HEA/BMAF Enterprise Education Event brief Feedback

I am going through an insomniac phase at the moment so at 7.45 a.m on a Saturday morning I've already been up for 2 hours already!

Thought I'd give a little feedback from the HEA/BMAF event I was presenting at on Thursday. I'll frame this around my tweets from the day (I use twitter - micro blogging). Here are the three tweets, the latter 2 are in response to my twitter pal and enterprise education colleague Dr Kelly Smith (from Huddersfield University).

1. A very interesting day. With some tough love re:responsibilities of business schools in relation economic crisis

2. @KellyJS on this basis, what responsibility do we take/have?Could new enterprise/entrepreneurship pedagogy's be more appropriate? about 19 hours ago from web in reply to KellyJS

3. @KellyJS long story short:Business schools continue to teach Fordist models, these clearly don't work in 2008. i.e. credit crisis (David Rae,2008)

The day was set in the dramatic, wintery valley scenery of Pontypridd at the University of Glamorgan. First up was Prof David Rae who gave a timely insight into where we sit as business schools in terms of our delivery of business management pedagogy's.  According to David our continued Fordist approach is out-moded and unsustainable. The current economic crisis clearly shows this.  This gave a lot of food-for-thought for myself and the other delegates.

As my colleague Prof Harry Matlay and I were immediatly following David we had to think on our feet somewhat to respond to this message. I think, however, that our own presentation complemented his in so much as we were focussing very much on the who, when, why, how and when entrepreneurship/enterprise should be taught? We also considered what Business Schools could learn from how other disciplines deliver their generic pedagogy. Here I used creative disciplines as an example (see this earlier paper which explores this idea). Briefly,  we suggest that generic training within, for example, art and design potentially leads to more enterprising behaviour, for example: experiential, project based curricula, peer review (crits), lecturers who are practitioners and exhibiting work.

Speaking with  Dr Andy Penaluna (the organiser) yesterday I was expressing my sense of seeing the world and future a little bit differently as a result of this day. From my perspective this was one of those occasions where you come away recognising that your thinking has altered, in other ways a thoroughly stimulating day. 

The presentations and a podcast from the day, I believe, will be made available soon and I'll point to them once they're online.