Developing the Future Scholarship of Entrepreneurship Education: Exploring educator authenticity through practice and identity – Celebrating 10 years of the 3E-Conference
Introduction
“The discussion around whether entrepreneurship can be taught is becoming obsolete as the number of entrepreneurship courses, specializations and degrees is rising at an unprecedented rate all over the world and the demand for entrepreneurial education teachers or instructors is constantly growing“ (Hägg & Kurczewska, 2021).
As a consequence of this development, over the past decade, the field of entrepreneurship education research has also grown significantly. But what have we learnt from the past decade about doing education-based research? What improvements do we perceive, what do we still know too little about?If as a scholarly community, we are serious about developing and crafting our practice, we must be mindful to question our own (past, present, and future) assumptions and beliefs.
It is also necessary to question and critique existing practices and to expose underlying assumptions and beliefs, as these may restrict our ability to ask different and difficult questions. We also need to thoughtfully consider the relevance and application of existing pedagogical and didactical knowledge, through new insight and debate. Connecting these questions potentially draws together conservations, which can reveal the relational orientation of enacted learning and agency both on the part of the educator and on the part of the student. Such a practice further opens up for the introduction of perspectives different to how we tend to view and practice entrepreneurship education. In this context, the role of our own attentiveness, including what it means to be reflexively aware as custodians of knowledge, becomes extremely important. Thoughtful inquiry requires questioning the relationship between ourselves, our roles as researchers and educators, how we enact our relationships with our audiences and wider communities, and the theories/concepts we work with in a meaningful way.
How we view ourselves as academics has become a topic of increasing interest in research on academics’ development as educators (Kreber, 2010, Nevgi and Löfström, 2014, Skelton, 2012). For the vast majority of academics working in HEI throughout Europe and the UK, being an “educator” is part of the job. However, it is a task for which many have not been educated. Qualifications have come with practice. Whilst research intensive HEI environments have the capacity to facilitate the development of highly competent researchers, their identity as educators often remains underdeveloped (Hannon, 2018; Henry, 2020). Hence, a lot of past and current entrepreneurship education literature focuses on ‘best’ practice in how to develop courses, and there is less concern with for example identity, authenticity, and agency in the educational process. Accordingly, there is also less attention to the long tradition and vast reservoir of knowledge from educational research in general.
In this SI we aim to surface and reflexively engage with tensions between the universal and the unique, the social and the self, in terms of what it means to be a scholar and educator in the field of entrepreneurship education. In particular, as academics, we are expected to excel both as researchers and as educators, as well as being compliant and entrepreneurial employees (Lackéus et al., 2020; Tomkins & Nicholds, 2017). Furthermore, each of us brings our own self-perception into our teaching practice. Hence, this SI wants to address questions surrounding how an educator develops into a credible, engaged, and authentic entrepreneurship educator accentuating the underlying means, processes, and reflections.
We especially welcome contributions that examine the foundations of entrepreneurship education and study what we have learned from the past ten years of entrepreneurship education research and discuss and reflect upon where we are going – and question where we should be going regarding the scholarship of teaching entrepreneurship education.
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Timeline and key dates
| Editorial process and timeline
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Key dates
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| Launch of the SI call for papers | May 1st 2022 |
| Formal in-person launch of SI: ‘Meet the guest editors’ at 3E Conference in Dijon, France | May 11th 2022 |
| First ‘Meet the SI guest editors’ session: Introduction to SI (virtual) |
June 2022 |
| Virtual Paper Development Workshop for interested authors and guest editors | September 2022 |
| Second ‘Meet the SI guest editors’ session: Build conversation (RENT 2022) |
November 2022 |
| Opening date for manuscripts submissions | February 1st 2023 |
| Third ‘Meet the SI guest editors’ session (3E Conference 2023) | May 10th 2023 |
| Full paper submission | August 31st 2023 |
| Reviewing period | September 1st -December 1st2023 |
| Notification on paper decision | January 15th 2024 |
| Resubmission of final papers | March 31st 2024 |
| Final decision | June 15th 2024 |
| Tentative first online publication | September 2024 |
| Final publication of SI | November 2024 |