Teaching Change Agency through Entrepreneurship Education
Presentation Format
Interactive Workshop
Intended Audience
Faculty/Practitioners
Presentation Description
Social Entrepreneurship has proven to be a powerful attraction to college students who are attempting to weave together life’s purpose, education, and professional aspirations. The addition of academic service-learning or community-based learning to an existing cross-disciplinary program in entrepreneurship education has proven to provide students with direct experience as “changemakers” with community partners. The premise of this workshop is that one goal of higher education is to help students develop as effective and empowered changemakers, investigating concepts of social impact, systems-change, and sustainability. Social Entrepreneurship, regardless of one’s definition of that term, demands innovative thinking and entrepreneurial action. At UNCG, we’ve approached entrepreneurial education as a cross-disciplinary enterprise, one in which service-learning pedagogy and engaged scholarship is ideally suited. In this session, we will highlight courses from multiple disciplines in which students are immersed in social innovation education. Additionally, specific methods and class activities will be shared. Examples by discipline will be given as to how service-learning has contributed to effective community-university collaborations for both shared learning and community capacity building.
As an example one class, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Community Leadership, students discover the role of innovative thinking to successful entrepreneurial enterprises, and the connections to eight competencies selected from leadership theory and research. The experiential piece of the course was based on the research that indicates that entrepreneurship has greatly impacted upward mobility of underserved populations and women. Greensboro is a federally mandated refugee resettlement site, so we have a large population of immigrants and refugees. Students are required to work with business startups in the community that are owned by an immigrant or refugee. They must recognizing an existing innovation and develop an innovation with the community partner that moves the social enterprise incrementally towards a community identified goal. The presentation will share ideas about how one might work with under-served partners within our communities.
During the session, participants will be introduced to the Human Centered Design (IDEO) methodology that allows for participatory action research, or engaged scholarship, appropriate even for beginner researchers. Human Centered Design is a process that helps students “hear” the needs of constituents in new ways, “create” innovative solutions to meet these needs, and “deliver” solutions with financial sustainability in mind. ( p. 3 Human Centered Design Toolkit. www.ideo.org). Human Centered Design can be used across any discipline with any community identified concern.
Location
Room - 1002
Start Date
4-14-2016 3:15 PM
End Date
4-14-2016 4:30 PM
Recommended Citation
Hamilton, Cathy H. and Welsh, Dianne H., "Teaching Change Agency through Entrepreneurship Education" (2016). Gulf South Summit on Service-Learning 2016. 94.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gss/2016/2016/94
Teaching Change Agency through Entrepreneurship Education
Room - 1002
Social Entrepreneurship has proven to be a powerful attraction to college students who are attempting to weave together life’s purpose, education, and professional aspirations. The addition of academic service-learning or community-based learning to an existing cross-disciplinary program in entrepreneurship education has proven to provide students with direct experience as “changemakers” with community partners. The premise of this workshop is that one goal of higher education is to help students develop as effective and empowered changemakers, investigating concepts of social impact, systems-change, and sustainability. Social Entrepreneurship, regardless of one’s definition of that term, demands innovative thinking and entrepreneurial action. At UNCG, we’ve approached entrepreneurial education as a cross-disciplinary enterprise, one in which service-learning pedagogy and engaged scholarship is ideally suited. In this session, we will highlight courses from multiple disciplines in which students are immersed in social innovation education. Additionally, specific methods and class activities will be shared. Examples by discipline will be given as to how service-learning has contributed to effective community-university collaborations for both shared learning and community capacity building.
As an example one class, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Community Leadership, students discover the role of innovative thinking to successful entrepreneurial enterprises, and the connections to eight competencies selected from leadership theory and research. The experiential piece of the course was based on the research that indicates that entrepreneurship has greatly impacted upward mobility of underserved populations and women. Greensboro is a federally mandated refugee resettlement site, so we have a large population of immigrants and refugees. Students are required to work with business startups in the community that are owned by an immigrant or refugee. They must recognizing an existing innovation and develop an innovation with the community partner that moves the social enterprise incrementally towards a community identified goal. The presentation will share ideas about how one might work with under-served partners within our communities.
During the session, participants will be introduced to the Human Centered Design (IDEO) methodology that allows for participatory action research, or engaged scholarship, appropriate even for beginner researchers. Human Centered Design is a process that helps students “hear” the needs of constituents in new ways, “create” innovative solutions to meet these needs, and “deliver” solutions with financial sustainability in mind. ( p. 3 Human Centered Design Toolkit. www.ideo.org). Human Centered Design can be used across any discipline with any community identified concern.
Program Abstract
Social Entrepreneurship has proven to be a powerful attraction to college students who are attempting to weave together life’s purpose, education, and professional aspirations. The addition of academic service-learning or community-based learning to an existing cross-disciplinary program in entrepreneurship education has proven to provide students with direct experience as “changemakers” with community partners. In this interactive workshop we will explore how using community based experiential learning enhances both student efficacy and community capacity.