How do students learn to become entrepreneurial in university?

The growth and development in the curricula and educational programmes devoted to entrepreneurship in higher education have been remarkable over the last 20 years. Entrepreneurial learning has been identified as exploratory, embedded into social contexts, creative and experiential (see, for example, Fletcher 2007; Higgins et al 2013; Löbler 2006; Rae 2000). Thereby, constructivism, as a philosophical paradigm, seems to provide a good explanation to understand the learning process of entrepreneurs in which they construct meanings through their experiences with the world. This paper explores the learning processes of entrepreneurship students from a constructivist perspective and seeks to understand how students learn to become entrepreneurial within a higher education context. The research that underpins this study is based on studying a small group of full-time Marketing Masters students who undertook an entrepreneurship module in the Business School of a UK based University. It explores how these students develop entrepreneurial learning and construct knowledge progressively over a three-month period as they engage with their studies within an entrepreneurship curriculum. The results show that the learning process of university students is perceived as profoundly experiential and based on all kinds of interactions inside as well as outside their classroom. The development of entrepreneurial graduates is underpinned by an experiential approach to learning, which is preferably action-based and student-centred, focusing on the development of entrepreneurial skills and competencies associated with entrepreneurship. The overall conclusion is that constructivism provides a good explanation of the learning processes within an entrepreneurship education curriculum. The constructivist perspective of learning regards knowledge as a form of mental representation and a construction of the human mind, and therefore offers a powerful framework for understanding how individual students organise what they experience, how they process what they experience, and consequently what they learn.