Using Ethnography to Explore Entrepreneurial Extracurricular Activities
In this article, co-authors Birgitte Wraae and Nicolai Nybye reflect on the inspiration behind their research article, “Learning to Be “Me,” “the Team,” and “the Company” Through Entrepreneurial Extracurricular Activities: An Ethnographic Approach,“ published in Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy.
We seem to have some knowledge about when our students decide to pursue a career as entrepreneurs. We know of the educational processes in the curricular field, and we know of activities taking place in the extracurricular incubator environments offered at the educational institutions. However, not a lot is known about how students learn and transform in their meetings and shifts between these two different learning environments.
Being a part of current discussions on what to offer students in the extracurricular learning environment, we got curious about students’ learning needs and their identity constructions, implicitly also trying to understand what kind of decisions students are facing when starting up their own business. We, therefore, decided to follow a group of students who began their BA in innovation and entrepreneurship to see what took place when faced with the task of starting up.
While not all students ran their own company in the end of our study, one team extended what they started as part of the entrepreneurial classroom and the teaching. These students continued initiating their own entrepreneurial venture as part of the incubator environment in their educational institution. Knowing the students throughout their entrepreneurial learning journey gave us valuable insights into how their learning and personal experiences influenced their decision-making. Further, we got insights into how they viewed the transformation from the curricular to the extracurricular learning environment in the incubator as identity development. However, the identity development encompassed more than the student entrepreneurs understanding of one-self (me). It was relationally intertwined with the co-creating process of learning to be a team (us) and a company (we). We hope that our shared insights can contribute to how to bridge curricular and extracurricular learning and, develop extracurricular activities, deliberate holistic guidance to students and to further research into the field.
The most challenging aspect of our research was our ethnographic approach that meant that every talk, every visit, every thought became a part of our data collection. Also, we knew that using a unique single case study was not something we see a lot in our research field. However, we believe that our approach is to be recommended to other researchers. We need to test our own boundaries as researchers as well to learn.
