Why stories of “entrepreneurial educators” are important

Education and entrepreneurship are often perceived as two very distinct fields – yet being able to initiate and carry out successful innovations is key to the success of both entrepreneurs in any field and educators who want to be change agents to improve education. 

Appreciating the value of entrepreneurial educators’ innovations is a critical first step – as to learn how to be a successful entrepreneurial educator you need first of all to want to become one.  The next step is understanding how successful entrepreneurial educators “think” (mindsets), as well as what they “do” (practices).  Examining “lived stories” is a powerful tool to advance both of these goals, as well as to begin to develop an identity as an “entrepreneurial educator” – as we can attest based on our experience teaching a course on Entrepreneurial Skills for Educators to over 400 students to date.

How these materials can be used

These materials may be used in different ways depending on your context, audience, and purposes. Feel free to use them as you would for any resource. If, however, you wish for more specific suggestions, click on the scenario that best meets your situation from those listed below:

• Suggestions if you want to learn about this topic on your own 
• Suggestions if you are leading a study-group with peers 
• Suggestions if you are teaching a higher education course 

We also would like to encourage users to take advantage of free tech tools like Hypothes.is and similar “annotation apps”, to add one’s own observations and analysis to any of the documents included in these OER materials – and especially the stories of specific innovations.  These annotations can remain private, and/or be shared among students and/or colleagues in the spirit of “open education”.   

How you can contribute to this OER resource

In the spirit of the “open education” approach we have assumed, we welcome users’ contributions to this e-book and the accompanying website, so that everyone can benefit from this additional work.  Possible contributions may involve:

1. A commentary to any case study or innovation story, to be accessed through a link at the end of the relevant case study/story.
2. An additional resource to be used in conjunction with our e-book and stories, for inclusion in the Other Resources section.
3. A learning task you created to leverage any of the case studies or innovation stories (either by modifying one of the learning tasks already in the collection, or by designing a brand new one), to be included in the Learning Tasks section.
4. An additional educational innovation story, to be included in the website’s Stories section and potentially also in the e-book as part of Appendix B.

To ensure consistency across the collection, we are asking interested contributors to follow the directions and provide all the information detailed in the “Guidelines for Contributions” for the type of item they want to offer.  Any contribution received will be reviewed by the collection editors to decide if and how it can be included.  Authors may be asked to make revisions and/or approve suggested edits before a contribution is included in these OER materials.

Who created this OER resource

This OER resource has been curated by Dave Miller and Raffaella Borasi, the designers and instructors of “Entrepreneurial Skills for Educators” – a course that has been offered at the Warner School of Education at the University of Rochester since 2006.  The publicly available materials included in this resource have been contributed by several Warner faculty and students/graduates, as well as other users, over-time – as recognized for each included document.  Short bios for each of these contributors can be found in the Contributors section of this website.  

The case-studies reported in this e-book were produced with the support of a grant from the Kauffman Foundation.  This project was also supported by the RCL Open Education grant from the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester.