SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: AN ABILITY FOR THE FUTURE TEACHERS

Abstract

Creative thinking, identifying new solutions, taking risks, the proactive attitude, initiative, self-esteem, social and innovative intentions to contribute to societal well-being are competencies listed down in the Learning Compass (OECD, 2019a). Such abilities can be connected with social entrepreneurial competence. Meaningful constructs for the social entrepreneurial competence are: risk taking, self-esteem, personal creativity (Scale of Konakli & Göğüş, 2013), as well as personal traits, social characteristics, and characteristics of social initiative (Scale of Capella-Peris et al., 2019), scales used also in this article. The teachers, as role models for their students, have to demonstrate this competence in order to scaffold it effectively in their students’ minds. We aim to identify to what extent the students in educational sciences in Romania, who will become teachers, demonstrate abilities on this dimension during their BA initial teacher education. Thus, we investigated elements of social entrepreneurial competence in groups of students from Pedagogy, Pedagogy of Primary and Pre-school Education, and Special Needs Education. 509 respondents, students in the first and third year of the BA program, from nine public universities, answered the online questionnaire. The results of the study highlight possible correlations between risk taking and elements of personal creativity, or personal traits, but it could not identify statistically significant differences between the 1st and 3rd year students regarding social entrepreneurial competence. To identify to what extent the social entrepreneurial competence can be noticed at the level of the student teachers, represents a reference for possible curriculum revision of the academic offers.

Keywords

• education for social entrepreneurship
• social entrepreneurial competence of teachers
• social entrepreneurship in education