurial learning in schools as part of a wider pro-market agenda. “We are not talking about bringing the market into the classroom, we are talking about something which is much more inclusive and which can help everyone to be more enterprising and more employable. It’s about preparing young people for uncertainty,” said Gribben.

    Concentrating on the benefits for everyone for becoming more entrepreneurial could be the best way forward, delegates suggested. “Teaching entrepreneurship

  • Inspiring examples

  • The symposium agenda included a range of inspiring examples of entrepreneurial learning in action. These included how Tunisia and Kosovo are mainstreaming entrepreneurial learning into national curricula and how the pre-accession countries are cooperating to address common concerns. The work of the South East European Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning involving multi-country expert teams co-working on teacher support tools for entrepreneurship as a key competence attracted significant interest, in particular the recommendations for pre and in-service teacher training.

    The discussions also demonstrated the diversity of issues from country to country and with this the challenges. “One question for us is the sheer size of the Egyptian education system; we currently need another 23,000 schools but can only build about 1,000 a year,”

    Focus on teachers a priority across the continent

    The Istanbul symposium was one of a series of meetings involving EU Member States and ETF partner countries on how to drive forward the entrepreneurial learning agenda. A high-level meeting with partner countries organised by the ETF and the European Commission in Zagreb in March 2010 called for an immediate focus on teacher training, while a similar symposium meeting of EU27 experts (including Iceland and Norway) in Budapest in April this year came to the same conclusion. “No matter what we declare as priorities in our work plans at higher levels, what actually happens in the classroom is key,” said ETF Director, Madlen Serban.

    Harald Hartung, Head of Unit at the European Commission’s education directorate described teachers as “important multipliers” where existing teachers must be given the chance to upgrade; and called upon school management to “give legitimacy to new teachers to put ideas such as partnerships or new teaching methods into action. The important issue is that entrepreneurial learning is not just an addition to the curriculum but an integral part of it.”

    A report covering the issues and recommendations from both the Budapest and Istanbul symposia will be available on both the ETF and European Commission websites in November 2011.

  • said Mohsen Said, advisor within Egypt’s education ministry. “So how do you prepare teachers to foster entrepreneurial attitudes when they may be dealing with classes of 60 students?”

  • Words: Rebecca Warden, ICE

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