Entreprenöriellt lärande: Gymnasieelevers skilda sätt att uppfatta entreprenöriellt lärande

Students need to be entrepreneurial, because society has changed locally and globally and individuals must carry more responsibility for their learning and their livelihood. Information technology affects everyone and makes it possible to obtain facts far beyond the classroom. In all, the changes affect the perception of what and how pupils learn.Supranational bodies such as the OECD, the European Union and NUTEK have argued for a couple of decades that schools and businesses need to work together to educate students in an entrepreneurial direction. Today, in 2011, entrepreneurship is in fact enshrined in the new curriculum for the upper secondary school, GY 2011. The school has long sought to increase students responsibility for their own learning and different education practices have been tested to develop this. The purpose of this study is to form knowledge about entrepreneurial learning and make a contribution to knowledge about a form of learning, from a student perspective. The theoretical and methodological approach of the study is phenomenographic. Sixteen students at an upper secondary school with a pronounced entrepreneurial profile have been interviewed. The interview guide used was open-ended with ample opportunities for the informants to talk about their work on the basis of the project that the students perform during their last school year. Students do not use the term entrepreneurial to describe their perceptions, but from the data I understand with my teaching experience that they describe their perceptions of entrepreneurial learning. The results of the analysis of the data material show upper secondary school students’ different perceptions of entrepreneurial learning and fall into five description categories. They are Understanding, identifying and defining the task, External contacts and communication, Team building, Learning in different social practices and Looking beyond the obvious. The results show that if the school is to use entrepreneurial learning as a learning approach, tasks need to be retrieved from activities outside the school to be challenging for students to manage themselves and with the help of others.