Sarah Robinson

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Aarhus University

Purpose Entrepreneurship education is transforming from traditional teacher-led classrooms to student-centred learning environments, where effectuation principles are increasingly adopted as a pedagogical framework. Yet despite its promise for developing real-world entrepreneurial capabilities, the implementation of effectuation principles in class...

In this paper, we ask what is the university for? Currently, universities worldwide are facing a legitimacy crisis, contesting and threatening what the purpose of the university is. Higher education institutions are under pressure to serve economical goals both nationally and globally, hindering a more robust sense of purpose. We explore how a focu...

Purpose This paper investigates the importance of team formation in entrepreneurship education, and the authors ask: how do different team formation strategies influence teamwork in higher education experiential learning-based entrepreneurship courses? Design/methodology/approach Employing a multiple case study design, the authors examine 38 stude...

The connected global world brings groups of people together, who are otherwise separated by geographical distances, time and economic constraints to play, learn, experiment and work together. The potential of the internet and digital technologies are enormous regarding informal learning. Digital technologies provide a myriad of platforms and format...

The university is moving on uncertain terrain. As we are writing this introduction, we are coming close to completing the first year of the pandemic (but possibly not the last). As a consequence, and due to the massive changes and restrictions, the last year has seen a disruption of some of the recent global drivers within higher education, such as...

Drawing on teaching that focuses on the pre-idea phase of entrepreneurship, a course was developed to initiate a seven-step process. These seven steps were didactically designed to bring awareness to and evoke understanding of the individual’s own inherent entrepreneurial potential. The process begun with identity development from ‘who am I’ and ‘w...

This volume wholeheartedly engages with the current climate in higher education and provides not only a thorough analysis of the foundational elements constituting higher education but also a critical discussion of possible connections to societal and cultural domains and policy debates. Today, higher education institutions and programs are beset w...

World organisations like OECD and World Economic Forum point to creativity and collaboration as important 21st century competences that should be supported through schooling. The European project (SEEDS) set out to examine the development of these competences linked to digital technologies in preschools. We ask: “How can these competences be nurtur...

This paper introduces “pedagogical nudging” as a method, which can transform student dispositions and their perceived “fit” with the field of entrepreneurship. The authors investigate what characterises the identity change process experienced by students when exposed to pedagogical nudging. Using ethnography, the authors apply an experiential-explo...

As higher education institutions have increasingly come under criticism for failing to equip students for a fast changing and unpredictable future, the role and purpose of the future university has come under debate (Barnett and Bengtsen, Knowledge and the university; Re-claiming life, Routledge, London, 2020). In response, discourses about entrepr...

Creativity and collaboration are 21st century skills that should be supported throughout schooling. In the SEEDS project we are in the process of developing a technologically enhanced toolkit for kindergartners to support creativity and collaboration in a kindergarten setting. In this paper we will showcase our first ideas, prototypes, and initial...

Med denne artikel ønsker vi at gøre opmærksom på, at vi i Danmark bør tage ved lære af den bagside, som test-regimet og accountability-tilgangen kan have på uddannelsessystemet, og i særdeleshed på lærerens effektuering af undervisningen i form af en snæver teach-to-the-test-tilgang, som vi ser det i en del angelsaksiske lande. Set i et handlingsfo...

This paper argues for a novel view of the entrepreneurial and asks, can faculty and universities play a role in reshaping neoliberalism? In the last ten years there has been a significant literature talking about the impact of neoliberalism and its accountability regime on faculty and universities. This neoliberal regime is about recreating the uni...

Purpose Since Sarasvathy’s (2001) research on decision making logics of expert entrepreneurs effectuation has become a corner stone in entrepreneurship education. Effectuation is not only subjectified in EE but has also become conceptualized as a method in the learning process. This paper aims at exploring how students, who are novice entrepreneur...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to ask: what effect does moving from individual to collective understandings of the entrepreneur in enterprising education have on the student’s learning? And given this shift in understanding, is there a need for a new paradigm in entrepreneurship learning? Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on ethno...

The interest in teachers’ discourses and vocabularies has for a long time been studied under the rubric of knowledge, most notably teachers’ professional knowledge. This interest can be traced back to Shulman’s distinction between different kinds of teacher knowledge and Schwab’s interest in the role of practical reasoning and judgement in teaching...

Purpose - This chapter demonstrates how Humanities students in a blended learning course become active learners, use an entrepreneurial approach, and reflect on the achievement of an entrepreneurial mindset. Students at the Master’s ICT-based Educational Design, where they work with information- and communication technology in an educational contex...

Purpose The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about the complexity and heterogeneity of entrepreneurship education. In order to achieve this objective, this paper combines educational psychology with perspectives from entrepreneurship education research to make explicit educators tacit assumptions in order to understand how these...

Questions we care about (Objectives): When students have to work on challenging tasks, as it is often the case in entrepreneurship classrooms that leverage experiential learning, team success becomes central to the students learning. Yet, the formation of teams is often left up to the students or prearranged at random. Therefore we investigate the...

A key debate in the curriculum field has centred on the extent to which teachers should or could achieve agency over the curriculum they enact. Threats to teacher agency have come from top-down control of curricula, either through input regulation (prescription of content, methods and/or teaching materials) or output regulation (steering through ou...

The interest in teachers’ discourses and vocabularies has for a long time been studied under the rubric of knowledge, most notably teachers’ professional knowledge. This interest can be traced back to Shulman’s distinction between different kinds of teacher knowledge and Schwab’s interest in the role of practical reasoning and judgement in teaching...

There is an ongoing tension within educational policy worldwide between countries that seek to reduce the opportunities for teachers to exert judgement and control over their own work, and those who seek to promote it. Some see teacher agency as a weakness within the operation of schools and seek to replace it with evidence-based and data-driven ap...

If the goal of entrepreneurship education is to make changes in society via changes in individual behaviour, then we need to implement pedagogies that promote transformational learning. Transformational learning is a process of increasing awareness that helps learners interpret and reinterpret their experiences. Catalysts for transformation can be...

The concept of teacher agency has emerged in recent literature as an alternative means of understanding how teachers might enact practice and engage with policy (e.g. Lasky, 2005; Leander & Osbourne, 2008; Ketelaar et al., 2012; Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2013). But what is agency? Agency remains an inexact and poorly conceptualised construct in...

Educational reforms have largely been analysed from the perspective of the effects on students, teachers and schools, their practices and performance. While there is also a large body of literature that draws on the rhetoric and discourses found in policy documents, there has been little attention given to the organisations in which the educational...

The concept of teacher agency has emerged in recent literature as an alternative means of understanding how teachers might enact practice and engage with policy (e.g. Lasky, 2005; Leander & Osbourne, 2008; Ketelaar et al., 2012; Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2013). But what is agency? Agency remains an inexact and poorly conceptualised construct in...

Ethnography is a research method that seeks to gain a detailed understanding of how informants see their world and how they understand the problems that they confront in everyday life. As such it is an ideal method to both study the practices that entrepreneurship educators engage in and the discursive and cognitive shifts that learners go through...

Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence offers an example of a different approach to national curriculum development. It combines what are claimed to be the best features of top-down and bottom-up approaches to curriculum development, and provides an indication of the broad qualities that school education should promote rather than a detailed descript...

Promoting entrepreneurialism, enterprise and entrepreneurial behaviour is a goal shared by many governments. European policy rhetoric strongly supports the promotion of entrepreneurial, creative and innovation skills in all disciplines and the cultivation of entrepreneurial mindsets. The transformation of society from an industrial society into a k...

Drawing on agency literature, this paper demonstrates how teachers’ professional agency emerged when seemingly conflicting strategies were imposed on them in policy reform. Policy discourse is often linked to performance and accountability measures, which teachers respond to in a number of ways. Some education researchers identify tensions caused b...

This ethnographic study captures the processes that led to change in an Australian public education system. The changes were driven by strong neo-liberal discourses which resulted in a shift from a shared understanding about leading educational change in schools by knowledge transfer to managing educational change as a process, in other words, allo...

The apparent simplicity of ethnographic methods--studying people in their normal life setting, going beyond what might be said in surveys and interviews to observe everyday practices--is deceptive. Anthropological knowledge is gained through fieldwork and through pursuing a reflexive flexible approach. This study carried out in a non-government pri...