Professional development session : threshold concepts in entrepreneurship education and their implications for teaching and learning

Abstract

Given entrepreneurship education's continuing growth and importance within the educational landscape, there remains a significant demand for theoretical and practical approaches. In particular, there is a demand for approaches that shed light on the interplay between course design and individual learning. In this session, the presenters draw on the threshold concept approach, becoming an increasingly important perspective in educational research. While this approach has been usefully applied to develop the pedagogy of various disciplines, it has received little attention in the context of entrepreneurship education. The idea of threshold concepts addresses how learners can practise an exploratory, reflexive approach to discipline and subject-area-specific ways of thinking and practising. In this session, we discuss how 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. The presenters also discuss the candidate entrepreneurial threshold concepts to characterise them as a potential starting point for a promising field of research.