The Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan identified education as a main pillar for catalysing entrepreneurship inside the European Union. Higher Educations Institutions (HEI) take on a central role for the deliverance of entrepreneurship education (EE) and thus for developing entrepreneurial competences which European policy makers consider key for lifelong learning. Moreover, frameworks as EntreComp demonstrate that the available competence catalogue is by far not only relevant for graduates that seek careers as entrepreneurs but rather matters to all students. However, educators are often still not aware of this wider understanding. Therefore, they do not acknowledge inherent benefits and omit entrepreneurial competence development in their daily teaching efforts. While this applies to many academic fields, higher education teacher training centres take on a special role as they educate the educators of tomorrows pupils. This leads to an insufficient provision of an entrepreneurial knowledge base delivered through ITE and ultimately to a sub-optimal exploitation of entrepreneurial teaching and learning potentials at school stage. This has motivated us to establish a Partnership for Initial Entrepreneurship Teacher Education (PIETE) which will: (1) create a scalable framework that allows to develop a sound understanding on the functionality, educational priorities and institutions necessities of ITE educators and teacher training centres of higher education, (2) directly sensitize 30+ ITE educators for the merits of entrepreneurial competence development through a serious of 6 workshops in 3 countries, (3) create a comprehensive Teaching Compendium for use in ITE that is structurally rooted on EntreComp and put it to practice among 90+ ITE students, (4) create an online Test Center that allows to assess the EE understanding of pre-service teacher trainers involving 30+ ITE educators, (5) design, construct and conduct a study that will assess the EE conception of 100+ ITE educators in teacher training institutions of various European countries and generate new scientific results, (6) establish a European Good Practice Collection that showcases 10+ outstanding examples for the realisation of EE within ITE, (7) make a significant contribution to add an operational dimension to EntreComp, (8) maximise the exploitation of the project’s outputs and outcomes by widely disseminating them to approximately 5.000+ individuals via an interactive project website and the implementation of a comprehensive dissemination strategy. The transnational set-up of the partnership guarantees that the inter-disciplinary knowledge, experience and competences of 7 highly proficient institutions from 5 EU countries can be pooled to develop innovative resources for the promotion and provision of EE within ITE. Moreover, our methodology also foresees a close collaboration between ITE and EE experts on a regional scale. Participating HEIs have been selected, among others, on the basis of graphical proximity to establish inter-institutional /departmental teams which represent both competence areas and will take on a catalyst role for the achievement of PIETE objectives in their regions. We do believe that our partnership will largely impact ITE educators of the involved and other teacher training institutions. This will not only affect their own lifelong learning capabilities but also influence generations of ITE students taught by them. Given that these future teachers will be exercising their profession until the 2060s and beyond, the powerful cascading multiplier effect inherent in PIETE becomes evident. Hence, the impact PIETE unfolds will not be limited to teacher training centres. It rather extends to the school-level at a later stage as teachers that have been educated to employ elements of EE in class-room settings will be able to pass on their entrepreneurial mindset and skills to numerous cohorts of pupils. As these skills are considered to be vital for lifelong learning, the benefits of PIETE may actually have an impact on learners beyond the current century.
European policymakers continuously highlight the importance of entrepreneurial and transversal skills for the next generations of students, researchers and innovators to build a resilient society that is able to learn lifelong. In fact, the priority given to entrepreneurship education (EE) is an integral part of every current key policy document (e.g. European Skills Agenda) or strategic plan (e.g. Plan for European Education Area) relating to education inside the EU. Evidently, schools and universities take on a central role for developing entrepreneurial competences amongst learners. Moreover, the European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework (EntreComp) states the case that the ability to think and act entrepreneurially should be considered not only relevant for graduates that seek careers as entrepreneurs. Rather, entrepreneurial competences matter to all learners in all walks of life. Despite this, EE is not embedded deeply across disciplines and subjects yet. With our Partnership for Initial Entrepreneurship Teacher Education (PIETE) we wanted to make a contribution to change that in the field of initial teacher education (ITE). However, operationalising EntreComp in this context was a challenging experiment. After 3 years of intensive work, we can proudly claim that we were successful in doing so. In terms of intellectual outputs, we have accomplished the following: - a scalable methodology for ITE framework reports that allows to map functionalities, educational priorities and institutional necessities of ITE higher education institutions (esp. for non-ITE stakeholder; applied to contexts of ITE institutions in Poland, Hungary, and Austria) - an EE Capacity Building Compilation to facilitate workshops that foster EE capacity building in the ITE context (applied to 50+ educators during project lifetime) - an EE Teaching Compendium for use in ITE (composed of 15 modules, structurally aligned to EntreComp, pilot-tested among 200+ ITE students & 20 ITE educators - an online EE Awareness Test Center suite that allows to assess conceptual understandings and knowledgeability levels of EE (applied to 170+ ITE educators in Hungary, Austria, and Poland) - a peer reviewed discussion paper on the topic of EE in ITE that analysed the data of the Test Center (from HU, AT, POL) - a Good Practice Collection that showcases 12 EU & outside EU initiatives that successfully put EE into practice within ITE & school contexts PIETE relied on a team of dedicated experts from the fields of entrepreneurship and pre-service teacher education (PIETE Regional Tandems) of 7 organisations from 5 EU countries that were highly motivated to take on the challenge of embedding ITE into EE. Our project has impacted ITE educators & students of the involved organisations (target regions: Szeged - Hungary, Tirol - Austria, Silesia - Poland) and set the base to influence generations of learners taught by them. Given that aspiring teachers educated now will be exercising their profession until the 2060s and beyond, the powerful impact cascade inherent in PIETE becomes evident. This, together with the large dissemination and high quality display of our project results online provides an excellent basis to leverage and sustain PIETE outcomes post project funding. However, with PIETE we did not try to be dogmatic about entrepreneurship education and its place within initial teacher education, but rather realistic on its current relevance for respective educators in their given educational contexts. Moreover, we needed to raise awareness for the benefits of EE first, especially when conceptually understood in a wider sense (as exemplified by EntreComp) before we tried to convince ITE educators to join us on our entrepreneurial journey. This careful and respectful approach has been key success element of PIETE. Besides, we also needed to build a general understanding inside our partnership for how the education of future teachers is rolled out in the PIETE target regions and institutions - not only, but also to become aware of potential barriers and institutional constraints that may hinder introducing more elements of entrepreneurship education to existing teaching activities. These core elements “opened the doors” for integrating EE into ITE. Naturally, a small-scale project like PIETE can only provide excellent starting conditions to enhance and sustain this development. With the end of the project, it is in the hands of the regional tandems, but foremost, each involved ITE partner, to decide on how to continue their entrepreneurial journey. All of them have expressed their commitment to do so with well reflected and context-depending measures. PIETE has prepared them well to go further, inspire others to do alike and, thus, to contribute to the development of entrepreneurial teachers as called for by European policy makers.