Changing the World or Changing Ourselves?
In this blog post, co-authors Catherine Brentnall and David Higgins reflect on their interest in how educators change themselves and their practice in a multi-crisis environment. This is the focus of their research paper “Entrepreneurship Educators in an Age of Climate and Ecological Breakdown”, which is published in Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy.
Climate and ecological breakdown was the starting point and motivation for our research. An assumption we set out in the paper is that we are existing on a planet that is facing the immediate consequences and long term implications of ecological overshoot. Increasingly, extreme weather events and record temperatures interact with natural resource depletion and existing social inequalities to create misery and harm for half the world’s population. Business as Usual is the term that is used for the economic system where powerful and affluent countries seek to maintain this status quo – and social tolerance towards it – rather than securing communal benefits. As Entrepreneurship Educators – people who teach and research in areas including ideation, start-up and entrepreneurship – we wanted to capture the lived experience of trying to change ourselves and our practice in this context. Our situation is likely to feel familiar to increasing numbers of educators in entrepreneurship and other business-related disciplines. People are finding themselves increasingly aware of the seriousness of the climate and ecological breakdown and yet trapped in norms and practice which support Business as Usual. We explore: how do we move on? And we illuminate action that people and organizations are taking to develop their practice and our field.
Our approach was influenced by recent demands for change in entrepreneurship and enterprise education. Influential work we connect the study to are: Loi et al.’s 2021 paper about entrepreneurship education being at a crossroads; Dodd et al.’s 2022 paper about transforming enterprise education in the face of the multi-crisis environment; Klapper and Fayolle’s 2023 study which showed there are many calls for transformed practice but few practical examples, and Hoppe and Namdar’s 2023 paper calling for entrepreneurship education for a better world.
In the paper we note that writing about climate change has been criticized for being too scientific and not communicating enough urgency or being too depressing and diminishing agency. Related to this, a contribution of the paper is in its attempt to write differently (Gilmore et al., 2019). We present action-based accounts which are descriptions of people and organizations taking action in the face of unsustainability and interpret these from a dialogic perspective. The style is not linear and dispassionate, but rather communicates care and elevates human agency.
As well as putting words to people’s experiences of dissonance and a desire for change, there are various concepts in the paper which may be a source of agency for educators and scholars. The two loops model of change (see image), describes the need to compost a dying system; the meta-crisis speaks to the crisis of imagination which surrounds and underpins the multi-crisis environment, and time between worlds articulates the role education can play in comprehending truth and complexity and questioning the purpose of existence. Ultimately, these concepts speak to shifting inner worlds and provide language and perspectives for how change happens through people changing themselves.
