Taking Entrepreneuring Seriously in Entrepreneurship Education—Conceptual Dimensions and Implications for the Classroom

The scholarly and educational field of entrepreneurship has rapidly expanded and evolved over time, carrying promises of enhanced economic growth and prosperity for nations that harness it. Such speedy establishment and expansion of entrepreneurship education, however, may have obscured the onto-epistemological underpinnings of our pedagogical methods and students’ learning. Thus, the following questions may need attention: Why does entrepreneurship education need to be refocused? Under what onto-epistemological rationale should such renewal be brought forward? And what could be gained for the field of entrepreneurship education? This conceptual paper opens discussions about these three questions from the perspective of entrepreneuring. Entrepreneuring with its underlying process and practice onto-epistemology may be a propitious “conceptual attractor” for the classroom, bringing forward four key pillars for entrepreneurship education to be taken into account: (1) situatedness in space and time; (2) relatedness and open-endedness; (3) everyday creativity and play; (4) reflexivity. The paper contributes to entrepreneurship education by proposing specific learning objectives, teaching methods, and assessment practices for each of the aforementioned four pillars and invites educators to consider entrepreneuring, social and more mainstream perspectives of entrepreneurship not as exclusive but as integrative perspectives that can be unified under the “socializing” umbrella of entrepreneuring.