Learning from within in Enterprise Education

Objectives: Understanding how individuals learn can significantly improve educators’ philosophical stance in designing and delivering courses. This paper provides a philosophical conceptualisation of how learners, undergoing Entrepreneurship Education (EE), learn from within, thus, highlighting what possibly makes one learner and/or didactical design better than another.
Prior Work: In their discussion of the dimensions of EE, Klapper and Neergaard (2012) highlighted the dimension of ‘withness’; i.e. from within (Shotter, 2006). Despite being discussed in the field of education (Korthagen et al., 2013; Evelein and Korthagen, 2015), there is hardly any literature discussing learning from within in EE. In fact, Fayolle (2013) highlighted the lack of research investigating how learners learn as well as research investigating the rationale behind ‘effective didactical design’, where most EE research, so far, has focused on contents and methods. Fayolle (2013) also stressed the lack of knowledge in addressing the vast differences among audiences in EE, where such understanding could significantly improve educators’ ‘philosophical posture and role’ in the field (Fayolle, 2013).
Approach: This paper adopts a postmodernist perspective to understand the role of the self in EE. The paper draws on the Learning Onion Model for learning from within (Korthagen et al., 2013, p.32), thus, linking entrepreneurship literature to key literature in education to offer a better philosophical understanding of the ‘withness’ dimension to learning in EE.
Practical Implications: The paper considers the value of Mystagogy as means to offer insights into learning from within in EE. Thus, highlighting Mystagogy as a foundation for effective heutagogical and andragogical learning.
Value: Besides the importance of contents and methods in EE, the paper adds an inspirational dimension to EE that highlights the value of understanding selves and beliefs in education, consequently, proposing the latter as important aspects to effective didactical design.