When Reflections are Beneficial to Entrepreneurial Learning?

Objectives: the purpose of the article is to stress the importance of reflections through transformative learning in the entrepreneurship education.Organisations work in highly dynamic and competitive environments (House et al, 2004), where entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills become vital not only to boost productivity, managing competition and foster innovation (Higgins and Mirza, 2012), but also to encourage new ways of thinking (European Commission, 2013) to contribute successfully to the economy. Consequently, European policies (European Commission, 2006and 2008) and the Higher Education (BIS, 2011) have encouraged the educational sector to engage entrepreneurial education within university curriculum. A combination of experiential learning, skill building and mindset shift are indeed provided by entrepreneurship education in order to inspire students to consider an entrepreneurial career for their futures (Wilson, 2008).

Approach:Freire (1970) argue that adult learners develop their abilities to evaluate, ask questions and take actions on various contexts through a critical consciousness process. Freedom is required to encourage the engagement of action and reflections among learners. This enables transformative learning at personal and social level (Dirkx, 1998). A framework for understanding transformative learning is offered by Daloz (1996). He identifies the importance of discover and construct meaning within our lives as an essential feature to motivate the participation of adult learners in formal learning experiences. This will impact positively the dialogue among learners and, consequently, reflections.

Implications: Understanding reflections and their positive use to promote effective learning is a key value for a learner. Reflective methods are useful not only to engage students actively (McGrath-Champ et al., 2013), but also to promote innovative learning. Reflective approaches are significant helpful in entrepreneurship education to encourage learners to reflect upon their active learning engagement. Furthermore, using a practise-based perspective will impact their present abilities to assess resources in a social process of learning with active involvement (Higgins, and Elliott, 2010).
Value: According to the Human Capital theory (Becker, 1964; Freeman, 1986) education is an investment decision; people invest on higher education with the perspective to access and to grasp future employment opportunities. The reflective features are honed because students readily identify with each other’s learning through an approach different from the top-down teacher-direct learning (Abercrombie, 1969). Educators could facilitate the reflective process however reflections are always effective in a learner. They could enable student to recognise his/her entrepreneurial aptitude toward observe the world, grasp opportunities with a self-awareness of his/her strengths and weaknesses.