An investigation of emerging signature pedagogy for social entrepreneurship and the sharing of practice

• Main Author: Clément, Michelle Lorna
• Other Authors: Kennedy, Eileen ; Kahn, Peter
• Published: University of Liverpool 2018
• Subjects: 370
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.755601

Social entrepreneurs and social enterprises play a key role in society as they provide innovative solutions to society's most pressing social, cultural and environmental problems. Social entrepreneurial education is a specialized academic field with a potential to impact community issues through social and economic value creation but the complexities and uncertainties of social entrepreneurial curriculum require academics and students to balance social, environmental, and business goals. The balancing of such diverse goals coupled with the newness of the subject area creates challenges to developing and teaching social entrepreneurship (SE). Unlike entrepreneurial education, SE curriculum should reflect the social entrepreneurial business environment where emotional intelligence, compassion and empathy are skillsets that define social entrepreneurs and social enterprises. It is a complex matter, therefore, to begin teaching SE as an academic, how does one teach this subject especially for faculty used to the more traditional Business School curriculum? This study therefore aimed to elicit elements of emerging signature pedagogy for SE through semi-structured interviews with expert faculty. Signature pedagogies are the 'forms of instruction that leap to mind' (Shulman, 2005b, p.52) when thinking about a discipline, are replicated across institutions, and can reveal the core values of a discipline. Social entrepreneurship is a new academic field and this study explored common pedagogical approaches across institutions offering SE programs that may create distinctive practices - signature pedagogies. Shulman's (2005a; 2005b) emphasizes the need for sharing of knowledge across institutions to sustain signature pedagogies but his work does not address how to share knowledge. This study builds on Shulman's work investigating ways of sharing of knowledge practices among academics as a way of building an emergent signature pedagogy. In a design-based research approach, two sets of interviews were conducted in this study with faculty experienced in teaching and those that were not. A Reflection And Service Learning Design (RASL) was created following the first set of interviews and introduced to faculty new to SE in the second set of interviews. Shulman's (2005b) work identifies characteristics of signature pedagogy but does not address how signature pedagogies are formed in emerging disciplines. This design-based research approach helped test the feasibility of sharing emergent signature pedagogy in SE through a learning design which also provided insight on the development of signature pedagogies. The results of the study indicated there were both barriers to sharing and ways that building resources among faculty members could encourage a culture of sharing with the goal of establishing emergent signature pedagogy. Shulman's (2005b) work focuses on common pedagogical practices observed in the classroom by discipline but it does not address institutional support or barriers to implementation of these pedagogical practices and the findings in this study build on the institutional gap. This study concludes that the biggest influence on building social entrepreneurial pedagogy involve: institutional development of faculty around service learning and the use of student reflections in the classroom, providing administrative support for community engagement, and offering rewards for sharing resources.