Using rich narratives in entrepreneurship education

Project introduction and background information

As part of the Comenius Teaching Fellowship scholarship ‘Making Entrepreneurship Education more inclusive’, we have developed in 2019 nine rich video narratives. The video cases created are real stories of entrepreneurs active in emerging or developing economies. In their stories they tell about their challenges and problems as well as their entrepreneurial journeys and how they addressed issues along the way. From an educational point of view the video cases combine case-based learning with the power of narratives and the use of technology-driven approaches (i.e. video technologies).

Objective and expected outcomes

Employing rich narrative video cases as a teacher can serve different types of desired student learning outcomes, including more cognitive as well as affective ones. This is because in the narratives there is ample room for reflection on the entrepreneurial journey, critical incidents that emerged during that journey and specific dilemma’s that the entrepreneurs discuss and reflect on.

Results and learnings

The richness firstly means that the cases are very rich in narrative information: they are stories that entrepreneurs active in emerging economies tell themselves and share with us. The power of stories is that they make a direct connection with everyday activities, decisions and practice relevant to entrepreneurship in emerging/developing economies. Secondly, rather than paper-based information, the cases studies are presented to students in a media-rich format: a video. As such these rich narrative video-cases are a more complex than the classical paper case-studies, and, they are more authentic as the problems and dilemmas are conveyed to the students in the verbal and non-verbal language of the actual case-owner (i.e. the entrepreneur).  Findings in the scientific literature indicate that perceptions of the feasibility of entrepreneurship are more strongly affected by videos than by cases (Fellnhofer, 2018).

Recommendations

Although narratives play an important role in our video-cases, the focus remains on experiences and learning from that experiences. The narrative thus remains the object. However, we acknowledge that narratives can be even more powerful in education when we approach narratives as a method of inquiry to learn about, for or through entrepreneurship: thinking narratively can be also seen as pedagogy, in which we actually ‘live and learn in, and through, the living, telling, retelling, and reliving of our stories’ (Huber, Caine, Huber, & Steeves, 2013).

Practical outcomes

The nine videos have been developed in the context the Comenius Teaching Fellow grant, between 2018 and 2019 (completed). The full teacher note, including scoring rubric, can be downloaded here (or at the downloads on the right).