Although entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behavior have been proposed by EU and national policy for long time, it has been hard implementing it in the education system. There are frameworks for what should be focused (e.g. EntreComps entreprenurial competence framework), but educators seem to struggle with how they should work as frameworks on pedagogical and didactical aspects of entrepreneurial education are lacking. To support educators at all levels in the education system that want to work entrepreneurially, we will develop a framework for organizing studies entrepreneurially (FOrSE) with two main parts. First, a pedagogical strategy outlining the principals that guide the design and implementation of entrepreneurial education and second general guidelines for how to work entrepreneurially in practice (e.g. how to craft tasks, lead processes or design examinations). To accomplish this, three higher education institutions in Finland (University of Lapland), Latvia (Riga Technical University) and Sweden (Luleå University of Technology) will work together with three other partners (LTU Business (working with competence development) and UF Norrbotten (a Junior Achievement organization) in Sweden and VITAE (working with teacher training for in-service teachers) in Latvia). Altogether, there will be about 35 active participants working to develop and test the pedagogical strategy and guidelines by working both nationally and transnationally. The core project group (one person from each partner) will work closely during the entire project period and meet on-line (e.g. through Skype or Zoom) every month and face-to-face every fourth month. The extended project group will meet three times during the project for learning/training sessions. Between these transnational meetings, there will be national activities. The extended project group is used for practical validation of the results. For scientific validation of the results, central parts of the pedagogical strategy and guidelines will be presented at scientific conferences. The final results from the project is the FOrSE pedagogical strategy and FOrSE Guidelines that we will disseminate broadly to educators in Europe. The main target group is educators at university or upper secondary schools. We believe the potential for impact on both short and longer term is great as educators lack tools to work entrepreneurially practically and in a coherent way.
Our project name - Framework for Organizing Studies Entrepreneurially - says a lot about what we wanted to achieve. A general framework helping educators (and students) in all disciplines and in all levels to apply entrepreneurial learning in their education. By truly integrating entrepreneurship and education we believe that many problems that have been present earlier can be prevented. First, it will be easier to implement the framework with general educators as it will have a sound grounding in the education literature (and not be a foreign threat). Second, it will lead to better pedagogy when entrepreneurship educators teach entrepreneurship as they better understand the underpinnings of their teaching.
Entrepreneurship education is growing, but even though many European countries have policy and curricula addressing entrepreneurship, it has been difficult implementing this in the education system. In Europe and especially in our three countries (Sweden, Finland and Latvia) there are many initiatives focusing on entrepreneurship in education and many educators want to work entrepreneurially, Still, even if there is a will to work entrepreneurially there is a lack of coherent principals and concrete guidelines as how this can be achieved in practice. The EU EntreComp framework is useful for getting grips on what the competences are, including different progression levels, but lacks a pedagogical and didactical framework. From EntreComp we thus get help with what to focus on, but we still do not know how to work. Other initiatives provide insights on how to create an entrepreneurial process among students, but as the researchers are from the entrepreneurship field, some educational aspects are lacking. Likewise, education scholars tend to miss aspects from the entrepreneurship field in their work. We wanted to integrate the entrepreneurship and the education perspective when developing the pedagogical strategy and guidelines.