Abstract:

Entrepreneurship educators face a constant challenge of ensuring that students remain at the core of teaching and learning. Much attention has been directed towards finding the ‘right’ solutions as to how we can effectively stimulate meaningful - and therefore motivational - classroom experiences. Withstanding large amounts of invested interest and a growing canon of literature in this domain, from an entrepreneurial educator’s perspective research still remains relatively scarce. Given that it is the educator who is tasked with finding ways to effectively facilitate the learning process, there is a clear need to address a scarcity of attention towards the prominent role that teachers play. We believe that such valuable knowledge can be achieved through developing further insights regarding what mindsets, behaviours, and practices the educator can display in bid to create more innovative and self-motivated learners. The current article therefore aims to abridge the apparent dearth of teacher focus through outlining the pedagogical methodologies employed within an undergraduate module entitled ‘Entrepreneurial Culture’ delivered at a Business School in Valencia (Spain). More specifically, we encourage teachers to develop a pedagogical efficacy through attempting to see the world through the perspective of their students. It is suggested that students should be empowered to lead their own learning experiences that will hopefully result in greater levels of engagement. After describing the main teaching and learning methodologies employed, descriptive results are presented and discussed from the surveying of the 35 students who participated in the module. Findings showed that perceived autonomy-supporting teaching strategies had a positive influence on both motivation and self-assessed attainment.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship, Education, Self-motivation, Innovation, Pedagogy.