Browsing by Subject "Yrittäjyyskasvatus"

Goals. The aim of this study is to examine what kind of thoughts Aalto-university teachers have according to academic capitalism and entrepreneurship education in the context of inside their own university. Academic capitalism and entrepreuneurship education are relatively new phenomenon in the finnish field of education and the goal is to figure out are these new customs in disagreement with the traditional values of universities or are they suitable together. There is a lot of international studies of these topics which helped me to do my thesis and helped me to choose different kind of point of views. Methods. There were 8 univeristy teachers who took part in this study. The interview-material consisted of three group-interviews, which all had 2-3 teachers. I used qualitative content analysis as a method in my thesis. Results and conclusions. What was found out of the interviews was that the teachers had both positive and negative experiences and thoughts about academic capitalism and entrepreneurship education. Academic capitalism could benefit researchers financially but the negative affect of it was that the values of academic capitalism were often times conflicting with the traditional views of the university. Teachers saw that entrepreneurship education coud give students benefits for example teaching them worklife skills and helped them to network when they were still at university. The negative effect of of entrepreneurship education from the point of view of the teachers was that it gave a narrow view of what a good worker of the future was.

In my master's thesis, I examine entrepreneurship education in the context of neoliberal governmentality. I approach this phenomenon with analytics of power and governmentality developed by Foucault. My goal is to look at what kind of discursive reality is constructed in the entrepreneurship education guides for teachers, what kind of subjectivity is produced in them for students, and how governmentality appears in these, produced subjectivity. Since entrepreneurship education is seen in many studies as part of neoliberal change in education policy, I think it is appropriate to approach the topic through theory of neoliberal government as well. I selected five entrepreneurship education guides for teachers as my research material, one produced by Suomen Yrittäjät, three produced by the YES Network and one produced by the Ministry of Education and Culture. In terms of the nature and topics of my research, I chose critical discourse analysis as my research method, where it felt like a natural choice when I studied the power in discourses and governmentality that they produce. In my research material I searched discourses that were in a hegemonic position and that occur as natural truths. When I had found them, I focused my research in what kind of dominance were inside discourses and what kind of subject positions they constructed for students. I found three dominant discourses, individual, responsibility, and entrepreneurial discourses. The discourses constructed a reality in which students had to be individual and responsible, however, in such a way that individuality and responsibility appeared only as a certain kind of trait that served working life. Entrepreneurship turned out to be a requirement for the whole individual to be certain, both in terms of personality and action. The discourses built an entrepreneurial subjectivity in which students had to be rational, flexible, and moral, allowing them to automatically act correctly toward the market. The reality built by the discourses made these demands appear to the students as their best, in which case they want to implement them, that is, to control themselves. The subjectivity constructed in the entrepreneurship education guides appeared strongly to the neoliberal ideal individual, so entrepreneurship education could be seen as neoliberal governmentality.