Educating towards the prudent entrepreneurial self – an educational journey including agency and social awareness to handle the unknown

Developing graduate entrepreneurs and enterprising graduates

In this section, we will recap upon how research has portrayed the development of entrepreneurial education from both a narrow and a broad approach. We do not intend to make a systematic review of the field as that has been done by others in more density (c.f. Hägg and Gabrielsson, 2019; Nabi et al., 2017; Pittaway and Cope, 2007). Instead, we use this part as a key to unlock the following poles of paradoxes. We do not take sides nor do we argue that one pole is unique for the narrow or broad approach as the intertwined discussion in the field warrants little determination of sides. However, to reach the poles of paradoxes, a brief account of the history is needed to contextualize the nature of current thinking in the field. We depart from the two related definitions laid forward by Ball (1989, pp. 6–7) where

the narrow approach perceives entrepreneurship as business entrepreneurialism and sees its promotion and development within education and training systems as an issue of curriculum development, enabling young people to learn, usually on an experiential basis, about business start-up and management. On the other hand, the broad approach sees enterprising as a group of qualities and competences that enable individuals, organizations, communities, societies and cultures to be flexible, creative and adaptable in the face of, and as contributors to, rapid social and economic change.

Within these two definitions there are differences that have been picked up by scholars and also similarities. For example, already in 1985 Robert Ronstadt termed teaching entrepreneurship as entrepreneurial education but given the circumstances and the time he was clearly addressing a narrow approach. Furthermore, in the reasoning of Jones and Iredale (2010), they separate entrepreneurship and enterprise education arguing that an enterprise is by nature more experiential, which following Ball (1989) would also lean on a narrow approach despite the explicit focus on enterprising pedagogy in Jones and Iredale's study. The intertwined relation between the narrow and the broad approach despite an attempt to separate the two has both decreased and increased over time, and there is no clear separation between the two, and perhaps the historical foundation of them being born through an understanding of how entrepreneurs behave and develop businesses (Vesper, 1982) as well as the behaviour of small business owners and the knowledge, skills and attitudes they possess (Gibb, 1987) has too many similarities for creating distinct educational paths, despite continuous attempt in diversifying the two (e.g. Jones and Iredale, 2010; Neck and Corbett, 2018).

More recently, entrepreneurial education has been viewed as relating to education and/or training programs (Valerio et al., 2014). In this approach, it is the anticipated application of knowledge and skills that organizes learning activities as being about entrepreneurship (i.e. education) or for the purpose of entrepreneurship (i.e. training). Such an approach assumes that the intentions of the learner can be known in advance, often a problematic assumption. Indeed, Fayolle and Gailly (2008) outlined several challenges unique to the field of entrepreneurial education. They argue that at the ontological and theoretical level, insufficient consensus exists as to what is entrepreneurship and discuss the pedagogical challenges that naturally flow from such a lack of agreement. Correspondingly, Gibb (2008) observed the field's development has resulted in “a veritable pot-pourri of activity delivered under the enterprise/entrepreneurship umbrella”. Not surprisingly then, there are many different views present in the literature regarding what is the appropriate focus of entrepreneurial education and what might actually constitute learning (or impact) in the field (Rideout and Gray, 2013).

In the absence of either mature pedagogical content knowledge (Magnusson et al., 1999) and/or any accepted signature pedagogy (Shulman, 2005), the field has continued to drift in multiple directions to satisfy the diverse needs and wants of its various advocates (see Landström et al., 2021 on the social structure of entrepreneurial education). As the reach of entrepreneurial education continues, the very legitimacy of the field is questioned (Fayolle et al., 2016; Rideout and Gray, 2013), and the challenge of satisfying the requirements of multiple stakeholders (Jack and Anderson, 1999) increasingly threatens to become unsustainable. Just as the overarching field of entrepreneurship needed to come to grips with how its key characteristics are interpreted and combined (Gartner, 2001), it would seem logical for entrepreneurial education to address this issue as well. Doing so, would allow the field to contemplate 1) the different poles of paradox that divide us and 2) the validity of having the prudent entrepreneurial self as a unifying aim for all forms of entrepreneurial education.

Unlike Gartner's (2001) elephant that can be imagined as being comprised elements that in a tactile sense differ significantly (i.e. tail, trunk, ears, etc.), entrepreneurial education demonstrates a split personality. Narrowly, entrepreneurial education can be training for venture creation (Aulet, 2013), where actions are predicated on assumptions related to relatively unknown factors. In this context, decisions and actions for tomorrow are being made with the limited knowledge of today. The anticipated outcomes of action outweigh the opportunities to step back and reflect on one's own development. Nevertheless, in such a context, unpredictability can be traded-off against time to produce greater predictability (Fiet and Patel, 2008) through the use of systematic search methods that may offer increased protection from the realities of failure.

Conversely, more broadly, entrepreneurial education can be aligned with the progressive development of a person's knowledge, skills and capability use in unknown contexts (Jones, 2019a). Here, failure is an essential (and unavoidable) aspect of the educational experiences (QAA, 2018), offering at least the illusion of a coherent set of circumstances through which learning deepens (Beard and Wilson, 2002).

In both contexts, educational institutions place arbitrary timelines within which to assess learning that may or may not be related to the planned actions and actual learner experiences. Within these moments of time, the opportunity to unite entrepreneurial education with quantifiable learning outcomes is lost, as micro-outcomes, like intentions to start a potential business, are preferred over more holistic outcomes, such as the usefulness of knowledge developed (see Nabi et al., 2017; Rideout and Gray, 2013 on the assessment discussion).

With direct reference to Fayolle and Gailly (2008), Fayolle (2018) speaks of the philosophical void that currently remains in the entrepreneurial education literature regarding what it means, and what are the roles of educators and students. We respond to Fayolle's challenge to consider society as the client of entrepreneurial education, viewing society also as Kegan (1994, p. 5) suggests, the provider of “the curriculum of modern life”. Without an overarching purpose, entrepreneurial education would seem beholden to many masters, remaining fragmented at the didactical level in terms of who is its audience, what is its knowledge focus, which pedagogical methods are appropriate, which methods of assessment should be used and finally, what is the ultimate goal of entrepreneurial education?

From the above perspective, we can return to Barnett (2004) and view the nature of unknownness present in modern society, which is increasing in degree of magnitude by the day. Alternatively, perhaps our consciousness vis-a-vis the existence of an unknown world is only really awakening as technology provides increased access to our local and global surrounds. This leads to greater demands on the individual as they must not only adjust to the demands of different societal changes but also how they as individuals can understand the personal ramifications of such change. Finally, the waves of change experienced in a single lifetime are seemingly more than any time in history (Barnett, 2004). The challenge that awaits the learner in today's society is to appreciate the gap between the abilities of one's mind relative to the challenges ever-present in the curriculum of modern life.

In the next section, we move beyond the dual nature of entrepreneurial education by positioning prudence as a potentially unifying element, drawing on the seminal work of Palmer (1998) to address six different poles of paradox present in both the entrepreneurial education literature and its related practice.

The dual nature of entrepreneurial education

Palmer (1998) notes the negative impact of either-or thinking in the educational literature, and we see this in entrepreneurial education literature. Palmer (1998, p. 67) addresses the need for wholeness in the following way:

The poles of a paradox are like the poles of a battery: hold them together, and they generate the energy of life; pull them apart, and the current stops flowing. When we separate any of the profound paired truths of our lives, both poles become lifeless spectres of themselves — and we become lifeless as well.

By exploring the ever-present contradictions in the literature, the aim of entrepreneurial education and its intended outcomes and methods, we can identify several noncontroversial paradoxes that we instead could view from an “and” perspective rather than an “either-or” perspective.

1. Entrepreneurial education should develop students for individual and collective contexts.

2. Entrepreneurial education should support student development and value creation.

3. Entrepreneurial education should be slow and fast.

4. Entrepreneurial education should embrace failure and protect from failure.

5. Entrepreneurial education should focus on education and training.

6. Entrepreneurial education should accommodate today and tomorrow.

What does prudence imply and why prudence over the other three cardinal virtues?

Before addressing what prudence implies, there is reason to also briefly address why prudence and not any of the other three cardinal virtues are of specific importance for entrepreneurial education. Aquinas discusses four cardinal virtues, justice, temperance, fortitude and prudence, noting that prudence alone is the directing principle of the other three virtues. The definition of moral virtue states that it is “a habit of choosing the rational mean, and as a prudent man [2] would define it” (Aquinas, 1915, p. 112). Prudence is a complex intellectual virtue that is interrelated with justice, temperance and fortitude (Broadhead and Gregson, 2018). In this sense, prudence acts as a “centring” process (see Richards, 1989), where, just like with the potter's wheel, life is shaped through contemplating how our actions in life wobble, become distorted and ultimately find shape through accommodating ambiguity (Hart, 2001). Throughout this process, prudence creates questions of oneself that shape our position vis-a-vis justice, temperance and fortitude. The application of prudence to entrepreneurial education also allows us to contemplate that “the purpose of education is to show a person how to define himself authentically and spontaneously in relation to the world – not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of the individual himself” (Merton, 1979, p. 3). This requirement for self-exploration through open-ended questioning enables prudence to align neatly to Jung's (1921) process of individuation within which one's vocational calling is also discovered through self-dialogue (Sharp, 1995).

Is wisdom acquired or learned?

Hart (2001, p. 117) argues that “we do not possess wisdom, as if it were an object; instead, we act wisely”. In much the same vein, Lawson (1961, p. vii) states that “wisdom lies in human action which possesses both intellectual and ethical orientation; and the promotion of such wisdom is the task of education”. While a long life of experience (Thomson et al., 2004) is logically associated with the development of prudence, Broadhead and Gregson (2018) highlight the basis upon which the components of Aquinas' prudence (in Table 2) can be incorporated into a curriculum (see also Aquinas, 1915, pp. 97–99). Our central thesis is that a likely by-product of successfully nurturing an “and” approach (rather than either-or) is the holistic development of entrepreneurial graduates capable of prudent behaviour. In the sense that an entrepreneur is always rooted to three distinct worlds (i.e. the past, the present and the future), there is a direct benefit to students who develop the (interrelated) capabilities of prudence. Importantly, this approach also neatly echoes the logic of Dewey's (1946) experiential continuum where past life experience is incorporated into the process of learning about our current and future experiences. Therefore, we argue that entrepreneurial students will especially benefit from acquiring the eight capabilities associated with prudence due to their future mental needs being aligned (simultaneously) to three distinct worlds, which we can now consider the temporal nature of.

Aquinas noted three specific time contexts for prudence. First, knowledge which has past (Memoria and Intelligentia) or what remains in our memory, so understanding and intelligence; second, knowledge which is being acquired, so the present (Docilitas, Solertia and Ratio) and third, knowledge of the future in form of conjecture (Providentia, Circumspecto and Cautio). These eight specific capabilities can be logically reconciled to the underlying behaviour of being entrepreneurial vis-a-vis the tasks associated with value creation. Given the inherent unpredictability of attempting to create new value, the development of mental abilities that reduce the possibilities of past experiences being rendered “mis-educative” (Dewey, 1946) and naturally increasing the precision of trial-and-error learning, ensuring more past experiences are educative vis-a-vis future actions. In both the narrow start-up sense and broad enterprising approach, collectively, the eight parts of prudence hold the potential (Huang, 2015) to increase the efficacy of entrepreneurial actions by contributing to the development of guidance routines (Nelson and Winter, 1982), increasing one's awareness and understanding of past experiences relative to future actions (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) and reducing overconfidence (Busenitz and Barney, 1997) as it applies to estimating both supply and demand possibilities as they are related to consumer behaviour and all critical factors for nascent entrepreneurs and enterprising graduates.

Past, present and conjecture forms of entrepreneurial knowledge

Figure 1 portrays the development of a schema in the terminology of cognitive load theory (Sweller, 2016), which centres on how to develop the various types of knowledge that Aquinas connected to prudence (the arrow in the middle). In this connection, past forms of knowledge are not seen as redundant, for example the neglection of the business plan component and the move towards the pitching deck and other more lean or agile views. Consistent with paradoxes two and three, here we want to stress that past knowledge, what we actually remember when all details have vanished, actually plays a very important role in building up what Sweller et al. (2011) address as a schema in long-term memory. Without the basic factual domain-specific knowledge (which could be whatever depending on what target that is aimed for), there is nothing that the mind can reconnect with when facing present forms of knowledge. Oftentimes, we address this present type of knowledge either as knowing (Dewey, 1930) or procedural knowledge manifested through the skills acquired to perform certain tasks or activities (Alexander et al., 1991), which in a narrow start-up approach would imply issues, like pitching an idea, engaging in commercial activities, opportunity recognition and exploitation, etc. However, neither of these two forms, past or present, will move a student towards a prudent entrepreneurial self. To move in that direction (as noted in paradox five), which might take years and years as Aristotle reminded us already a couple of thousands of years ago (Thomson et al., 2004), we also need to engage in the conjecture form of knowledge as per paradox six that bears similarities to present ideas on conditional knowledge (Alexander et al., 1991) as a state of knowing when, why and for what reasons one ought to act in a specific manner in given situations. In the entrepreneurial world, it would imply the ability to make judgements on right and wrong, falling closely to the idea laid forward by Dewey (1891) on moral practice, where the aim is for individuals to engage in intelligent action. The eight forms of knowledge that are ingrained in the idea of prudence through its three parts are by no means a simple and straightforward endeavour. But, through seeing entrepreneurial education as wholesome in the spirit of Palmer (1998), there are six different and's that in conjunction might play different roles to develop in our view, a reachable entrepreneurial schema that provides a baseline to act in a prudent entrepreneurial way. From the arrow in Figure 1, we then move to the vertical and horizontal axes that provide different inputs for how to develop the eight different forms of knowledge that makes up the prudent entrepreneurial self.

A journey of social awareness

From the horizontal axis (see Figure 1), we see the possibility of enhanced social awareness linked to higher levels of knowing. From Comenius (1967), we learn that we plant the seed of knowledge in the individual and provide a broad scope of subject knowledge, but we cannot know which branch that each student will pay particular interest to and develop depth within. Hence, educating towards the prudent entrepreneurial self is not solely a matter of providing a specific subject matter where everyone will deep dive in the same specific area, but instead an orderly process that provides the necessary tools (skills not only to take action but also abilities to judge situation through developing the reflective ability, as well as forming attitudes on how to create value for the broader scope of society, vis-a-vis paradoxes two and five) to aid both the enterprising graduate and the entrepreneurial student in the journey from an inexperienced state to being increasingly curious, and eventually, knowing, in the sense of becoming temporally an expert vis-a-vis the task at hand (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1988). We do not argue that each individual will require all steps, and they might never move through the steps completely, but developing the seeds for a capacity for prudence also creates within the learner abilities of self-awareness and self-determination to take control over their continuing life-long journey as a learner.

This solo journey to an unknown destination whilst in the company of others seems in and of its self, a contradiction. However, and as discussed in paradoxes one and six, when viewed through the lens of constructive alignment (Biggs and Tang, 2011), it represents a journey already imagined. Biggs developed his constructive alignment approach by extending the prior work of Tyler (1949) and doing so accommodated the possibility of that each individual student's immediate needs (as learning objectives) could act as a compass to enable the navigation of one's own learning journey across all three time perspectives encompassed in prudence (i.e. past, present and future). Once operationalized as an individual-level construct (Biggs, 2017), the process of constructive alignment is supportive of any such individual growth trajectories. Through such a process, the development of the prudent entrepreneurial self would require the development of an individual learner agreement where learning outcomes, learning activities and methods of assessment are (in part) developed ex ante. In turn, this requires an appreciation of the different roles for the student (i.e. different levels of responsibility of the learning process) and educator (i.e. a movement between the teacher, guide and facilitator of learning experiences) vis-a-vis the interplay between pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy (see Hägg and Kurczewska, 2019; Jones et al., 2014).

A development of individuation as a learner

Movement up the vertical axis is tied inextricably to movement along the horizontal axis. As our student becomes curious of the world's curriculum, so does the possibility of deeper introspection. Viewed as transformative learning (Cranton, 2000), agency emerges as the epiphenomena of developing the cognitive architecture (Vygotsky, 1978) required for prudent behaviour; rather than trying to pinpoint other specific endpoints, we factor in the likely delayed progression (Jones, 2019a) that students of entrepreneurship will make towards authentic start-up activities, as per paradoxes three and five. We advocate a need to support the student to move from misperceiving the world (i.e. illusion) to developing within them hope about their ability to journey into unknown worlds (Barnett, 2004) and to do so with their “fidelity to the law of one's own being” (Sharp, 1995, p. 48) driving the development of self-control, where paradox four becomes important to be able to face uncertainty through a clear educational process. In addition to embracing Kegan's (1994) arguments to move students from an instrumental mind to one capable of self-authoring and self-transforming, this approach builds on the reasoning behind cognitive load theory and the importance of developing a basic understanding of a subject before venturing off into constructing new destinations. Hence, when addressing the extremes of enterprising and entrepreneurship, consistent with QAA (2018), we can acknowledge a difference in the subject matter, where entrepreneurship has a clear context in mind (being more domain-specific), and enterprising is more blurred (being more domain-general), whilst enterprising has a long-term focus of developing capabilities (i.e. metacognition), entrepreneurship is less future oriented through its high focus on methods and tools despite being contextualized in an uncertain environment. In embracing Palmer's (1998) wholeness approach, and as discussed in paradox one, we view the development of the prudent entrepreneurial self as occurring alongside the student's journey towards individuation (Jung, 1921); a journey through which Bandura's (2006) four core properties of human agency (i.e. intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness and self-reflectiveness) are essential to ensuring learning experiences are truly educative and not mis-educative (Dewey, 1946).

In summary, through the unification of six different poles of paradox found in the broad umbrella of entrepreneurial education, we envisage the possibility of the prudent entrepreneurial self. We view this initial outline of the prudent entrepreneurial self as a potential blueprint for the nature of required change in cognitive architecture for such a schema. While acknowledging the challenge of such development, we identify the logical components and processes for such learner development. Through combining three distinct forms of temporal knowledge with specific pathways for personal and social development, we outline a plausible learning journey towards the prudent entrepreneurial self.