Embedded entrepreneurship pedagogy: Six key practices for an entrepreneurial classroom

• Modern employment expectations demand new educational perspectives. • Skills and competency education models show promise as responsive pedagogies. • Youth entrepreneurship education shows great potential for building key knowledge, skills, and attitudes, including creativity, persistence, risk tolerance, collaboration, and knowledge synthesis. • Embedding entrepreneurial ideas and practices into secondary school course offerings can promote entrepreneurial propensity. • Six key practices can be integrated into various curricular areas with the intention of building entrepreneurial competency among youth. This paper explores youth entrepreneurship education, most suitable at the secondary school level, through the mobilization of embedded entrepreneurship pedagogy. The paper is informed by a two, recently completed research projects, involving classroom teachers, and practicing entrepreneurs. Those projects, which examined how secondary schools can sharpen their entrepreneurial offerings to students, and in addition to their primary findings, hinted at the possibility of infusing key entrepreneurial principles into all curricular learning experiences. To illustrate this approach, this paper will examine how embedded entrepreneurship education can be included as part of the curricular and pedagogical planning of any subject area. It introduces six key practices for embedded entrepreneurship and explores, with examples, their curricular and cross-curricular potential.