3 The reflexivity grid

Exploring conscientization in entrepreneurship education

Leona Achtenhagen and Bengt Johannisson

Introduction

Entrepreneurship education has witnessed a shift from teaching about entrepreneurship in different forms towards encouraging the actionand activity-based training of students for entrepreneuring through business plan writing on fictitious or concrete ventures to enacting these ideas in real life. For example, Ollila and Williams-Middleton (2011) describe ways in which a venture creation approach allows students to “test the waters” while reflecting on real-life situations and while exploring entrepreneurial behaviours (see also Williams-Middleton & Donnellon, 2014). Though there has been a growing focus on simulating or experiencing entrepreneurial behaviours through entrepreneurship education, little space has been given to students’ reflexivity in positioning themselves as learning subjects beyond educational settings. Yet very often questions posed by our students in the classroom, for example when listening to entrepreneurs telling them about their venture journeys, start with a “why” statement, clearly expressing their desire to engage with reflexivity. Reflexivity is then not only understood as a kind of generalized self-awareness (Swan, 2008, p. 393) but also as a concern for the world at large (Swan, 2008, p. 394).

We thus argue that reflexivity plays an important role in entrepreneurship education, whether in supporting students in becoming responsible entrepreneurs or in training them to develop the intuitive insight eventually needed to determine what is right and wrong both practically and ethically in various types of concrete situations. Situated knowing differs from the general and formal knowledge that academic education typically provides. The ancient Greeks did not only recognize Aristotelian episteme, techne and phronesis but also mētis, or cunning intelligence (Letiche & Statler, 2005). While the two former modes refer to scientific knowledge and to skill proficiency, the latter two recognize knowledge as situated, experientially acquired and embodied. Mētis concerns a knowing of how and when to apply rules of thumb, or street smarts, for instance when enacting a venture, and phronesis represents practical wisdom on ways to act judiciously in a particular situation (Flyvbjerg, 2001). This is the kind of knowing that we associate with entrepreneuring (Johannisson, 2011, 2014).

Getting students to acquire and practise mētis and phronesis in an academic context that otherwise promotes episteme and techne calls for a conscious pedagogical approach to advancing reflexivity. Mētis and phronesis bring students out of their traditional roles as passive recipients of scientific knowledge and advice delivered by teachers. This is what Freire (1970, 1998) refers to as a “banking system”, referring to a metaphor of students as containers into which educators place knowledge. Instead, students are expected to take responsibility for their own learning by becoming personally involved and by using their curiosity to build new knowledge and to enforce their entrepreneurial identity. In this chapter, we will explore modes of reflexivity this challenge triggers and how these modes capture students’ experiences in different learning contexts.

In doing so, we draw considerably on Paulo Freire’s work. Since his notion of “conscientization”, originally published in his Pedagogy for the Oppressed (1970), mainly concerns developing (Latin American) countries, we instead relate to his notion of “epistemological curiosity”, the focus of his last book Pedagogy of Freedom (1998). Epistemological curiosity refines spontaneous or ingenuous curiosity through reflection: “one of the fundamental types of knowledge in my critical-educative practice is that which stresses the need for spontaneous curiosity to develop into epistemological curiosity” (Freire, 1998, p. 83). This development builds from the students’ concrete experiences with the world.

The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. We open by arguing for a pedagogy that allows (business school) students to conscientiously enact not only their own learning, but to also contribute to the (local) world in which their learning occurs. Next, we propose three different modes of enacting reflexivity – cognitive/emotional, hierarchy/network and being/becoming. We then present and empirically illustrate two alternative pedagogical paths to the enhancement of reflexivity and use these to illustrate examples of reflection along the three modes. Taking the first road forces students out of their comfort zones and of their view that entrepreneurship represents just another form of management and economic value creation. We refer to this path as the “catharsis approach”. The second path originates from contemporary students’ familiarity with social media and from its potential for the creation of an entrepreneurial identity. We refer to this path as the “blogging approach”. Based on our findings, we develop a “reflexivity grid”. By capturing cognitive and socio-emotional effects, this grid presents different forms of reflexivity of relevance to responsible (would-be) entrepreneurs. One dimension of this two-dimensional grid covers the proposed modes of enacting reflexivity, while the other dimension concerns in which (personal, academic or global) communities of practice reflexivity can be located. Using this grid, we present various types of activities that may be used as part of an entrepreneurship curriculum to support different aspects of reflexivity. We conclude the chapter by discussing further challenges confronted when facilitating activities aimed to enhancing reflexivity.

Getting started – making students enact their own learning

Entrepreneuring and different forms of knowledge

We associate entrepreneuring with generic human faculties such as curiosity, creativity and care – for oneself and for others through social (inter)action. As relentless action and interaction are at the core of entrepreneuring, it is best viewed as a process of creative organizing or as entrepreneuring (Steyaert, 2007; Johannisson, 2011), which, as experientially enacted, is closely related to learning (Hjorth & Johannisson, 2007). To capture this through a pedagogy of entrepreneurship, we claim (by paraphrasing Mahatma Gandhi) that “there is no road to entrepreneurship; entrepreneuring is the road”.

Entrepreneurship education – whether in focusing on hands-on skills for venture creation or on entrepreneuring as an approach to professional/public and personal/private life – requires a pedagogy that allows students to acquire mētis and phronesis and not just formal knowledge captured through episteme and techne. The commonly used pedagogical tool of business plan writing encourages the focus and internal consistency of a roadmap generation that is of no value when travelling into an unknowable future (see Chia & Holt, 2009). It fails both at encouraging students to develop improvisation skills through the handson enactment of venture ideas (= mētis) and in favouring prudence in guiding actions and their outcomes (= phronesis).

Practising entrepreneuring calls for versatile competencies. Lazear (2004, 2005) suggests that the enforcement of non-cognitive skills such as social skills might help aspiring entrepreneurs create a resourceful personal network that allows them to align their professional identities with other identities marking their life-world. Among individuals who recognize the world as becoming (Chia, 1996), and here we include entrepreneurs and university students who are about to craft their identities and careers, reflexivity is then as much an existential issue as a work-related project. Yet, with comparatively little experience to drawn on, students cannot typically trust the embodied knowledge that they bring to the university because it still appears as what Freire addresses as “ingenuous” curiosity and knowledge. Thus, universities have the opportunity or even responsibility to provide an arena in which students’ experiential learning as an outcome of curiosity, playfulness and emerging passion is designed to train and advance their practical reasoning or “actionable knowledge” (Jarzabkowski & Wilson, 2006).

Drawing on Weber (2003, 2005), we argue elsewhere that entrepreneurship education at business schools can fruitfully coach students in developing their entrepreneurial selves (Achtenhagen & Johannisson, 2013, 2014). Such identity work requires that students – individually and collectively – take charge of their own development. In the university setting, students can be encouraged to activate their immediate social worlds, and namely, their peer students, in this construction endeavour, creating a training ground for students to acquire core entrepreneurial capabilities. Self-organizing not only supports entrepreneurship as creative organizing, but solidarity and democracy as well (Spinosa, Fernando & Dreyfus, 1997). This in turn renders students aware of other values than economic ones such as social, ecological and cultural values. In line with our concern for supporting students in developing their entrepreneurial selves, we thus view socially and environmentally responsible projecting as important dimensions of the process of entrepreneuring (Steyaert & Katz, 2004).

Identity work self-organizing also bridges students’ professional and private lives. Today, international programmes are found in many business schools, as very diverse student cohorts provide social and cultural variety that can be used to complement traditional teaching resources (see Achtenhagen & Johannisson, 2013). This can save personnel and financial resources, and most importantly provide a more dynamic and potential context.

Introducing three modes of reflexivity

An education in entrepreneuring that aims at benefiting both students and society triggers student experiences along different modes of reflexivity, which in themselves present dualities in that they have two opposing poles. We identify three such modes and label these dualities as “from cognitive to emotional engagement”, “from a hierarchic to a networked order” and “from a concern for the present situation (as being) to an orientation towards the future (as becoming)”. These modes are discussed in more detail in the following.

Between cognitive and emotional reflexivity: more or less explicitly, academic literature rather normatively presents critical management research as a cognitive activity whereby the researcher’s own understanding and values are integrated into thorough investigations of what is taken for granted by others (Alvesson & Deetz, 2000; Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009). While such an approach questions the status quo of received knowledge, it appears to be too distanced from a practice approach (Schatzki, 2001; Chia & Rasche, 2010). A practice approach instead highlights reflexivity as not only a cognitive project but (also) as a social and emotional activity (Swan, 2008) and, in the context of entrepreneuring, even as an existential endeavour (cf. Johannisson, 2011) relevant to the crafting of an entrepreneurial identity.

If reflection is merely treated as a mental process, it may in turn prevent hands-on action rather than triggering it (see Brunsson, 1985), which obviously would run counter to the notion of a more action-based pedagogic approach to entrepreneurship education aimed at encouraging entrepreneurial drive (see Florin, Karri & Rossiter, 2007). Kyrö, Seikkula-Leino and Mylläri (2011) suggest that effective action-based entrepreneurship education should be based on developing key competences and propose that affection (relating to values and attitudes; see Gibb, 2002) and cognition (relating to declarative knowledge and procedural skills) should be combined with conative factors. Conation refers to aspects of motivation and volition (see English & English, 1958; Snow, Corno & Jackson, 1996). Similarly, such combined capacities have been recommended as the means of explaining moral thought and action (Hannah, Avolio & May, 2011), which are crucial in the endeavour of training responsible entrepreneurs. However, as Messick (1996, p. 353) has noted, it is “exceedingly difficult to articulate educationally relevant processes fostering both personality and intellect, primarily because these overarching concepts are extremely complex as well as vague and amorphous”. The challenge of combining social/emotional features of reflexivity with the entrepreneurial dimension of experimenting is further amplified when educating young and rather inexperienced persons who are crafting their identities.

Between hierarchical and networked reflexivity: reflexivity can materialize as a formal and hierarchically structured – i.e. designed – activity typically organized by a teacher with fixed expectations regarding the form of results to be delivered and leaving little space for dialogue. The opposing pole of this duality is reflexivity as triggered spontaneously and as emerging from conversations with peers through multiple dialogues or polylogues. Related to responsible entrepreneurship education, the organizing of opportunities for reflection is an outcome of negotiations between groups of peers, whereby everyone can contribute with their “slice of genius” (Hill, Travglini, Brandeau & Stecker, 2010) that all human beings possess. In such networked and reflective educational settings, the role of the teacher necessarily changes from that of an instructor to one of mentor and/or role model in reflectively elaborating on their own professional academic competencies while engaging with students as a mentee, addressing not only educational issues but also existential challenges. Here, a promising dialogue can only emerge if students do not submit to their teachers altogether. In intercultural settings, with students for instance socialized into unquestionable seniority principles, establishing such dialogue requires extra care (see Achtenhagen & Johannisson, 2013).

Reflexivity between criticizing what has been and appreciating what may become: reflexivity is often associated with a thorough examination of what “has been” and of what “is”, so that those who are privileged are revealed while those who are marginalized are recognized. From a more conservative stance, this is mainly about correcting what retrospectively appears to be mistaken. However, reflexivity can also be associated with looking for coincidences that can be turned into opportunities and further enacted into real events – the trademark of entrepreneuring. Some argue that the ultimate vision of entrepreneuring is to create new worlds (Spinosa et al., 1997). Focusing on reflexivity as part of an entrepreneurship curriculum calls for careful consideration of how it is enacted. Eriksen (2011) notes the importance of being concerned with student self-development and how such “making of capable selves” could be achieved. However, while he along with Schön (1983, p. 276) differentiates between “reflection-in-action” and “reflection-on-action”, we suggest that a practice approach could bridge this divide. As a practice, entrepreneuring surfaces as processual, founded in an ontology of becoming (Chia, 1996) where improvisation and the use of analogy jointly invite reflexivity while space for new organizing and arrays of action is created (Johannisson, 2011).

Alternative pedagogical approaches for enhancing reflexivity

We have in the context of academic education experimented with two contrasting ways of stimulating epistemological curiosity and reflexivity among (business) students in a course setting. The first approach is based on the assumption that any student as a human being has a dormant potential to reflect on intellectual, practical and existential issues but that there may be barriers to such processes that must first be removed. The dominant management ideology of the business school setting and limited experience with or resources for interactions with local constituencies outside of the university hinder the crafting of a responsible entrepreneurial mindset. Students will then need help to escape ideological restrictions and the associated “banking system” (Freire, 1970) of knowledge provision. This can only be accomplished by exposing students to a radical experience through a “catharsis approach”. The second approach aims at stimulating reflexivity by drawing upon unique capabilities that contemporary students as “digital natives” have, thereby recognizing them as competent citizens. As noted by Freire (1998, pp. 36–37), it is important to recognize students’ capabilities, and we thus decided to articulate their digital skills (cf. Spinosa et al., 1997). According to Berglund and Johansson (2007), it is important to enact concrete “situations” to accommodate conscientization processes, and thus we next reflect on business school education ventures facilitated at two universities in southern Sweden that have adopted two different approaches.

Conscientization¹ through emancipation²

The rationale for and the design of a catharsis approach

From the mid-1970s, Linnaeus University has offered a bachelor’s programme in Entrepreneurship and Business Development (EBD). Over its first two decades of operation, a focus was placed on intense internships held in small firms through which students individually for two years socialized into the entrepreneurial milieu by working closely with owner-managers and by completing assignments translating between academic knowledge (episteme and techne) and practical knowing (mētis and phronesis) as applied in the firms. This model was then succeeded by a programme involving less intense practice in student teams and in different firms over the study period. This focus on practice in and concern for entrepreneurial values and behavioural norms is considerably reduced in the current EBD programme. One of the authors was however asked to draw attention once again to the original premise of the bachelor’s programme and to organize a training context that would facilitate student experiences with entrepreneuring as a hands-on practice extending beyond for-profit venturing. As the students had already been colonized by management ideologies communicated through a traditional academic episteme format, shock therapy was deemed required to convert the students. It turned out to be convenient to integrate this educational challenge with a research and development project aimed at adding a social dimension to the traditional triple helix constellation: the university, political body and business community.

The SOcial Regional Innovation System (SORIS) project, which ran from January 2014 to January 2015, was financially supported by a state agency, a regional political body and the university. It was also backed by a loosely coupled network organizing the regional social economy that involved workintegrating social enterprises as well as voluntary organizations and social activists. The formal project owner was Macken’s Friends, a non-profit association supporting one of the work-integrating social enterprises. A steering committee for the project was established, including resourceful and committed persons originating from the public, private and non-profit sectors. One of the authors, who also initiated SORIS, became the project leader and orchestrated the everyday operations of SORIS together with a project assistant.

With the formation of SORIS in February 2014, the project leader informed the programme’s 37 first-year bachelor’s students (all Swedish speaking) on entrepreneuring as a practice in general and as applied to SORIS in particular. They were then invited to participate in the enactment of three social ventures and were accordingly asked to self-organize into groups (one for each venture). The first venture, SNI (Social Network Innovation), aimed at establishing a tighter network between work-integrating social enterprises in the region. An experienced consultant who was also the chairperson of the board of one of the social enterprises became SNI’s process leader. The second venture, Gottfrid’s Barn, focused on energizing an emerging social venture in the tourism industry. SORIS acted as a temporary incubator for the venture mainly by providing mentoring support. Its initiators, themselves excluded from the labour market, remained as SORIS process leaders. The third venture, Växjö Young Competence (VYC), aimed at creating a staffing company offering young people’s competencies to privateand public-sector employers. A hard-core economist who later became a social activist, the originator of the venture idea, became VYC’s process leader.

The three social ventures were run sequentially from March to May 2014 lasting one month each and were reported at an innovation forum held at the university at the end of the month. Process leader(s) and student representatives then jointly and in public presented proposed measures for enacting the ventures whereby they were scrutinized by a panel of (regional) experts. Roughly one week after the forum, the students were individually examined through brief written reports whereby they were asked to reflect on personal and professional experiences gained throughout their involvement in SORIS and to position the latter against contrasting images of entrepreneuring. According to several scholars (e.g. Steier, 1991; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009), the basis of reflexivity is to reflect on one’s own impact on experiences created. This applies to students as much as it does to researchers and practitioners.

Evidence of reflexivity achieved through emancipation

In exploring our conclusive individual examination of the undergraduate students involved in SORIS to identity their ways of reflecting, we had two foci. The first concerned the students’ understanding of the entrepreneurial processes that they had co-enacted. We then asked them to use contrasting logics of “causality” and “effectuation” to structure their interpretations of their experiences, explicitly referring to Shane and Venkataraman (2000) and Sarasvathy (2001) (for details, see Johannisson, 2016a). Our second focus involved exploring illustrations related to the three proposed modes of reflexivity – the emotional/ cognitive mode, the hierarchy/network mode and reflections regarding the being/ becoming mode – as identified above. Below we provide some quotes related to each of these.

Reflexivity in the cognitive/emotional mode:

Both students recognize the need to hold back short-term personal interests when engaging in social entrepreneuring. The male student notes his concern for his own entrepreneurial career, which brings him close to the cognitive pole. The female student in contrast reveals her emotional stance and demonstrates a sense of solidarity with the initiators of the venture.

Reflexivity in the hierarchy/network mode:

Both students show that they have experienced problems in dealing with the ambiguities and paradoxes that they associate with the VYC venture. This suggests that the students feel locked into a hierarchical structure with few opportunities to break out and establish a networked structure with other students. To a great extent, this perceived imprisonment within a given structure is self-imposed given the process leader’s explicit ambition to practise democratic leadership.

Reflexivity in the being/becoming mode:

In reflecting on their involvement in the projects, both students seem to feel that they have had a learning experience that has helped them imagine their own entrepreneurial careers. The female student underscores the importance of engaging personally while the male student communicates the need to recognize that entrepreneuring is a relational exercise. Clearly, both students in their reflections have adopted a “becoming” mode.

Not very surprisingly, multiple tensions dominate the students’ reflections on their participation in SORIS. Nevertheless, the quotes bear witness to important lessons regarding the students’ own understandings of entrepreneuring and of what it takes to practise it both with respect to their own personal development and regarding their interactions and responsibilities within and across boundaries of the academic context.

Conscientization through articulation

The rationale for and design of a blogging approach

The second case draws upon some of the students’ unique capabilities to practice and enhance their reflexivity as part of an adequate pedagogy for responsible entrepreneurship education. Given that today’s students are “digital natives”, it was natural for us to develop an approach that would make use of this familiarity as a social and cognitive asset. The approach involved blogging activity following through the entire introductory master course entitled Entrepreneuring: Person and Process at Jönköping International Business School. As its name indicates, the purpose of this course was to invite students to develop their entrepreneurial selves based on a hands-on, practice-oriented approach. The blogging activity was coached and channelled through oral and written instructions that noted the importance of reflexivity for responsible entrepreneuring and through a number of guiding questions posed by us, the educators. In an earlier paper, we presented the findings of a blogging experiment that approached student reflexivity through individual tasks (see Achtenhagen & Johannisson, 2011). Here, we aim to examine the social dimension of reflexivity.

For a highly international cohort of master’s students, we thus adopted a relational design to capture entrepreneuring and entrepreneurial learning as a collective phenomenon. Using diversity (in terms of prior experiences and cultural backgrounds) as a criterion, the students were assigned to groups of four to five students. In addition to writing their own blog entries on various assigned topics, students could post additional entries on different entrepreneurship-related aspects of personal interest to them, and they were asked to comment on one another’s blog entries. In turn, different levels of reflexivity could be captured first through individual reflections on the different course sessions, the course literature, and the students’ prior experiences and second through reflexivity among equals, creating an arena for exchange and mutual learning. The instructions clearly communicated that students should not summarize readings and class sessions but should instead link the readings, class activities and their own experiences to provide their own thoughts on these linkages. Students were explicitly invited to question what they had heard and read.

Evidence of reflexivity achieved through blogging

Below we provide examples of students’ blog entries to illustrate how they capture the three different modes of reflexivity introduced above.

Reflexivity in the cognitive/emotional mode:

This discussion between the students illustrates two aspects of relevance to this chapter. First, it demonstrates how the students reflected on what they had heard during the guest lecture from a local entrepreneur in relation to their own experiences and opinions on entrepreneurial behaviour. Second, it shows how this mutual interaction was used to negotiate an agreement on what is right and wrong as evident from the discussion on moral behaviour. Both of these aspects illustrate students’ attempts to train their phronesis and mētis.

Reflexivity in the hierarchy/network mode: the following reflective discussion illustrates how the students negotiated a common view of the contents of a lecture challenging mainstream views on entrepreneurship and introducing them to the concept of entrepreneuring largely based on Johannisson (2011). While the students had been explicitly encouraged to challenge received views, the discussion below illustrates the students’ struggle in coming to terms with whether they had bought into what they learned or not.

The discussion above illustrates how epistemological curiosity (Freire, 1998) can emerge also in a peer-based setting in which newly acquired insights are tested and refined.

Reflexivity regarding being/becoming: the examples of reflexivity shown below illustrate considerations regarding how entrepreneuring is enacted.

[response from African student thanking the German student for her post …]

These excerpts illustrate the academic reflexivity process of becoming through mutual learning among peers. An important aspect of this emerging reflexivity is the openness to dare to say which subject-related aspects are not yet quite clear and the openness to take on explanations from fellow students. The process of explaining theories to peers including the search for examples that explain the subject at hand deepens understanding of the subject matter even if just for explanation purposes.

The “reflexivity grid” – a proposed integrated framework

Both cases confirm that there is not just one but at least three modes of reflexivity that are activated when students encounter mētis and phronesis as situated and experientially acquired knowledge. These modes of reflexivity also constitute one axis of what we refer to as the “reflexivity grid”, which is summarized in Table 3.1 below. The second axis of the grid concerns where, i.e. in what context, reflexivity “takes place”. Through both of our two pedagogical approaches, we identified three different yet coexisting contexts or “communities of practice” (Wenger, 1998) that students temporarily belong to while participating in an entrepreneurship education programme. These contexts are their personal community, academic community and global community. A “personal community” (see Wellman, 1982) is a network constituted by a student’s interpersonal relations. The relations that students bring upon joining a study programme are highly influenced by the students’ socio-cultural backgrounds. For example, in a number of blog entries students reflected on their families’ expectations regarding their entrepreneurial behaviours. The “academic community” is the temporary social cluster to which students are invited while enrolled at a business school or university. To a great extent it is populated by course mates, but other participants include academic staff and university stakeholders. In the case of SORIS, student teams assigned to social ventures clearly constituted such a community. The “global community” is the universal setting wherein a student participates as a citizen with both rights and obligations regarding social, environmental and moral issues. The global community does not recognize any boundaries in physical, social or mental space (Hernes, 2003). For example, throughout the blogging exercise, international students frequently described to their fellow students how insights gleaned from class had translated into their respective home contexts.

Social processes related to the three communities overlap and interact as students craft their identities and entrepreneurial selves. Membership in all three communities must be considered when identifying events whereby reflexivity may sediment into situated knowledge that we associate with mētis in regard to practical coping and with phronesis in regards to moral judgement.

The reflexivity grid integrates different aspects of reflexivity along proposed dimensions and provides examples as to how these dimensions might be captured in an educational setting – from inspirational meetings with entrepreneurs via reflective blogging to participation in (social) venture projects. These examples together with vignettes reported through the cases can jointly guide academic teachers who wish to creatively imitate our approach(es).

Concluding remarks

Echoing Freire’s advice to recognize ourselves as constant learners, in this chapter we encourage academic colleagues to expand ways of enhancing reflexivity among (business school) students. However, even more fundamental is approaching students as co-teachers and as co-learners.

We experience both the SORIS and the blogging case as appropriate mutual learning settings. Another conclusive lesson intentionally created but enhanced by serendipity is the sociality of entrepreneurship as both a practice and learning process. Socializing is today as much associated with close personal relations – in an educational context involving students and teachers – as it is with intense digital relating. This reveals the entrepreneurial self of the future.

The blog entries demonstrate this through a clear pattern: the designed event is represented by tasks given to the students to write about, but the discussion and interactions take place in response to individual posts. Furthermore, additional posts created outside the task structure of guiding questions are more improvised and effectuated (see Chia & Holt, 2009). They illustrate the students’ negotiations towards developing a clearer stance in determining for themselves what to consider right or wrong. In the case of SORIS, students were pushed into normality as in a “psychic prison” (Morgan, 2006) as much as many of the students had ideas that did not fit into SORIS’s format and that therefore were considered dysfunctional. During SORIS’s operation, students were also strangers to one another, as their previous programme courses had been delivered as traditional academic lectures. This experience explains the students’ awkwardness in terms of organizing their efforts in the SORIS programme. It also underlines how crucial it is that students are invited to experience entrepreneuring as relational and to become aware of the importance of collaboration in rendering entrepreneuring in the interest of society.

Our experience with blogging as a pedagogical approach to enhancing different dimensions of reflexivity shows that student familiarity with social media creates opportunities for identifying new ways of making students take charge of their own learning and of developing their reflexivity along different dimensions. At the same time, the blogging exercise offers educators opportunities to themselves practice entrepreneuring by experimenting with new pedagogical approaches to teaching and evaluating, serving as an entrepreneurial way of developing academic education. It is close at hand to invite readers to design student tasks whereby blogging carries a polylogue on the creation of social values like those aimed at through the SORIS project. Identifying was to grade reflexivity fairly however remains as a challenge to be addressed (cf. Francis & Cowan, 2008).

In spite of our broad approach, several contextual factors that condition student behaviour and (thus) the outcomes of blogging tactics are not considered. Additional impacts not considered here include the students’ contemporary social lives, the broader academic setting in which an entrepreneurship programme occurs and regional communities and their stakeholders. In our mind, these aspects invite further inquiry. For example, combining blogging as one of many ICT-based approaches can create room for building a learning community among university students across universities and national borders. Additionally, the blogging polylogue can easily be extended to include constituencies outside of the academic setting (e.g. practising entrepreneurs). Such interactivity may help us construct translations between formal education and experiential learning. This was practised in SORIS but certainly along a different and much more laborious, yet much needed, road. Perseverance is required not only in regard to developing epistemological curiosity and an entrepreneurial self but also in terms of entrepreneuring itself.

Notes

1 Although the concept of “conscientization” is not easily applied to a Western society like Sweden, we have maintained it as a conceptual attractor, as it is so closely associated with Paulo Freire.

2 This subsection draws extensively on Johannisson (2016b).

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