9 Between critique and affirmation

An interventionist approach to entrepreneurship education

Bernhard Resch, Patrizia Hoyer and Chris Steyaert

Introduction

The grand narratives of creativity and entrepreneurship, hailed as highly promising elements for growing the economy, have flowed, even flooded, into the lecture halls and curricula of business schools and management programmes around the globe (Steyaert & Dey, 2010). Hence, enacting critical approaches in entrepreneurship education means rowing hard against the tide. In fact, one could argue that any critique – no matter how enlightening or emancipatory – risks being perceived as either detached or hopeless in the face of such a powerful force. Still, we contend that it is naïve, if not potentially dangerous, to be overly optimistic about these twin notions, because they can distort and minimize the complexity that surrounds them.

Therefore, in the master’s-level course “Entrepreneurship and Creativity” that we have developed iteratively since 2009, we try to stimulate critical understandings of and alternative perspectives on the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurship. While a critical approach to entrepreneurship education can take different forms, our particular twist on the theme is grounded in the tension between critique and affirmation (Germain & Jacquemin, 2017), what Hjorth (2017) has called a “critique nouvelle”. More concretely, we argue that it is not enough to simply question the optimistic politics of entrepreneurship education. Instead we call for a critique of critique, which in our view requires affirmation (Weiskopf & Steyaert, 2009). According to Nietzsche’s (1969 [1886]) parable of three metamorphoses, critique is needed to make space for creation, yet critique without affirmation can become sterile (see also Weiskopf & Steyaert, 2009). In the spirit of Michel Serres’s “Troubadour of Knowledge” (1997), we believe that what makes imaginative learning possible is engaging in the unsettling practice of swimming in an ocean of “thirdness”, between the antipodes of critical reflection and creative affirmation.

In this course, the oscillation between critique and affirmation eventually takes the form of an interventionist pedagogy which integrates a series of sociomaterial and affective enactments. According to Fenwick and Edwards (2010), actor network theory (ANT) in particular offers the potential “for fresh and productive interventions within educational issues” (p. 1). More concretely, ANT-ish interventions destabilize existing associations among material and human actors by introducing new elements from the outside. Assuming that educational work unfolds through the assembling and disassembling of complex human and non-human relations, intervening in this process holds the potential for altering common perceptions and activities around learning pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. Therefore, we tactically intervene in the well-practised educational “assemblage” that typifies management education (Steyaert, Beyes & Parker, 2016) and (business) universities (Izak, Kostera & Zawadzki, 2017). Typically, our interventions aim at disentangling and reassociating time and space, bodies and motions, people and materials, and we constantly add new elements to the equation in sometimes curious ways: chairs are arranged in circles or removed altogether; students engage in improvisational theatre or visit a nightclub during the daytime; PowerPoint is banned while theoretical models become embodied in slogans, storyboards and soundscapes.

Such “reshuffling” opens up unusual learning formats which push towards critical reflection as well as experimentation with aesthetic, material, spatial and embodied ways of learning. At the same time, our interfering with the established assemblage of the business school classroom does not proceed without frustrations. In fact, it is often accompanied by (somewhat untypical) affective intensities. Students, for their part, have to step out of their usual comfort zone and class routines as they engage in a process of close collaboration. This requires them to disclose strengths and weaknesses, making it likely to trigger critical self-reflection. For us as instructors, the course requires an elusive balance between deliberate planning and flexible improvisation. Meanwhile, we also become the moderators of, and the projection screens for, all sorts of emotional intensities, both positive and negative, that students experience as they progress through their own learning journey.

In the following we will first describe the course in more detail by situating it in the context of the university and by zooming in on the opening session. As we share more details about the course process, we will describe more carefully our take on the modes of critique and affirmation and their interplay – which informs our interventionist approach to critical entrepreneurship education. By focusing on two particular course sessions that are vital in the overall learning journey, and by reviving a final presentation by one of the student groups, we try to exemplify and enliven this interventionist approach at the intersection of critique and affirmation in and beyond the classroom. We then discuss the theoretical groundwork and broader potential of an interventionist pedagogy in the context of critical entrepreneurship studies, and conclude this chapter by reflecting on the learning outcomes that this course can culminate in (or not) for both students and instructors.

Setting the scene

Any take on critique in entrepreneurship education, we argue, must begin with an assessment of its contextual conditions to determine how to proceed with a critical intervention. Over the past decade, the university where we teach the master’s course “Entrepreneurship and Creativity” has – like many business schools – increasingly built up an entrepreneurial emphasis by giving it priority in teaching and extra-curricular activities. These efforts range from a week-long “founders’ garage” and a “founder of the year prize” to the appointment of several professors in the field of entrepreneurship. This might be considered a fairly dramatic transformation for a business school that built its reputation on developing managerial experts in finance and consultancy but has increasingly incorporated disciplines and courses from the humanities and social sciences (Eberle & Metelmann, 2016) into its educational profile. In the university’s vision (as stated on its website), it engages in training “our students to become entrepreneurs whose actions are informed by social responsibility”.

Not surprisingly then, among the main attitudes that students bring to the course – usually filled to the maximum of 30 students – are enthusiasm about creativity and belief in entrepreneurship. Both concepts have become imperative signifiers of a post-industrial knowledge society, endowed with the promise of altering organizations, cities, communities and ourselves. Given this beginning, we know it will be a stretch to develop and maintain a critical edge in our course on entrepreneurship and creativity.

As students come in with a primarily positive view of entrepreneurship and creativity, our first challenge is to inquire more thoroughly into these preconceptions and to question their positive “bias”. One of the core mantras of the course is that we not only talk about creativity in the context of entrepreneurship, but also practise and experience it; that is, we “do” creativity, to understand how creation is the core of the process of entrepreneuring (Steyaert, 2007). Hence, what we as instructors try to “do” from the very beginning is disturb the familiar classroom through intervening in its spatial arrangements, learning formats, comfort zones and modes of presentation.

So, in the first session of the course we already pry into some student expectations, by removing all the tables and arranging the chairs into a circle (Steyaert, Hoyer & Resch, 2016). This might seem a rather minor deviation, but it launches us all on a different “entry” into the course. Since the circle of chairs creates a big opening in the middle, students are immediately drawn to the fact that the class has no real beginning or end but actually unfolds “in the middle” (Steyaert et al., 2016). Rather than validating new structures, though, we go on to re-arrange the classroom for each session according to the day’s programme. In the final session – when student groups enact their projects – the room is cleared out entirely and each group is responsible for arranging the empty space according to its needs. Sometimes a group even takes us to an entirely different space on campus, illustrating that they have internalized the “permission” to stray from the script.

Another way we try to alter some stabilized preconditions in the rigid context of the university is to tweak expectations around time. Instead of 12 sessions of two hours, we make it six sessions of four hours. This provides us with the possibility to create repetition and intensity. We also encounter other limits, to which we try to give a different twist. For example, we cannot stop the buzzer from going off at the start and end of every 45-minute teaching unit, but we can agree with the students to relocate the pre-scheduled break to a point in time when it fits the actual flow of the session. Likewise, though we must adhere to examination and grading policies that underpin the legitimacy of academic degrees at the business school, we are still free to ban the use of PowerPoint in students’ final group presentations, pointing out how this medium of supposedly professional communication extends its “genre-inherent characteristics even in the face of contradictory organizational requirements” (Schoeneborn, 2013, p. 1777).

Critique

Enacting critique

Once we have successfully fiddled with some of these taken-for-granted structures – thereby enacting a subtle yet material critique of the usual boundaries – we quickly schedule a first critical text. This reading – Rehn and De Cock (2009) – deconstructs creativity with its celebration of “the useful” and “the new”, namely by showing that creativity does not necessarily contain original properties. Moreover, we ask “what is meant by useful?” and “useful for whom?” to get students to reflect upon the startling idea that creativity per se does not yield positive results. More generally, the critical texts that we draw upon in the course mingle elements of various critical approaches such as denaturalization, use of critical theory and reflexivity. In particular, they provide interesting directions for two activities: expanding the prevailing individualized conception of creativity, and deconstructing the dominant image of the entrepreneur as an individual heroic male, who is granted flashes of God-given genius. We contrast this with a relational perspective, which regards entrepreneurial creativity as inherently embedded in cultural systems, material objects, and discursive formations; from this perspective creativity is socio-materially attributed and cannot be found inside certain objects or persons (Glӑveanu, 2010).

More fundamentally even in terms of enacting a critique that goes “against the grain”, we engage with relational changes, by connecting to different worlds: the world of choreography and (dance) theatre, the world of artistic creation and public intervention, and the world of entrepreneurial networks and urban renovation. In the following we will zoom in on one particular course session where students get a first impression of how – through strange encounters – an (affirmative) critique can play out beyond the boundaries of the classroom, as they engage in a four-hour city walk in a neighbouring city.

Taking a critical walk

Course session two: the class is on a field trip. We are on a train to visit a buzzing entrepreneurial neighbourhood in a city one hour away. Some students use this travel time to mingle with their groups and discuss the final presentations, while others casually engage with the tutors and share their excitement about the trip. Upon our arrival at the train station we are welcomed by an entrepreneur who is known for his alternative bookshop – also a café, event location and publishing house – which he initiated in a neighbourhood long before it became trendy (Deckert, 2016). Today he will show us his new project, near the station, part of the site of a huge urban renewal project the size of 10 soccer fields. As we enter the area of the former freight terminal into which the main investor has poured €1 billion, we immediately sense the tension between attempts to create an entrepreneurial third space and the blunt face of commercialization.

And so it continues. Walking in the shadow of the skyscrapers, all of them planned by big-name international architects, we witness the promise of the grand narrative: vegetarian restaurants, stylish bars and individualist designer stores – an evocation of the global and gentrified city. This project is surely part of the city’s effort to brand itself as a creative and entrepreneurial hub in close connection but also fierce competition with other cities to attract the global “creative class” (Florida, 2002). This political narrative of urban creativity (Steyaert & Beyes, 2009) urges city planners to engage in intensely challenging image production and marketing to attract the most promising creative talents, innovative technologies, and diverse lifestyles. Simultaneously, though, the counter-narrative lurks behind the corners of a deserted plaza of the newly built pedagogical university and other aseptic boulevards and atriums. The overall feel is of dystopia; it warns of precarious working conditions, gated communities and an economy based on surveillance.

Our guide embodies this tension. We see the excitement in his eyes as he leads us to the busy construction site for his new venture: an arthouse cinema turned bar turned cultural centre. While the construction workers are preparing their chicken thigh barbecue, he tells us about how the main investor, the public railway company, is now divided into a transport division and the profit-making real estate division. The latter has to make high annual adjustment payments to finance the public mandate of its sister. Unfortunately, this type of mega-project leads to a focus on profits and largely ignores social inclusion. This situation is also exemplified by his new neighbour, our guide tells us. Only recently Google decided to transfer one of its European headquarters from the periphery of the city to this location. In an attempt to open itself to the city, it rented the bulk of the office space in one fell swoop, jeopardizing access for smaller initiatives or investors.

Then we leave the area of the mega-project, which abruptly opens out into a vibrant neighbourhood caught in the early stages of gentrification. Shabby discount stores meet ethnic food restaurants; design meets demolition. We perceive the traces of pulsating nightlife, from galleries and student bars to venues of a more delicate sort. Our destination is a co-working space, a hub and salad bowl for socially minded freelancers, entrepreneurs and tech people. We enter through a colourfully and creatively designed café and wander through several floors of casually busy office space, including a joint kitchen, meditation room, sleepover area and digitally equipped workshop rooms.

During our guided tour we learn that this former atelier of the local art school has been recently refurbished in a collaborative effort and that the growth of this community-building organization is staggering. What we can’t hear though are the silent and solitary struggles of the emerging class of digital freelancers and entrepreneurs, their struggle for customers and a fair income, their long working hours and their precarious position in the social security system. How are these “entrepreneurial selves” (Bröckling, 2015) navigating their working lives between the poles of self-realization and self-exploitation?

Cohendet, Grandadam and Simon (2010) would conceptualize this hub as an example of the “middleground”, an intermediate structure that links the informal underground culture to the formal organizations and institutions of the upperground. Informed by this article, the students are asked to compare their immediate experiences during the city walk with the example of Montréal and its creative behemoths Cirque du Soleil and the game designer Ubisoft. The authors pick up a major shortcoming of the “creative class paradigm” (Florida, 2002): it deals merely with “who” the creative actors are in a city, rather than “how” they achieve creativity. In turn they were able to identify three different layers of urban creativity. On top is the “upperground”, the level of established innovative firms and institutions that market ideas. On the other end of the spectrum is the “underground” of adventurous individuals who are not well connected to the commercial scene but launch and develop these new ideas. The decisive layer, though, is the so-called “middleground”: communities, which function as intermediaries, facilitating learning between the actors and generating common knowledge as well as “grammars of use” (Cohendet et al., 2010, p. 92) that ultimately allow jointly exploiting and commercializing new ideas.

Later that afternoon we wander deeper into the same district, a former industrial area characterized by busy arterial roads, a freeway exit ramp, major turn-of-the-century industrial buildings, modern skyscrapers and a prominent S-Bahn viaduct, which houses bars, boutique shops and even a summer garden. Groups of students “lead the sightseeing” at distinctive landmarks that we have assigned beforehand. The highlights of the walk are marked by unexpected encounters like this one:

The tour ends in one of the city’s most popular (electronic) night clubs, which is famous for its artfully crafted decorations that carry its trembling crowd of visitors off into surreal worlds. Over a beer with one of the founders we have time to learn more about the entrepreneuring of night life and to reflect on the unfolding nexus of atmospheres and encounters that made our day.

Returning to the two struggling narratives of urban creativity and entrepreneurship (Steyaert & Beyes, 2009), we propose a third narrative or rather a heterotopic set of little narratives that takes into account the many sites that set city politics in motion. This is a performative perspective that acknowledges resistant artistic performances, and neighbourhood initiatives that pay attention to homeless people and others who may fall through the grids of the creative city. Whether it is critical theory or personally motivated indignation that informs such initiatives, what we emphasize is their potential to reveal alternative realities, to make them felt by exploring the weak points and fissures of the urban neighbourhood, eventually nudging it into and affirming a different constellation.

Affirmation: making space for affirmative practice

After this encounter with critique, or actually in parallel, we invite students to also engage in affirmative practices. For, as Weiskopf and Steyaert (2009) note, it is not enough to merely become “lionesque” – Nietzsche’s (1969) aphorism of emancipation – through questioning or refusing one’s own received views of creativity and entrepreneurship. Even if critique makes space for creative, different and entrepreneurial activities, more childlike transformations will be needed in the form of play, improvisation and experimentation. In fact, the affirmative mode presupposes a radical “ground clearing” (Hardt, 2002). It is less concerned with judgement, condemnation and silencing and more with “bringing an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life” (Foucault, 1997, p. 323). It is grounded in a spirit of creation and invention. Learning, in other words, becomes a matter of metamorphosis, and thus a commitment to “going all the way” in a Full Monty-like fashion (Steyaert, 2014): starting with an imaginative idea, forming a team, overcoming doubts, improvising, practising and, finally, taking the risk to perform and thereby be transformed.

In practical terms, through a range of group exercises students get to experiment and play around with different socio-material resources for enacting an affirmative critique of creativity and entrepreneurship. Going back to the very first session, we undertake a playful exercise based on four questions that elicit dominant conceptions around creativity and entrepreneurship, at the same time stirring up the affective flows in the classroom. We ask the students to quickly name three words they associate with creativity, and then ask three surprising questions: about their favourite failure, their earliest memory of doing something creative, and creative skills they have never applied in the classroom. As a result, each year we as a group are seized by flows of tension, excitement, timidity and relief, but each time these resonances evolve differently. In some cohorts, single acts of whistling, acrobatics or intimate story-telling immediately flush away a collective layer of self-protection; in others, suspicions about the unusual pedagogy actually harden.

Either way, engaging in affirmative activity is not just “optional” in this course, so some students will have to stretch as we gradually introduce different practices of “playing”. These variations of play are meant to prepare students for their final enactment of an entrepreneurial case in a creative group performance. Already in the first session we announce that PowerPoint is not a viable medium in this course. Instead we ask students to perform their final group presentations in a more imaginative format (Bohannon, 2011). This usually triggers an interesting cycle of headache, thrill, frustration and adrenalin, so we choose to support students in the unsettling process of “getting there” by continuously adding small exercises borrowed from movie makers, improvisational theatre and team-building seminars. These exercises often create relational and affective intensities.

In small groups, students are prompted to crystallize their understandings of creativity by drawing a triptych, sketching a story-board, preparing a five-minute performance in “musical” style, or writing a poem. While students prepare for their creative presentations, we occasionally interrupt the process again, asking them to integrate seemingly random objects into their narrative, or incorporating the perspective of a clown or a blind man into their performance. Moreover, with the help of brainstorming exercises, case studies, movie fragments and site visits, we investigate various practices of creative collaboration, ranging from industry giants like Pixar (Catmull, 2014) to the rather undocumented entrepreneuring of nightlife.

This series of smaller and larger interventions into the ordinary assemblage of a course process provides the students with a rich and intimately personal wealth of experience in collaborative-creative group dynamics to be taken up in their course papers. In addition to these fun and equally nerve-racking exercises, we dedicate various other resources into the build-up to the final presentations, such as inviting established local artists into the classroom to provide feedback on some work-in-progress elements of the student presentations. Interestingly, the latter intervention often leads to paradoxical outcomes. In most cases, the atmosphere in the room heats up when student groups present a preliminary scene or sneak preview of their planned presentations to us or an external “jury” – almost as if they were auditioning for one of the notorious TV talent shows where entrants get either a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Here’s the routine. The student group enters an emptied classroom. They have a few minutes to perform. Then they receive feedback. Usually there is scant time for discussion. Some students have performed amazing scenes that promised to convey a subtle yet clear message (and we applauded them). Paradoxically, to our dismay, during the actual presentation of the final project these promising beginnings fell flat as they turned into unreflective celebrations of the creativity paradigm. In other cases we felt we offered our critique in the right tone, but for whatever reason the group never implemented it. In yet another scenario, some student groups have grown angry and hostile as we criticized their overly naturalistic roleplays, their static use of space or their lack of multiple perspectives and narrative layers. These students left the encounter irritated, disheartened and somewhat demoralized, while we felt guilty at having broken the chain of resonances. Astonishingly then, out of the latter experience – probably the most frustrating one – students have developed some of the most memorable final presentations. In this respect, Bjerg and Staunæs’s (2011) study of “appreciative management” in a school reminds us that self-determined and inspired learning emerges not only from positive affect, but also from experiences like going through an emotional rollercoaster between excitement at performing and shame at not having performed up to one’s own expectations.

The lesson we take from this is that affirmation is not to be mistaken for blind approval or a struggle-free journey towards novel creations. Instead, affirmation can well be driven by the power of negative affectivity, unpleasant intensities and a harsh learning process. Just like critique, affirmation can confront and can be very disturbing. To illustrate this, we deliberately arrange for a number of unsettling encounters with the strange worlds of not only urban renewal, but also art performance and modern dance. For the latter, we leave the assigned classroom again and go work in a dance performance space. During a workshop with a dance choreographer – including the practices and affects that this brings with it – we hope to provide yet another alternative in the ongoing assemblage of the learning process.

Inviting students to dance

This session, where we invite students to move and dance, has become a kind of blockbuster over the years. It is hosted by an independent dance choreographer, who is a former dancer at the local dance theatre company, and an artistentrepreneur par excellence. Every year we observe students going out of their way to tap along with this considerable intervention in the assembling process. Students often mirror their experiences in their final group presentations.

The first unique element of this intervention is that we change locations and move to the local multi-art centre, an old yet refurbished train depot in an up-and-coming area of the city. It is only a 10-minute walk downhill from the university, but this change of location transforms the atmosphere considerably. While the industrial prehistory of the place is unmistakable, the art centre was completely renovated in 2009/10; today it hosts a bar and restaurant, a cinema and an art exhibition centre, as well as several dance and theatre performance spaces. For this session we book one of the two performance halls; this offers plenty of room for students to move around freely, unseen by outside spectators. In terms of materiality, the dress code for the session is also different as we encourage students to show up in sports clothes; this invites them to loosen up from their general habitus (of dressing) and disciplined postures.

Instead of tables, chairs and projection screens, students encounter only the empty space, with water bottles and some apples for the break. Instead of lectures and discussions, there is mostly just music or silence. Instead of pulling out, and hiding behind, their laptops, students have very different instruments for this session: their own bodies, their own sweat, their own intuition. Most importantly, working with an artist and dance choreographer rather than university lecturers (who are now participating in the exercises along with them) changes their self-awareness and their conception of what they can learn today.

During the first session of the course we have alerted students to a lethal danger: the danger of sitting on one’s butt. As Nilofer Merchant (2013) claims, “sitting is the new smoking” in the sense that a lack of movement may be considered the greatest cause of illness today, especially for people who spend their entire (working) day in front of a computer. This warning aligns well with a more general critique of how the body has become disciplined and docile in Western civilization (Foucault, 1977). As Ken Robinson (2006) explains in one of the most circulated TEDTalk videos – our invitation message to students prior to the start of the course – we educate our children “progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side” (2006: 9′10″). The hierarchy of subjects in all educational systems worldwide, he notes, is mathematics, natural sciences and languages on the top, then the humanities, and at the bottom we find the arts. Robinson even identifies a further hierarchy within the arts: art and music occupy a higher status than drama and dance. This is a pity, we think, as dancing has an untapped capacity to stimulate, among other things, (creative) thinking.

Therefore, the maxim of the session is: move! We do not accept excuses such as “but I cannot dance”; we follow Twyla Tharp (2003), the award-winning dance choreographer and author of several books, on her dictum that everyone can be creative. Vlad Glӑveanu (2010, p. 81) refers to this understanding as the “democratization” of creativity (see also Bilton, 2007; Hulbeck, 1945; Weiner, 2000), presenting a critique to the long-held and elitist assumption that creativity is the “métier” of only a few gifted talents. Instead, according to the so-called “I-paradigm” of creativity (Glӑveanu 2010, p. 81), everyone can be creative. And thus, taking it step by step (Coutu, 2008), students are gently “seduced” to practically rediscover their bodily talents and some ingredients of play that they had forgotten about and almost unlearned in the context of the business school.

After some warm-up moves and breathing exercises, students delve into their first affirmative lesson: “touch”. Ironically, even though the sensory experience of touch is one of the earliest and most instinctive ones, in the world of work and higher education the notion of touching has become one of those taboos that embarrass us to the core. So, to avoid breaking with conventions too drastically, we have students first experiment with touching the floor beneath their feet. Despite the fact that walking is one of our most habitual activities, people rarely consider it a sensual experience. This (un)consciousness changes, however, as students are asked to concentrate on the way their feet touch the floor. Next they are instructed to either “receive” or “conquer” the floor with their feet. As we observe the students’ changing postures, we can tell that they now walk around with much more awareness of self and other.

The next challenge then is to get into tactile exchange with others. At the university, exchanges of touch are normally reduced to a narrow repertoire – the occasional shaking of hands or a contextually justified pat on the shoulder. But this is drastically expanded in today’s dance and improvisation workshop. In a first step, the class is divided into pairs, and one of each is instructed to give the other person a massage, from the neck to the lower back and up again; then they give them a gentle to medium strong tapping from the neck to the feet, ending on the butt. We are still in the first hour of this dance improvisation session, but students have already come a long way.

The next affirmative lesson focuses on embodied trust. “Close your eyes and let yourself be guided through the room by the other person – but without the use of words, only a gentle yet firm grip on the arm and/or the back. Ok, start walking” … “And now faster” … “And now run”. Even though the space is big enough to spread out, when 14 dyads, a total of 28 people, start running around at the same time, the sound of the stampede itself may become intimidating to the blindfolded person. Or it may in fact not intimidate, depending on the trusting bond that is just in the making. What the trust building leads up to in the end is the formation of small groups of four to five people who are asked to develop a short dance choreography.

Curiously, while this should pose the biggest challenge of the course up to this point, mostly students deal with it well, even when the instructions are given that the choreography has to be developed without any talking among the group members. And then we observe something beautiful: Instead of falling into their usual work habitus of discussing things to the point of exhaustion, we see students trying something out, improvising, demonstrating something, watching others do their tricks, imitating, trying again, discarding, repeating, tweaking and twisting a bit here and there and then: rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. When it is time to perform their choreography in front of the class, students can hardly believe what they do: they move and dance together.

Performing

Even though we do not explicitly ask students to incorporate dance elements into their final group presentations, many of them – still influenced by the workshop – do so anyway. To give a little impression of what this can look like, below we describe a final group presentation entitled “freedom of speech” performed by a group of five students in 2015. In this presentation the audience is invited to revisit and to a certain extent re-experience the tragic events at Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, which in January 2015 fell victim to a terrorist attack that killed a large number of its editorial team. This time, however, the “story” is presented in a different way: through music, silence and percussion. In the entire presentation, the only person speaking in a series of short video clips, is a student acting as a French reporter who gives some context around the events in Paris. The story, which is centred on the theme of freedom, starts with a group of four Charlie Hebdo caricaturists performing a self-composed rap, each courageously taking the lead in one of the four verses.

Then, frighteningly, after this enchanting ode to freedom, the audience witnesses the “breaking of pens” – the shooting of all protagonists. They learn from the breaking news that this was an assault on the freedom of speech, notwithstanding – or maybe especially due to – the magazine’s controversial reputation for touching upon issues that are (supposedly) too sensitive for satire. Much of the happenings we have already seen before, but what happens then?

In the presentation, the caricaturists are resurrected, but this time they are muted with tape across their lips. A non-verbal, yet physically intense, fight breaks out over which direction to take from here. From the reporter we learn that this fight is symbolic of the chaos that has broken out in the streets of Paris, fusing feelings of solidarity and fear, and marking a loss of rhythm. A period of silence is needed, for both the performers and the audience, to be ready for the next phase. Then music is played, but this time without singing. The focus is clearly on the beat, which is taken up by one person at a time but then slowly becomes contagious. With the help of percussion a new collective rhythm is found again, one that seems to be even stronger than anything we have heard so far. The Charlie Hebdo editors remain muted, but now their jingle of freedom is taken up by the audience. The message gets multiplied: four times, five times, six times. For a moment it seems like the peaceful freedom fighters have won the war as they managed to bring their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit, which originally flourished in their work as free caricaturists, to a new and much broader level: one that has actually been fired up by this attack on freedom.

The presentation reminds us that the romantic notion of freedom can quickly flip into its opposite when the carefree feeling around it gets lost and freedom becomes something to fight for. In addition to the pointed enactment of the complex relationship between freedom, creativity and entrepreneurship, we are also struck by the aesthetic quality of the presentation. Not only do the students provide a beautiful variation between different elements and forms, such as video, singing, being muted, using percussion and engaging the audience; they also perfectly time and orchestrate the flow of action and the smooth blending from one scene into the other. This turns the presentation into one coherent piece of art with all its different layers: a performance that echoes well into the future.

An interventionist pedagogy

As we have tried to illustrate in this chapter, our approach to conveying a critical understanding of entrepreneurship is to playfully enact it at the intersection of critique and affirmation. We do so by interfering, in various ways, with the taken-for-granted educational assemblage process, which ideally then cascades into a multilayered learning journey. Since we consider this approach as above all a “practice” of holding a learning space between the stimulation of critique and the enactment of alternative views on the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurship, we also theorize the pedagogy of this course foremost as a series of practices.

Or, as Mulcahy (2012, p. 82) explains it with reference to Garfinkel, critical knowledge and imaginative thinking are “practice all the way down”. More concretely even, we consider the course pedagogy to be an in(ter)vention (Steyaert, 2011) in the playful way we scale and enact the learning situation through smaller and bigger inventions. An interventionist pedagogy, we argue, can offer a “powerful counter-narrative to the conventional view of developmentalism that dominates the pedagogical gaze, positioning learners in continual deficit and learning activities as preparation for some imagined ideal” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010, p. 22). As we have also tried to illustrate in this chapter, the affectual flows that such an interventionist pedagogy can generate in the classroom may even result in a fumbling reinvention of teaching itself.

An important inspiration of an interventionist pedagogy – understood as an associative process – is an actor network theory approach to education which perceives learning as continuously performed into material reality through webs of association (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010, 2012; Fenwick, 2016). As Fenwick and Edwards (2010) explain, ANT is not a theory of what to think but a way to “intervene”. The focus here, as Mulcahy (2012) asserts, is on how knowledge comes to be produced – also materially – into “tangible knowledge” (Gherardi, 2006). The question is how heterogeneous resources are mobilized and assembled through networks of association to establish an object of knowledge in practice. To answer this question it is vital to look at educational work as ontological, even if knowledge and learning are dominantly seen as an epistemological issue. The ontological stance, however, privileges knowledge and learning as always performed. Mulcahy (2012, p. 82) elaborates: “[t]he assumption is made that nothing has reality, or form, outside its performance in webs of relations with performances being defined as ‘material processes, practices, which take place day by day and minute and minute’ ” (Law & Singleton, 2000, p. 775).

Through this performative approach, “teaching a class” becomes a form of world-making that occurs as the classroom process unfolds minute by minute, but also through the range of entanglements that co-produce the process, some even from a distance: the school buzzer and water bottles, light and temperature; students’ bodies and teachers’ experiences; tables, chairs, computers and video players; session outlines and current readings, exercises and instructions; the day’s moods and the university’s reputation, and more. In this (dis)assembling process, it is important not only to alter human–human relations but also to acknowledge the materiality of ongoing associations that “make visible the rich assortments of things at play in educational events and how they are connected” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010, p. 22).

An interventionist pedagogy follows a tactical approach (de Certeau, 1984) as it tries to infiltrate the grand narrative of creativity and entrepreneurship through its cracks and fissures. The assemblage thinking of Deleuze and Guattari helps us to grasp a processual and socio-material perspective on the world, in which agency is derived from the precarious associations of human and non-human bodies into emergent wholes (Müller, 2015). For the educator, then, the task – in terms of both inviting critique and enabling affirmation – is one of bricolage. One gathers multiple resources – people, motion, spaces, materials, theories, time and exercises – and engages in constantly reassociating these elements in a broad spectrum of interventions as documented in this chapter.

By deploying interventions, one can create an empty or third space (Steyaert, 2006), which allows for material alternatives to be performed. This requires improvising, experimenting, taking risks and inviting external actors to the “playground” in order to form new associations. In the course we therefore try to intervene in the traditional assemblage of the classroom through play and through confrontation with unfamiliar elements. We hold that an interventionist pedagogy becomes “productive” when it brings along new translations and transformations not just on the level of critical ideas but also in the form of new enactments, collective experiences and unfamiliar affective intensities. For instance, the walk around the city oscillates between two kinds of experience: the usual process of ushering one’s way through the city, following planned routes, and another, less usual, of wandering around and becoming immersed in the city’s other feelings and little narratives.

Also, the improvisation workshop unfolds along a plethora of intensities and feelings: between being reserved and feeling enthusiastic, between staring in disbelief and going for it, between feeling unable and sensing the magic of your group improvisation. Likewise, both interventions – walking/strolling and dancing/moving – are embodied practices (Beyes & Steyaert, 2015); students’ bodies-in-interaction shape joint waves of affect that also immerse them and make them enact sessions in ways other than we had anticipated. In line with Deleuze and Guattari, we perceive affect as a “trans-individual force of organizing” (Michels & Steyaert, 2017). We stimulate its unfolding by exercising collaborative creativity and drawing in new external relations.

In summary, three elements – learning as knowing in practice, assemblage thinking and a focus on collective waves of affect – are interwoven conceptually in the interventionist pedagogy we propose in the context of critical entrepreneurship studies. Such pedagogy, if applied more broadly, requires sensitivity to the everyday performance of socio-material and affective webs of interrelating. The goal would be to enact imaginative performances that persuasively address weak points in the dominant assemblage of current academic education, while simultaneously relying on the performativity of embodied learning experiences that have an effect on the individuals as well as on the group on a collective level (see also Gilbert, 2013).

No critique without reflection

As students embark on their collaborative group work, somewhat vague but requiring intense rehearsal and interaction, we also try to offer spaces for them to reflect. In fact, as a little welcome gift to the course, all students get a colourful notebook as an important companion and material prop throughout the course, and we offer recurring diary moments where we encourage them to note down their experiences as they are happening. Based on their collection of reflections, students wrap up the course – usually a few weeks after the final session – in a reflection paper in which we hope to see the tension between critique and affirmation enacted again. Some students feel intrigued and at the same time overwhelmed by the opportunity to write a course reflection paper in a creative format.

Once the course is “over” (at least according to the academic calendar), it is time for us as instructors to also step back and take a moment to reflect. In their learning papers, students confront us – as much as themselves – with the questions “what is to be learned from this course?” and “how to make sense of this different learning process?” To provide a thorough answer to this question, one that cannot be easily summarized in three bullet points, students give us some insights into their own personal learning path throughout the course; some even speak of going through a notable transformation. Several students told us they had fundamentally departed from their pre-course conceptions of what the notions of creativity and entrepreneurship embody. We are praised for the unusual and creative format of the course and the unique assemblage process of each course session. A few students have even said this was their best course in four years of university education.

But there are doubts as well, all the way, which we notice as students do not spare us from their frustrations, struggles and hard lessons. Sometimes our feedback on their creative attempts was too blunt, we provided too little time in improvisation exercises, or they couldn’t easily understand why we moved slowly at various points or built in repetition. Especially the work involved for the creative group presentations is described as emotionally intense and conflictual. Usually, individuals can work through these upsetting experiences in their learning papers, but we have also had to deal with interpersonal problems in groups; one student even quit over this.

We instructors can certainly relate to such dynamics. Working in a team of three, we find our own course preparations are also intense, mostly fun, but never trouble-free. We brainstorm, we negotiate, we get silly at times, we all have our “favourites”, but there’s never enough time to incorporate all our ideas. If we were to teach the course individually, we would probably be teaching three rather different courses. And yet, we never considered turning the course into a “one (wo)man show”.

Prior to each of the course sessions, we spend a considerable amount of time and resources to carefully plan the “run of the session”. That means mapping the unique set of interventions of each course unit: what (critical) readings will we draw upon and how will students engage with them? What exercises will we try out? What objects/materials do we need to bring to the session? Can we show a video (clip)? Can we go outside? Will we break the group up and work with them in separate classrooms? Who will say what? As we try to keep the course lively and alive, we also – sometimes zealously – try to avoid repeating session designs from the previous year(s).

Despite all these efforts, we are painfully aware of our weak points as well. It almost feels paradoxical to offer a course on creativity in which we prepare the sessions so meticulously, even developing a detailed schedule. We have learned that the group can come to a creative flow and instant improvisation only with a well-rehearsed scenario. Even then, we must constantly counter an inclination towards “safe execution”, so we frequently try to break out of our own comfort zone. Otherwise this would thwart our pedagogic idea(l)s around collective improvisation and open risk. Along those lines we agree with Gilbert (2013) that the individual state of the teacher is as important as thorough preparation. By changing the bits and pieces of each session each year, we try to keep up our own sense of surprise, excitement and anticipation. Reacting to subconscious and bodily felt affective feedback loops requires a healthy mental and physical state as well as the confidence to speak freely about the “run” of the session. Taken together, all this results in a sense of awareness and presence that would easily dissolve if we stuck compulsively to a set scenario.

Accordingly, we also try to stay sensitive to the dynamics of the day, so we can make last-minute adjustments as the course unfolds. Indeed, whatever preparations we make, we can never predict the process through which a session will unfold, and especially the relations between sessions; after all, no one can design intensities, affects and atmospheres (Michels & Steyaert, 2017). In other words, the tension between critique and affirmation evolves with the moods and modes that colour the responses of the students; so, rather than sitting on our butts too comfortably, we too have to constantly seek to reimagine this course on entrepreneurship and creativity, a course that is constantly in the making.

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