Envisioning entrepreneurship : Using photographs to elicit students’ preconceptions of entrepreneurship

Sammanfattning: Nowadays, entrepreneurship is taught on a ‘university-wide’ basis, implying that thesubject is introduced to multiple students from a diversity of backgrounds. At thesame time, a student-centred movement has been noted in the field, focusing ontailored education based on students’ preconceptions of entrepreneurship. However, studies of students’ preconceptions of entrepreneurship are scarce. Thus far,entrepreneurship education literature has primarily examined what to teach or how to teach. This has taken place in accordance with the Anglo-American didactictradition in which ‘didactics’ is a form of instruction rather than a way of combining ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions from various perspectives. As a consequence, distinguished authors in the field are calling for more advanced theoretical links between entrepreneurship education research and education science. This study develops and examines a visual-based exercise as a means of studyingstudents’ preconceptions of entrepreneurship and as a novel educational tool. Thisis conducted in accordance with the German didaktik tradition that presumes thatstudents, the learning content and the teacher are interdependently related. The purpose is to elicit students’ preconceptions of entrepreneurship using a visual-based exercise, as well as to offer knowledge of how this affects didaktik relationships in entrepreneurship education. To address this purpose, phenomenographic didaktik is used to discuss a subject-specific ‘entrepreneurship didaktik’, characterised by astudent-centred perspective. Photographs were used in a visual-based exercise to elicit students’ preconceptions and interviews with teachers and students were conducted in order to evaluate the exercise from a didaktik perspective.The results of the study show that students’ preconceptions of entrepreneurshipare multifaceted and that there are both similarities and differences between students’ preconceptions of entrepreneurship and established understandings of entrepreneurship. From a practical perspective, the study introduces a visual-based exercise that contributes to both students’ and teachers’ understandings of where entrepreneurship education starts from a student perspective, thereby helping students to link new knowledge to their contemporary understandings and helping teachers to base their education on students’ preconceptions in order to enhancetheir learning. On a theoretical level, this work contributes to the student-centred movement in entrepreneurship education by demonstrating how the relational perspective in the German didaktik tradition can advance the link betweenentrepreneurship education and education science.