Abstract:

In the current business context, organisations that actively embrace the integration of sustainability into their operations to solve environmental problems face a unique set of challenges and opportunities. As a result, a wide variety of hybrid organisational forms have emerged to manage or exploit these. One of their distinctive characteristics is their attempt to blend, in several manners, an environmental and social ethos with a demand-driven market logic and interweave them, seeking a balance rather than only taking the traditional instrumental economic rationality as a reference. Consequently, these sustainability-oriented entrepreneurial endeavours necessitate the integration of innovative pedagogies within the academic curriculum employed at universities to educate aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly in the context of sustainable entrepreneurship education. In this context, an effort was made during the 2023/2024 academic course to overcome the mindset embedded in conventional teaching tools aligned with an instrumental economic rationality. This was achieved through the exploration of different social learning strategies with a small group of engineering students enrolled in an elective entrepreneurship course at the School of Engineering of the University of Huelva (Spain). In particular, the course employed a variety of pedagogical techniques, including the use of diaries, personal and collective reading, presentations on entrepreneurial success and failure, group discussions, visits to institutions integrated in the entrepreneurial ecosystems, personal empirical and theoretical research, evaluations and self-evaluations. The combination of a wide range of teaching activities that emphasises a social and sustainable approach to the creation of new businesses, along with the empowerment of students to take an active role in their learning process, has been demonstrated to be a successful experience from the perspective of both students and teachers.

Keywords:

Sustainable entrepreneurship education, social learning, innovative pedagogies.