This project is an act in radical trust, compassionate pedagogy and true enterprise education that challenges how we think about:
- What we collect and archive, who decides and who has access
- How research funds are spent
- How university spaces are designed and who’s paid to design and fabricate them
- How enterprise and entrepreneurial education is delivered
I worked on a million-pound research project funded by a huge educational institution. Do you know what 80% of that money went on? Salaries! And bolstering those researchers’ CVs. That’s not entrepreneurial education, that’s an exercise in individualism. Some of those people have probably since taken flights to various conferences to ‘share best practice’ and I’m not even mad at them.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game, right?
But what if we radically reimagine academic research in the enterprise and employability space? What if enterprise education was entrepreneurial itself? What if it centred the very students and graduates it’s designed to serve?
This same project paid an industry board,with no mention of a student board in any of the bid – which, in case it isn’t obvious, I wasn’t involved in writing.
Are we really going to engage in a million-pound project designed to serve students and their needs in enterprise education and at no point ask them what it is they need? What they think? What their struggles are? Look, you can make the case that sometimes students don’t know what they need. Perhaps fair. But to not ask them?!
If you argue that we’re experts in teaching, they are surely experts in their learning? They’ve been learning since we pack them off to school at four or five years old. Wouldn’t a truly pedagogic, compassionate, student-centred approach involve both parties? If we’re in the business of pedagogy, which, let’s not forget, is the theory of teaching and learning, then surely we need the learners here too.
And don’t even get me started on paying the industry board and not the student board it was eventually agreed to recruit.
Imagine, on one hand, me in the classroom working through values and value. Encouraging these incredible students to know their worth and charge for it.
Also me: “But actually, can you do this thing for me for free so I too can put it in my research profile and on my CV and fly around the world ‘sharing best practice’?”
I don’t think so!