Threshold concepts in entrepreneurship education and their implications for teaching and learning

Abstract

In view of the continuing growth and importance of entrepreneurship education within the educational landscape, there remains a significant demand for theoretical as well as practical approaches. In particular, there is a demand for approaches that shed light on the interplay between course design and individual learning. This chapter draws on the threshold concept approach, which is becoming an increasingly important perspective in educational research. Whilst the threshold concept approach has been applied usefully to develop the pedagogy of various academic disciplines, for example, economics, healthcare and information literacy, they have so far received little attention in the context of entrepreneurship education. The threshold concept approach addresses the question of how learners can practise an exploratory, reflexive approach to discipline and subject-area-specific ways of thinking and practising. The contribution of our chapter is twofold: firstly, we want to show that the threshold concept approach offers a new perspective for theory and practice in entrepreneurship education through its focus on bridging a disciplinary way of thinking and practising, on the one hand, and a subjective view of entrepreneurial phenomena, on the other hand. Secondly, in order to enrich entrepreneurial teaching and learning conceptualizations, this chapter presents a review of the candidate entrepreneurial threshold concepts which have appeared in the literature to date, in order to characterize them as a potential starting point for a promising field of research.