PROGRAMA IMPORTE

The work leading up to this thesis has surfaced many limitations and challenges of the work at hand. Some are on a philosophical level, others are on a more practical level and yet others are on a scholarly level.

6.3.1 Philosophical limitations and challenges

An educational philosophy asking students to focus on knowledge that can be useful for others will likely be criticized for its utilitarian emphasis. If focus is put primarily on useful knowledge, there is a risk of neglecting a disinterested pursuit of such knowledge that is deemed irrelevant for society short term. Value creation as educational philosophy can thereby be seen as a companion to consumerism and marketization of education with its focus on competencies valuable on a “market” of external stakeholders, even if no financial transactions take place. Another philosophical challenge is whether it is ethical to expose students to the risk of experiencing strong negative emotions. This problem was brought up by Pittaway and Cope (2007b), and appended papers 1 and 2 indeed illustrate just how transformative and crisis- generating value creation as educational practice can be. Some ethical aspects are if such highly negative events are acceptable, how students are to be informed about the risks, how to manage problematic events once they occur, and how much resources to devote to the treatment of them. A challenge with narrowing the definition of entrepreneurial education to student value creation could be its excluding effects. It is therefore important that such a strict definition of entrepreneurial education is not used to blame teachers for doing “wrong”. Instead, a strict definition could perhaps be used as an ambitious vision that teachers could be working towards, sometimes reaching it and sometimes not depending on circumstances and available resources. Such progression based issues constitute an important focus for further research.

Another challenge with a narrowed definition would be what to label learning about entrepreneurship, since a value creation based definition of entrepreneurial education would exclude such courses and programs from the field of entrepreneurial education in its more strict

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sense. Also, the mere use of the term entrepreneur-ial (rather than entrepreneur-ship) education could by some be interepreted as signifying that it is the education that is entrepreneurial rather than education being about entrepreneurship. Such perceptions are not necessarily misleading, given the definition proposed in section 5.1, likely leading to an embedded approach of entrepreneur-ial education rather than a separate approach of entrepreneur-ship education (cf. Smith et al., 2006; Smith, 2008; Pittaway and Edwards, 2012; Handscombe et al., 2008). There is also a general critique against any analytical work in philosophy of education that is worth taking into account here. An “ostensibly neutral and objective” definition of a term can also result in a hidden imposition of certain values (Burbules, 2000, p.23). Applied to this situation, an attempt to propose a more precise definition of entrepreneurial education, with all its plausible benefits, is still inevitably based on assumptions and values that are potentially excluding and too rigid. Such risks need to be taken into account here, in what seems to be a challenging choice between inclusive fuzziness and excluding precision.

6.3.2 Practical limitations and challenges

Applying value creation as educational philosophy is rife with practical challenges. There is currently no literature apart from this thesis describing it extensively. The entrepreneurial methods proposed to be used for supporting teachers and students are not contextualized to educational purposes in terms of removing unnecessary business terms and adjusting them for educational purposes. This constitutes a major endeavor, given that each method needs to be tested in a variety of different settings, adjusted in ways that are then found necessary, and then evaluated against the intended learning outcomes for the students as well as resource requirements that might limit its practical applicability in various settings. There is also a wide plethora of generic challenges in educational change (Elmore, 1996) that will likely impede the dispersion of the educational philosophy articulated here. Any application of the tentatively new educational philosophy will also likely be done in a combination with other established educational philosophies, leading to interaction effects not investigated at this stage. Another practical challenge will likely be the patronizing of students from adults. In appended paper 1 there is empirical evidence of students being seen as incapable of creating value to others. 6.3.3 Scholarly limitations and challenges

Research in entrepreneurial education is inherently interdisciplinary. The two scholarly domains of entrepreneurship and education are very distant from each other, representing what seems to be two different galaxies. Future research endeavors drawing on the work presented in this thesis will be reliant upon involving experts from both fields, thus applying a collaborative approach to research. Even if such dual expertise is secured, there will still be the challenge of getting the results diffused more widely through publication outlets. Journals are often employing rather strict delimitations when taking decisions on which contributions / contributors to accept (Burbules, 2000), making diffusion of results a challenge. Scholarly discussion that might follow will be hampered by the absence of dual experts. A scholar who is an expert in one of the fields might not even be a novice in the other field. This opens up for many kinds of miscommunication and misunderstandings. Given how rare it is for teachers to let students learn by creating value to others (see appended paper 3), there is probably a multitude of additional limitations and challenges that has not yet been identified.

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