Learning to be enterprising in school through an inquiry-based pedagogy

Abstract

In the French-speaking province of Québec in Canada, entrepreneurship was officially introduced into the Québec Education Program (QEP) in 2001. Entrepreneurship is viewed there as a learning tool associated with the conduct of entrepreneurial projects; that is, student-led action projects that respond to a community need by creating a good, offering a service or organizing an event. The purpose of this article is to report on an investigation conducted into a school shop at primary school level to document what it means to learn to be enterprising in school. The results show that, to learn to be enterprising (i.e. to learn to plan and implement an action project), pupils have to be fully engaged in the creation of the shop and in the inquiry processes to be conducted. Thus they need to be able to identify problems arising, analyse the environment, devise solutions and implement them. Moreover, learning to be enterprising entails learning through being enterprising. Two main learning points were enabled by the inquiry processes based on the school shop experience: (1) the integration of multiple disciplinary contents from the QEP, and (2) critical reflection on society.