An intensive week to delve a little bit more into the entrepreneurial education and learning new methodologies and ways of being more teacherpreneurs. That’s what 13 people of the Primary Education degree of the Psychology and Education Faculty of the University of Deusto have been doing during the past week (from the 21st to the 25th of October) at the Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall (Sweden).
Do you want to know a little bit more about this experience? Keep reading because I’m going to tell you.
On the 20th of October, 10 students of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades and 3 teachers of the Primary Education degree headed to Sweden with our bags full of winter clothes to be able to stand the low temperature that awaited us, but especially with much enthusiasm and desire to keep sharing our entrepreneurial spirit of the teacherpreneur that we carry within ourselves with our colleagues from Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden and Lithuania.
Before arriving to Sundsvall, our final destination, we had ahead 3 flights and many hours at the airport, where we were able to share nerves, laughter, personal and academic experiences, works to prepare, memories of past intensive weeks, and a great desire to keep learning. Our adventure in the interest of entrepreneurial education and development as teacherpreneurs keeps progressing. This time with a mandatory stop in Sweden.
As I’ve told you many times in this blog, this intensive week of work is in line of the Erasmus+ project named EIPTE (Entrepreneurship in Initial Primary Teacher Education), in which the Psychology and Education Faculty of the University of Deusto takes part since August 2017, when the project was approved.
This time, the week was focused on the ecosystem of entrepreneurial education in the initial training of teachers. During that time, the students were able to:
- know the reality of the entrepreneurship in Swedish schools, the agents of the ecosystem in entrepreneurial education and a type of entrepreneurial learning through the value-creating learning;
discuss about examples of schools who use this type of learning, with teachers who are using it and students who are an active part of it;- visit different schools (some of them have implemented the value-creating learning), as well as Tecnichus, a center where science is the protagonist and where some entrepreneurship and innovation projects are carried out;
- think every day about the learnings of each day; and, at the end of the week,
- prepare a presentation about how to implement the acquired knowledge with examples created by themselves in schools.
All of that with the goal of developing the entrepreneurial teacher or teacherpreneur’s competencies.
As I was saying earlier, if there is something that’s been present every day, it was the value-creating learning. It’s a type of learning that’s based on “the other”, on what we can contribute “to others”, on a different way of learning in which the learning of each person is based on what we can contribute to others with our projects, ideas or solutions. In other words, it’s creating a value for others at the same time that we also learn. It’s kind of a win-win strategy in every way, where the different participating or involved parts (people, organizations, schools, professionals) are benefited.
This 4th intensive week, a continuation of the 3rd celebrated in Bilbao, has shown us once again that the entrepreneurial education is worth it and, especially, that our students are more than ready to keep learning to become teacherpreneurs and to make their future student body be more entrepreneurial that what they are now.
Hugs to everybody and I will see you in a couple of weeks.
Enjoy each day.
Translated by María Ubierna Quintanilla and supervised by Arantza Arruti.