Tom 10 (2019): Zeszyt 2 (December 2019)

All entrepreneurs of the future are at school today, the nature of their value-oriented education and their willingness to actively participate in business and society in the future is shaped by today’s learning. This article focuses on the development, the reasoning, the legal bases, the implementation and the future perspectives of the Austrian approach to Entrepreneurship Education with a specific focus on an Entrepreneurship School Certification. Entrepreneurship Education in schools involves a variety of factors: the learning program, the learning environment, the teachers with their passion, encouragement and appreciation of learners and the value-orientation of the organization, which ranges from corporate culture to networking with external school partners.

This research describes the results of a national survey of entrepreneurial mindset conducted with 3,194 randomly selected individuals in a representative national sample. Several other measures of entrepreneurial personal characteristics appear in the literature. These include the Entrepreneurial Attitude Orientation measure (cf. EAO, Robinson, Stimpson, Huefner, & Hunt, 1991), the General Enterprising Tendency (cf. GET2, Caird, 1990), the test of Entrepreneurial Self-efficacy (cf. Chen, Greene, & Crick, 1998), and the Entrepreneurial Mindset Profile (cf. EMP, Davis, Hall, & Mayer, 2016). Valuable as these measures are, each has important limitations. This comprehensive study successfully addressed nearly all of those limitations.

Promoting sustainable development is top on the agenda of many national governments. The provision of quality primary education is key in pursuing this agenda and relies heavily of committed teachers. This article explores the potential contribution of transformational leadership practices of primary school principals in promoting teacher commitment. It is argued that primary school principals who exhibit the transformational leadership feature of commitment motivate teachers towards commitment and thus contribute towards sustainable development. This study was quantitative in nature and out of the hundred and fifty teachers sampled, only ninety-five responded to the questionnaires. Drawing from the theory of transformational leadership and the findings from the Limpopo Province education district case study, it can be concluded that primary school principals promote the culture of commitment and therefore a foundation for sustainable development is laid.

Today’s society has valued entrepreneurship in various sectors of personal and professional life, but the school seems to forget this reality. Aware of this fact, the Portuguese Ministry of Education has created a program, from early childhood education to basic and secondary education, to develop the concept of social entrepreneurship in schools. The Porto Polytechnic Higher School of Education, as an educator of teachers and teachers of the First and Second cycle of Basic Education, joined the European UKIDS project to integrate this theme in the initial and continuous teacher training. In this article we will analyze the data obtained from a UKIDS Portuguese Partner School in the context of continuing teacher education and present some conclusions. The qualitative methodology used allowed us to conclude that the UKIDS project enhanced the valorization of individual capacities, such as creativity, self-confidence, the power of argumentation, as well as the construction of social competences, in interpersonal and group relationships, which are crucial in the formation of a child’s personality in the basic school learning process.

In order to manage the challenges of the 21^st century, the assessment of individual self-efficacy constitutes an important factor in the educational context; both on the personal as well as on the social and organisational level. This fact justifies the consideration of self-efficacy as a basic competence, whose development must be started on the primary level. Pupils and teachers realise the resources that contribute to the development of a successful self-concept: increased motivation, a courageous selection of tasks to be fulfilled, and the possible influence on future social and economic developments. During their formation pedagogues are learners and teachers at the same time. In their lectures they deal with Social Entrepreneurship Education and competences connected with it. They reflect their own potential to exert influence and develop strategies to support pupils/students in the development of their own self-concept. In accordance with current findings the re-formulation of the curriculum of primary and secondary level demonstrates a development towards conceptual learning in larger contexts, following the principles of self-guidance and activity-orientation.

Developing social innovation and entrepreneurship competences and skills of children and young people is on the agenda of European educational policy-makers. The European research and innovation project “DOIT – Entrepreneurial skills for young social innovators in an open digital world” suggests using makerspaces and tools, within schools and externally, to promote practice-based social innovation and entrepreneurial learning of children and young people. This article first gives an overview of different types of maker-spaces, addresses the concept of maker education, and highlights common development goals of such education with entrepreneurship education regarding particular attitudes and competences. The main part then describes the DOIT learning program that allows children and young people (6–16 years) to acquire skills and an entrepreneurial mind-set for turning creative ideas into potential social innovations. This program is currently trialed in DOIT pilots in different types of makerspaces in ten European countries. The article describes learning processes and outcomes that are promoted by the program with two examples that are different regarding the makerspaces, topics and other aspects. Some first experiences and lessons learned from these and other pilots are summarized.

Operating in today’s markets is challenging due to information overload and an expanding choice of products. Children also encounter these complex markets at an early age. Providing consumer education in schools is an excellent opportunity to enhance their ability to think critically and increase their awareness. However, it would be a mistake to ignore the interconnections between consumer education and entrepreneurship education, since active and innovative people are also a prerequisite for future development. Taking advantage of the opportunity to provide consumer education in schools requires teachers to be familiar with consumer issues. This article aims to discuss the perceptions and experiences that primary school teachers in Finland have regarding children’s consumer education in schools. This study was conducted using the phenomenographic qualitative method to analyse data from teacher interviews. The analysis revealed a set of categories that describes the various ways the participants perceive and experience children’s consumer education in schools. These categories include themes, actors, teaching methods and the challenges and expectations teachers relate to children’s consumer education. The findings of this study are worth exploring when planning how to support teachers’ consumer educational competences for a sustainable future. The authors consider that this article is especially valuable for curriculum planners, educators, consumer organisations and parents’ associations, because it shed light on teachers’ perspectives about consumer education.

Teachers act as role models and through their activities are active co-designers of future generations. Independent thinking and taking responsible, sustainable actions form the basis for a vibrant society. Entrepreneurship skills can already be fostered in primary school children. This requires well-trained primary school teachers. The following text deals with the contents of “Entrepreneurship Education and Mathematics”, which the curriculum provides for primary school children as well as for students of primary school education. In a case study the author describes the implementation of a course at the University College of Teacher Education Vienna/Krems as taught since 2015.

Entrepreneurship Education often emphasizes the practical applications of competencies. This article aims to collect findings on entrepreneurship education linked to democratic formation in primary education as experienced by teacher students. Based on a model from the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship and theories on democratic formation and active citizenship, the authors analyze what entrepreneurship and democratic formation have in common. Entrepreneurship education will also be linked to education for sustainable development. By following a group of teacher students in two different cases, the authors discuss how a potential synergy is visible, when the teacher students learn by reading, discussing and solving concrete tasks connected to social entrepreneurship education. The teacher students’ personal attitudes and understanding of authentic practical experiences turns out to be important to their learning from entrepreneurial education tasks. The structural organization of teacher education is a challenge to the organization of teaching entrepreneurship education.

Today’s children are born into a digital world and are exposed to various electronic devices and digital contents both in the home environment and other environments since the first years of life. Children, who are a natural recipient of the environment in which they live, are exposed to the effects of the digital world at different levels and reflect these effects in different ways. The purpose of the reported study is to investigate if preschoolers’ daily media usage habits affects their drawings. This study is planned according to the case study design of qualitative research methods. The study was conducted with 15 preschoolers and their parents. There were nine boys and six girls in the study. The preschoolers’ drawings and their parents’ interview data were analyzed by using the descriptive analyzing method. The study result shows that there are differences between boys and girls media usage habits. Boys spend more time with media tools than girls. Additionally, boys are exposed to more inappropriate content because of their preferences. The analysis of their drawings revealed that boys are more affected than girls from media contents since boys’ drawings include more characters from media than girls. It can thus be suggested that media tools might be harmful when they are used in a developmentally inappropriate way, and excessive media tool usage has negative impact on children. Therefore, the reported study recommends that parents and caregivers take some precautions to limit preschoolers from spending time with media tools and to control content of children’s activity.

This present paper focuses on the pedagogical aspects of parents’ thinking in order to get acquainted with the ideal mindset for supporting the development of entrepreneurial competence, one of the key competencies of the 21^st century. Our quantitative research applied a questionnaire with 101 items and a reliability of Cronbach-α=0.856, N=1,146. Respondents from different regions and social classes in Hungary filled in the forms. Results indicate that parents are aware of the 21^st century ideal; however, their educational views suggest conservative practice, which is not as supportive for the formation of entrepreneurial skills.

This article provides an overview of challenge-based social entrepreneurship education in primary schools in Austria. The “You^thStart”-Programme “Empowering Each Child” is introduced as well as its impact on children. Research accompanying the programme shows that small challenges strengthen particularly the following skills and abilities of pupils: self-confidence and self-initiative, innovation, creativity, mindfulness, empathy, self-motivation and participation in society. Many of the challenges are based on the SDGs, so children are encouraged to learn to think and act in a sustainable way already at the beginning of their school career. The aim is to make young people aware of the fact that a change of people’s mindsets is needed worldwide, educating responsibly acting individuals, who do not only have their personal benefits in mind but also the needs of future generations.