Using the threshold concept framework to enhance entrepreneurship curricula in higher education

This research uses the threshold concept framework as a lens to define entrepreneurship as an academic subject and suggest approaches to entrepreneurship education in higher education informed by how students understand it. A staged stakeholder curriculum inquiry has been conducted, interrogating the perspective of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship educators and students of entrepreneurship education. By researching the distinctive way entrepreneurs think and practise, candidate threshold concepts (CTCs) in entrepreneurship have been identified. Approaches to educating students in entrepreneurship within a framework of engagement are suggested, together with a means of assessing students’ experiences of learning entrepreneurship. A conceptual framework to inform entrepreneurship education is presented, responding to calls for such an approach (Blenker, Elmholdt, Frederiksen, Korsgaard, & Wagner, 2014; Fayolle, 2013; Nabi, Liñán, Fayolle, Krueger, & Walmsley, 2017; Neck & Corbett, 2018). Applying the threshold concept framework serves as a counter discourse to the commodification of learning, to which entrepreneurship is particularly vulnerable. This research assumes that there are distinctive ways entrepreneurs think and practise and builds on research that argues entrepreneurs are distinguishable according to their cognitive tendencies (Shaver & Scott, 1992). It also assumes that these ways of thinking and practising can be developed in higher education and that students can be educated to think and practise like entrepreneurs (Palich & Bagby, 1995). Taking an interpretivist and social constructivist approach, entrepreneurship has been treated as a socially constructed phenomena and a qualitative research approach has been adopted. A staged stakeholder curriculum inquiry involving semi-structured interviews, a Delphi survey and concept mapping workshops has been conducted with ten entrepreneurs, eighteen entrepreneurship educators and forty-eight students. By identifying CTCs in entrepreneurship and gathering perspectives on effective ways to educate students in them; the bounded and integrative characteristics of threshold concepts enable a definition of entrepreneurship and inform the development of entrepreneurship curricula

Learning to become an entrepreneur : integrating the threshold concept approach and social learning theory in Higher Education.

This paper suggests a conceptual framework to inform entrepreneurship education, integrating the threshold concept approach and social learning theory. It forms part of a doctoral research project consisting of an extended transactional curriculum inquiry interrogating the perspective of entrepreneurs, educators and students regarding aspects critical to thinking as an entrepreneur. After outlining the threshold concept approach, social learning theory, in particular communities of practice, is suggested as a context in which to position threshold concepts. It is proposed that the purpose of entrepreneurship education could be to cultivate the ways of thinking and practicing of an entrepreneur in students. This will encourage the establishment of a pedagogy specific to entrepreneurship built around entrepreneurship threshold concepts, and informed by social learning theory, rendering it distinctive and enabling a greater degree of effectiveness, alignment and consensus

Self-selecting Entrepreneurial Students: Reflecting on a University Selection Event

Objectives: This case study examines the development, design and staff perspectives of selection events for an undergraduate degree in Entrepreneurial Business Management. Aspects of design and delivery promoting student self-selection and individual assessment of fit are described which are intended to have a positive impact on recruitment and retention. Prior Work: This work-based programme is based on the Finnish ‘Team Academy’ model (Tiimiakatemia, 2013) where participants work in teams as business owners and learning takes place in the context of establishing and managing those businesses. It was introduced at Northumbria University in September 2013 and, since its introduction, events have been held to support the recruitment of three consecutive student cohorts. This study focuses on the most recent sets of two one-day events conducted in March 2014 and March 2015. The selection events were developed to provide an immersive experience that informed, inspired and energised prospective candidates so as to increase ‘best-fit’ enrolment, optimise their course selection and career development decisions, and enable better informed self-selection. Literature exploring the themes of the growth of entrepreneurial education, the importance of ‘fit’ between HE programmes and applicants, factors impacting enrolment and admission decisions and why UCAS points alone may not offer a satisfactory criteria for the selection of prospective entrepreneurial students have been reviewed. Approach: A mixed method was adopted taking quantitative information from a brief applicant satisfaction questionnaire, and qualitative data drawn from the reflections of staff members involved in the selection events, including some of the authors. Results: Applicant data indicated the events had been interesting, useful and enjoyable and offered several ways in which future events could be enhanced. From a staff member perspective, there were concerns about how well the team working and coaching aspects of the programme were conveyed. Implications and Value: This case study will be of interest to those developing selection events for undergraduate programmes for which traditional academic performance and UCAS application forms serve as imperfect means of discriminating between applicants. Shifting the pressure of the selection decision from the programme team to the applicants may help to achieve a better student:programme fit, and it is likely that events which allow for two-way selection decisions will prove to be most operationally realistic. This case study encapsulates the early research stage of a longitudinal study to track applicants through the selection process to eventual graduation and post-graduation. Although small-scale, the findings reported here would indicate that there may be merit in selection events which enable self-selection across a range of this type of non-traditional programmes

Progress in entrepreneurship education and training

In view of the continuing growth and importance of entrepreneurship education within the educational landscape, there remains a significant demand for theoretical as well as practical approaches. In particular, there is a demand for approaches that shed light on the interplay between course design and individual learning. This chapter draws on the threshold concept approach, which is becoming an increasingly important perspective in educational research. Whilst the threshold concept approach has been applied usefully to develop the pedagogy of various academic disciplines, for example, economics, healthcare and information literacy, they have so far received little attention in the context of entrepreneurship education. The threshold concept approach addresses the question of how learners can practise an exploratory, reflexive approach to discipline and subject-area-specific ways of thinking and practising. The contribution of our chapter is twofold: firstly, we want to show that the threshold concept approach offers a new perspective for theory and practice in entrepreneurship education through its focus on bridging a disciplinary way of thinking and practising, on the one hand, and a subjective view of entrepreneurial phenomena, on the other hand. Secondly, in order to enrich entrepreneurial teaching and learning conceptualizations, this chapter presents a review of the candidate entrepreneurial threshold concepts which have appeared in the literature to date, in order to characterize them as a potential starting point for a promising field of research.peer-reviewe

Threshold Concepts in Entrepreneurship – the Entrepreneurs’ Perspective

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present research into the entrepreneurs’ perspective of concepts critical to thinking as an entrepreneur, in order to inform enterprise and entrepreneurship course design in higher education. Approach: Taking a social constructivist approach, using a Delphi-style method, semistructured interviews with entrepreneurs were conducted, transcribed, thematically coded and analysed, and a list of candidate threshold concepts drawn up. Two rounds of Delphi were conducted with the entrepreneur panel and consensus was reached on a final collection of threshold concepts in entrepreneurship. Findings: The threshold concepts identified are “I can create value” (or self-efficacy), “I see opportunities” (or opportunity), “I can manage risk” (or risk), “I know what’s important” (or focus) and “I take action” (or impact). Implications: Entrepreneurship is generally regarded as an important factor in economic growth, and higher education an appropriate place for the development of entrepreneurship. However, there is a lack of consensus regarding how best to educate students for entrepreneurship in higher education or indeed what educating students for entrepreneurship really means. Identifying threshold concepts in entrepreneurship using the lived experience of entrepreneurs is likely to open up new and more effective approaches to teaching this multidisciplinary subject area. Value: This study contributes to the call for more research-grounded discussion on the quality of entrepreneurship education initiatives, particularly in relation to what makes pedagogical innovations effective by suggesting 5 entrepreneurship threshold concepts. These entrepreneurship threshold concepts can be used to set out a structure for the design and (re)development of enterprise and entrepreneurship curricula, as well as enabling more constructively aligned assessments

A proposed approach to the design of a doctoral study to identify threshold concepts in Entrepreneurship education and the implications of these for the curricula and pedagogy of Entrepreneurship programmes in Higher Education.

This is an exploratory, developmental paper, outlining a proposed approach in a doctoral study to identify the threshold concepts in Entrepreneurship education, and the implication of these in the development of curricula and pedagogy in Entrepreneurship programmes in Higher Education. The production of knowledge is commonly organized in disciplines and the communication of knowledge within a disciplinary field and a non-disciplinary field (such as Business Management) is normally expected to differ (Peter Van den Besselaar & Gaston Heimeriks, 2001). This study therefore will be of interest to educators working in multidisciplinary fields, with an interest in practice-based learning. Five groups have been identified as important to this study which uses transactional curriculum inquiry (Cousin, 2009). These are Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship educators, students of Entrepreneurship programmes, suppliers of professional services to Entrepreneurs and educational developers. A combination of concept mapping (Trochim, 1989), semi-structured interviews and use of the Delphi survey technique (Tigelaar, Dolmans, Wolfhagen, & Van der Vleuten, 2004) are proposed, to identify the threshold concepts of Entrepreneurship, which in this context, has been preliminarily defined as a domain of expertise (Saras D. Sarasvathy, 2008)

Staff perspectives of threshold concepts in the context of an undergraduate entrepreneurial business degree programme

This developmental paper explores staff perspectives of threshold concepts in the context of a newly developed, innovative undergraduate entrepreneurial business degree programme. It is intended that this work will form part of a future larger project exploring how students come to understand entrepreneurial business management using various frameworks and concepts, including the critical lens of threshold concepts, as tools for interpretation. Focusing on the individual student and the development of their competencies and behaviours, entrepreneurial business management is explored as a multi-disciplinary subject area applied in a work-based learning programme. There is a significant challenge inherent in the definition of threshold concepts in this context however the research could potentially unlock the language of entrepreneurialism and map its relationship to the concepts of graduateness and employability. This in turn has the potential to create a common discourse across the subject disciplines, creating dialogue and future learning value

What's Distinctive about Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship Education? Threshold Concepts and Expertise

With the ever growing fashion for all things entrepreneurial, we are perhaps in danger of over using the term and rendering the word’s meaning to be so all-encompassing as to become nothing but a trendy label. Is it time to get clearer about what we really mean when we educate in entrepreneurship? How can we differentiate entrepreneurship manifest in the HE sector in any subject discipline from entrepreneurship as a subject discipline? Recent work (Lackéus, 2015) promoting value creation as an educational philosophy grounded in entrepreneurship would suggest that an entrepreneurial approach may be taken to teaching and learning in any subject discipline in an educational context. Where does that leave HE programmes claiming to teach entrepreneurship? What implications does this have for the curricula of such programmes? Using the theory of threshold concepts and the concept of expertise as bridges between the domains of education and entrepreneurship; this workshop aims to explore the distinctiveness of specialist entrepreneurship programmes, more general Business programmes and other type of HE programmes, using the visual research method of triad comparison. Participants will leave this workshop with a clearer understanding of the potentially unique differentiating characteristics of specialist entrepreneurship programmes, enabling better curricula design and delivery, as well as the improved marketing of such programmes