Danish University Colleges
“Pit Stop – a Reflective Tool in Entrepreneurship Education”
3E Conference 2021: Practitioner Development Workshop Nybye, Nicolai Løntoft; Wraae, Birgitte
Publication date:
2021
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Citation for pulished version (APA):
Nybye, N. L., & Wraae, B. (2021). “Pit Stop – a Reflective Tool in Entrepreneurship Education”: 3E Conference 2021: Practitioner Development Workshop. Paper presented at 3E Conference – ECSB Entrepreneurship Education Conference on 5-7 May 2021 online and/or in Trondheim, Norway, Trondheim, Norway.
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Download date: 24. Mar. 2022
1 3E Conference 2021: Practitioner Development Workshop
“Pit Stop – a Reflective Tool in Entrepreneurship Education”
Nicolai Nybye, Assistant Professor, PhD, Dept. of Applied Business Research, UCL University College, Denmark.
Birgitte Wraae, Dr., Associate Professor, Dept. of Applied Business Research UCL, Denmark.
Workshop Summary
A common understanding of pit stop is the situation in which the driver in a motor race stops in the pits to change wheels, for fuel or have the car repaired. In this context, we apply the term as a pedagogical metaphor that the entrepreneurial educator can use in her/his both didactical preparations of entrepreneurship education and educating practice. The Pit Stop is a short stop embedded in the teaching process and eventually a temporary deviation from the forward living entrepreneurial process conducted by students. Hence, the Pit Stop is a potential for students to reflect on selected aspects of the experientially lived process.
In this workshop we ask: “How can educators assist students in reflecting on the dynamical sides of entrepreneurship?” The overall purpose is to strengthen the sense among students of own power to take action as creative and reflective students within the real process of difficult decisions, feelings, struggles to create commitment and unintended bumps. We explicit the importance to acknowledge the consequences of how and why the students' abilities to take action are affected trough the educators’ way to realize the educational settings. However, this is not a closed loop. The students’
ideas are possible opportunities that might affect broader social and cultural sides of society while they at the same time are met with social and cultural expectations inherent in our learning goals, that students have to become entrepreneurs, innovators, democratic citizens, good employees etc.
Teaching experiential entrepreneurship is often linked to idea generation, testing ideas with the final goal to create value. However, entrepreneurship contains more than the value creation focus. The workshop represents other layers of the entrepreneurial process:
Level 1: Bright and dark sides of entrepreneurship
Level 2: Regulations in relation to the idea - role of educator, learning objectives and theories relative to students' learning.
Level 3: The impact related to the broader social/cultural context.
The Pit Stop as teaching practice brings more intangible aspects from the students' entrepreneurial process to an outward form by reflecting on the three levels.
Underpinning theories
We theorize the experientially lived process as the effectual process (Sarasvathy, 2008). Here, entrepreneurship is active, effectual, and a venture is not just a noun but an active as in venturing.
Further, the expert entrepreneurs have a preference in the early stages of an entrepreneurial process to fabricate markets rather than finding them from causal segment analysis (Ibid., p. 38-41). Thus, a critical aspect of entrepreneurship education is the acknowledgment of human agency and experience.
Entrepreneurship is as such not only a noun. We can consider it as the active process in which humans experience the entrepreneurial side of entrepreneurship which both hold more creative, spectacular moments as it can produce unintended outcomes (Bandera et al., 2020). However, entrepreneurial
2 endeavors have a tendency to be constructed as mainly bright sides highlighting the heroic aspects while the mundane or dull sides are left in the dark (Berglund & Johansson, 2012). The Pit Stop is a potential to reflect on and also visit covert aspects of the entrepreneurial process. Thus, we bridge the effectual process by reflections where students learn to grasp the dynamical sides of entrepreneurship as an expansion of functional causal idea development. Hence, we talk about reflective Pit Stops.
Details of existing evidence
The abovementioned three levels stem initially from an analytical-model applied theoretically in a PhD (Nybye, 2020) that serve as guiding tool for the reflective pits stops in practice:
The development of reflective Pit Stop as didactic and pedagogical practice of the educator is still work in progress and we are exploring and testing the model together with students during the spring 2021. A mockup of the concept was pretested in the autumn 2020 on a group of undergraduate students (BA level). The Pit Stop has been introduced as part of the curriculum at an undergraduate entrepreneurial elective programme where two Pit Stops are planned in March 2021 during the course.
We bridged student’s individual reflections with peer discussions on their ideas. The reflective mode on both idea, own role and the frames for their exploitation of their ideas started a dynamic process of a deeper reflection. Two students wrote afterwards: “Thanks for a super teaching day 😊” and
“thank you for a great lesson yesterday. Based on your presentation, I have found even more 'good stuff', it's AWESOME “. The second part of the Pit Stop has yet to be tested. Applied didactically, the model becomes part of a ‘roadmap’/timeline.
Timings and activities in the PDW
The 40 minutes workshop-session has the following agenda:
10 minutes: Introduction of the basis in the Pit Stop model and in the process of applying it in EE.
5 minutes: From the introduction each participant reflects on own teaching preferences. We especially focus on the dark and bright sides of entrepreneurship.
10 minutes: The individual reflections/’findings’ are discussed in breakout rooms of approximately three participants.
10 minutes: We progress into plenum and a short reflective question on how to incorporate the thoughts on the dark and bright sides of entrepreneurship as planned reflections in EE.
5 minutes: Recapture and key-takeaways.
Outer level:
Realisation of Social/Cultural context.
Intermediate level:
Realisation of Educational Settings.
Middle level:
Realisation of ideas.
3 Interactive involvement
The workshop is interactive and reflects the Pit Stop process conducted with students by applying key opening questions that are crucial in entering a reflection on entrepreneurial dynamics. A key opening question is about own teaching preferences: What do you emphasize in your own entrepreneurship teaching? In groups the participants briefly highlight insights from the individual reflection and discuss the presence of possible bright and backsides of their teaching practices. In plenum, we turn the reflections around to usage suggestions that we note in an online padlet. What does the feedback mean to your teaching practice or theoretical foundation?
To do in advance
In this educator customized workshop the participants receive a link to an online padlet where they can find a picture of the model and some written key points and visuals to explain the three levels in the model. The padlet will contain a short list of references as suggestions for optional readings. It is not required, however it will be an advantage if the participants have knowledge of the effectuation principles before participating in the workshop. We encourage the participants to visit the padlet before the workshop to create a smooth transition to the introduction of the workshop.
Outcomes and takeaways
As takeaways this workshop provides:
An applicable tool for teaching about the complex dynamics of entrepreneurship.
A tool for student reflection on own practice, the why and effects in the entrepreneurial process.
It works as a thought-provoking break - a pit stop in the midst of the entrepreneurial process.
A possible supervision tool for educators when supervising students participating in an entrepreneurial course/programme.
A frame for reflection on own role/teaching process as an educator. It will provide insights on how own preferences for educational content affect the students’ process and the influence from broader social/cultural values.
References
Bandera, C., Santos, S. C., & Liguori, E. W. (2020). The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship Education:
A Delphi Study on Dangers and Unintended Consequences, Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy, 0(0), 1–28.
Berglund, K. & Johansson, A. W. (2012). Dark and bright effects of a polarized entrepreneurship Discourse… and the prospects of transformation. In: K. Berglund, B. Johannisson & B. Schwartz (ed.), Societal Entrepreneurship: Positioning, Penetrating, Promoting (p. 163-186). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Nybye, N. (2020). An ambiguous entrepreneurship concept in an educational context of welfare- professions: Between obvious and hidden making of meaning, PhD dissertation, monograph, University of Southern Denmark.
Sarasvathy, S. D. (2008). Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise. Cheltenham, UK:
Edward Elgar Publishing.
