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Entrepreneurship Education, Entrepreneurship Training? Issues, questions, transformations.


16-21 november 2020 - Entrepreneurship Education - University of Lille, France

 

The conference is evolving and will stand virtually !

We know how much the risk, the unexpected and the change are part of the daily lives of entrepreneurs. This is partly what makes the difficulty and the value of their initiatives. In this very special year 2020, the first international conference on entrepreneurship, education and training which can help to develop it, will take place in Lille (France). It was supposed to take place in the spring… in May 2020. In March 2020 we quickly understood that this would not be possible and we postponed it to next October. What happened is unbelievable. We do not yet know everything about what happened during this period. But what we know is that these few months have changed the world forever. It is as entrepreneurs of change that we want to carry out the business prepared for more than two years that this conference is about. Rather than deplore the test and the change, we will choose to innovate to work differently, to ask new questions, to mobilize this spirit of entrepreneurship, initiative and creativity we are studying. The symposium is already a great success and is eagerly awaited.

From the start, we wanted to make exchanges and debates as open as possible: international, multidisciplinary, bringing scientific and professional circles into contact. 14 countries, several disciplines of human and social sciences and numerous universities are represented through the conferences, symposia and offered communications. Everything is now there for that. The conference will take place in a distant on November 2020 16-21. It is not a new organization. Many training courses, seminars and symposia were already organized on this form. We are aware you will miss beers and waffles from the North of France, as well as the discovery of the Lille area and the whole Hauts-de-France region. But this is only part postponed. We will appreciate instead by looking at the pics and videos from our partners on our website. Our meetings, our interactions, our sharing will have other advantages. They will be within everyone's reach. Wherever you are in the world it will be possible to participate without any hindrance, the symposium will be eco-responsible and will save additional damage to our out of breath planet, it will be cheaper for all. Above all, it will be an opportunity to invent, imagine and, around the spirit of entrepreneurship, to place at the heart of the re-designed conference the place of the entrepreneur in a world in need of re-inventing itself.

 

Argument

Developing Entrepreneurship with education, training and different forms of support currently answers social, ethical, economic, political and educational issues. The education and training fields are directly concerned due to the growing role occupied by Entrepreneurship in our contemporary societies.

However, as Pepin and Champy-Remoussenard point out (2017, 7), the evolution of educational policies and practices associated to entrepreneurship "still remains largely understudied, unknown or misunderstood, mostly in French scientific works on educational issues". That is why, it is time to gather researchers from different countries to give them the opportunity to discuss and participate in the creation of a specific research field in that domain.

Making understandable, from a scientific viewpoint, the evolution of educational and training practices that aim at developing Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial spirit requires multiple perspectives, given that the object crosses several disciplinary viewpoints (Economy, Management, Education Sciences and Training, Political Sciences, Sociology, History, Philosophy, etc.).  Furthermore, this enlightenment deserves to be fed and enriched by the meeting and the dialogue between entrepreneurial researchers and professionals.

The colloquium: Entrepreneurship Education, Entrepreneurship Training? Issues, questions, transformations aims to spark, on the one hand, an interdisciplinary discussion between researchers interested in educational entrepreneurship and, on the other hand, a discussion with the professional fields involved in entrepreneurship education (EE), the support and training intended for entrepreneurship's project leaders. The ambition, on this basis, is double: to set up a dialogue between the actors of this strongly emerging and evolving field; to cross the views, answers and questions that the researchers may bring in a view to lay the foundation for a scientific project to continue.

Currently, the political recommendations, the development of practices, the sociopolitical interest for the role of education and training in developing entrepreneurship bring us to question entrepreneurship education. School entrepreneurship? Educational entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurial education?  Entrepreneurship education? Entrepreneurship training? Entrepreneurial culture awareness? The miscellaneous denominations reflect a field of various, emerging and professionalizing educational practices.

The educational practices that intend to develop entrepreneurship aim at many objectives on, at least, two levels:

- some large objectives aiming at promoting the sense of initiative, entrepreneurship, creativity, autonomy, critical thinking, capacities belonging to a same base of knowledge and skills identified as useful for every citizen and that would have a lifelong development thanks to educational and training systems.

- some objectives specific to the development of entrepreneurship, to business culture, to the knowledge required to invest entrepreneurship activities, to create and keep a company active.

In a world dominated by permanent and fast change, the link between education and entrepreneurial spirit appears as a major issue. This is why the expectations and social stakes are strong (Fayolle 2011). Entrepreneurship is a subject increasingly treated by the media and enters into social emergencies and regional, national, international and supranational policy agenda. It is also a part of the European Key Competence (Champy-Remoussenard, 2012, 2018). The impact of the educational efforts made in that field is closely connected to the innovation and adaptation to societal change, vocational guidance and occupational integration, the evolution of types of employment, the pursuit of competitiveness...

There is no doubt that political powers agree at a local, national and international level to say that promoting a culture, which can encourage entrepreneurial initiatives among the population, is mainly the role of educational systems. We can talk about a virtual consensus.

The assumption that the development of practices, policies and measures is a point of education is, nonetheless, questionable from a scientific viewpoint. The mindset and the skills, which may make entrepreneurial initiatives possible, can be entirely or only learnt in the formal system of training. They should be part of a socialization process, of a more complex educational process that needs to be better understood. Moreover, the means do not always follow the policy incentives. Finally, the effects of these educational efforts are not necessarily always known.

Therefore, the scientific view can and must bring a critical and overhanging assessment about policies and activities that have a potential of social change that might be strong.

 

Organization of the colloquium

This colloquium is initiated by the Inter-University Center for Research in Education of Lille (CIREL), a French research team that has developed research on policies, practices, actors and systems aiming at developing the entrepreneurial spirit. The CIREL (65 titular members, 70 PhD students) is an expert in that field, and conducts research more largely related to the training/employment relationship, the school/company relationship, professional insertion and vocational training.

The colloquium is going to take place in Lille in the Hauts-de-France region, which is the first French area that has been certified as an ‘Enterprising European Region’ in 2013. Close to Paris, Brussels and London, Lille is the main city of the Eurometropole ‘Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai’. The University of Lille is one of the major French universities (70,000 students, a staff of 7,000 people, 70 research laboratories…).

During the colloquium, there will be a specific moment for discussion between the professional communities concerned by the development of Entrepreneurship Education and the researchers interested by it. It will aim at allowing both spheres to express themselves and to discuss the questions that can unify them. Concerning delicate aspects, issues, perspectives and systems that can require a scientific approach, the researchers will try to express their expectations, to identify what can be undertaken in terms of doctoral and postdoctoral research, multidisciplinary research, collaborative practice involving researchers and practitioners. Professionnals who wish to take part in the discussion researchers/professionals during a round table or other forms of exchanges are invited to contact Patricia Champy-Remoussenard (patricia.remoussenard@univ-lille.fr).

 

Thematic focuses

To encourage an interdisciplinary debate on the issue of the current entrepreneurship development by education and training, several themes are being identified in the call for papers.

Five themes will contribute to guide the discussions and the reflections during the colloquium.

The colloquium is opened to any other perspective of analysis in that it enters into a questioning on the educational means intended for stimulating the entrepreneurial spirit and entrepreneurial initiatives. In that cases, formulate clearly in a line the themes you propose.

 

1. Origin and development of educational entrepreneurship

  • A history of entrepreneurial practices and of educational entrepreneurship.
  • Evolution and stakes of public policies about educational entrepreneurship.

 

2. Epistemology of research on educational entrepreneurship

  • The origin and evolutions of the concepts and representations associated with the entrepreneur, the company and educational entrepreneurship (autonomy, creativity, initiative, action, project, risk, etc.).
  • The access modes and the analysis of the activity or of the entrepreneurial actions? Can we understand the specificity?
  • The history and epistemology of research on educational entrepreneurship.
  • The methods used in research: assessment, perspective, prospective.

 

3. Educational entrepreneurship and working life

  • The current transformations of the forms of activity and employment in our society. The increasing power of self-employment in its various manifestations. The emergence of an entrepreneurial society? The impacts on work/training relationships and on the educational system? The company: an educational actor?
  • The actual work of an entrepreneur: Success stories and failures. The forms of companies created and the values carried.
  • The relation to entrepreneurship in the life course: the link between risk taking and personal/professional development in the entrepreneur's career.
  • The link between the entrepreneurial activity and the entrepreneurial form of activity?
  • The gender issue in entrepreneurial education, in entrepreneurs' career. Do the systems for entrepreneurial education allow to take into account the question linked to the notion of "the internalization of gender-related professional roles" (Gianettoni, Simon-Vermot & Gauthier, 2010).
  • The links between educational entrepreneurship and vocational guidance. The role of the systems for entrepreneurial education in learner's vocational guidance.

 

4. Entrepreneurship: training and education issues.

  • Can we learn entrepreneurship?
  • The forms of pedagogy linked to entrepreneurship education (active learning, project-based learning, experiential learning, the new educational methods, the social pedagogy) in the speeches and/or in the practice and in the transformations they generate in educational circles.
  • Awareness raising, training, support? What forms does the support to entrepreneurial initiatives for young people and adults (practice, actors, competences, stakes, market) take?
  • The entrepreneurship education's actors. This field often gathers actors from various backgrounds. The role of teachers in the actions taken. The role of the other actors. Which work division and/or what kind of collaborative work is initiated? What kind of partnerships does the meeting between the different actors generate? The professionalization process of the actors from this scope of practice and the required competences.
  • The systems promoting entrepreneurship in the educational field provide some effects. How do we assess them?
  • What are the subjects of instruction and training associated to entrepreneurship education? Are they specific or not to some curricula, systems, trainings? Are they transversal: place of transversal skills, key competences in relation to  the common bases?
  • Entrepreneurship education is an "education to" that is part of the 'academic form' and curricula. To what extent does entrepreneurship education fit in training and education courses or in systems of support?
  • The difficulties and opportunities in developing the entrepreneurial mindset.

 

5. At the heart of business creation, creativity in the workplace and innovation?

  • To what extent the entrepreneurial creativity questions other forms of creativity?
  • Entrepreneurship in a future world: what opportunities for social evolutions in and by entrepreneurship, what innovations, what links with the major climatic, environmental challenges, etc.?
  • Do the entrepreneurial education systems allow to develop the learners' creativity and innovation capacities?
  • What are the values carried by entrepreneurship education? What about training systems? And in the field, once entrepreneurship education has been realized?
  • What are the factors of business creation and of creativity at work (self-efficacy and/or entrepreneurial self-efficacy, self-esteem, entrepreneurial intention, entrepreneurial behavior, etc.)?