The Norwegian Pilot

The Norwegian pilot targeted teachers (upper-secondary) in Technology & Research from all over the country. We decided to invite teachers to a course in creativity, rather than in entrepreneurship. The reason is that entrepreneurship has a poor reputation among some Norwegian teachers, in particular among science teachers.

In some upper-secondary schools groups of teachers work with entrepreneurship-related initiatives, like gründer camps and student enterprises/business. The problem is, in most cases, that those groups of teachers work more or less on their own and quite isolated. At many schools, there seems to be little collaboration and exchange between those who are involved in entrepreneurship education and those who are not. There seems to be a boundary between groups of teachers at the same school. We wanted to challenge that.

There is a potential when it comes to science teachers: science teachers are easily engaged in inquiry-based approaches, and such approaches are closely related to entrepreneurial approaches. In particular, when taking the entrepreneurial pedagogical perspective, there seem to be many connections. We have started a project, together with the National Resource Centre for Science in Education, where we wish to explore how to connect modern science teaching practices and entrepreneurial approaches to teaching.  We decided, first of all, to pilot this idea with teachers in Technology and Research, because this school science subject in its self is the closest you can come entrepreneurship.  If this shows to be successful, we will broaden our work to other science teachers.

Our intention with the course we designed for this purpose was to introduce the teachers to creativity as being the core concept when trying to explore the connections between science teaching and entrepreneurial approaches in general. Creativity, thus, was our focus during the course. In a plenary session on the last day, in a dialogue with the participants, we summarized the ideas about creativity and teaching put forward by the participants. The summary resulted in a model, drawn on the black board,  in which all elements of the CRCL-model were present. In fact, the participants had, themselves, constructed their own CRCL model. That gave us a opportunity to explicitly link creativity to innovation and entrepreneurship.  Looking back, we think that we made a good decision. The teachers were easily engaged in discussions about creativity, and to us that seemed to form a solid base for thinking and reflecting on their own teaching practice. For many this may lead to further thinking, more explicit towards entrepreneurial teaching.