Entrepreneurial narratives and concept teaching and learning

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education (EE) is facing a tension between practical valence and academic institutionalization. As a consequence, we know very little about how story-based pedagogy is implemented in the classroom, though various entrepreneurial narratives have been institutionalized into EE programs. This article examines how one Chinese teacher thematically constructs six nascent entrepreneurs to illustrate the concept of entrepreneurship in a classroom setting. The findings suggest that the entrepreneurial narratives used by the teacher are different in structure from those reported by entrepreneurship studies, because entrepreneurial stories narrated by teachers are non-participant life stories. This article argues that narrative is an important tool for teachers to personalize their conceptualization of entrepreneurship. Such conceptualization, embedded in both the structure and the content of narratives, facilitates entrepreneurial teaching and learning in a holistic, instantiated, and impactful way. The article also demonstrates that teachers can create additional learning opportunities, by resorting to specific narrative features and thematic construction. It concludes with critical reflections on entrepreneurial narrative, story-based pedagogy, and EE research and calls for more classroom-based research in the field.

Keywords

Entrepreneurial narrative entrepreneurial pedagogy entrepreneurial teaching and learning story-based pedagogy

To address the global increasing demand for entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education (EE) is believed to be the optimal solution because various EE programs share some common goals to prepare students with an entrepreneurial mind-set and the skills and practices necessary for starting new ventures (Neck and Corbett, 2018: 8). Nevertheless, Fayolle et al. (2016) point out that EE research is still a young field and that it is facing three main challenges. One of these is that EE research has moved away from its initial practical perspective to academic institutionalization (also see Frank and Landström, 2016). As a consequence of this challenge, there is tension in EE between practical relevance and scientific rigor (Fayolle et al., 2016: 900). Loi et al. (2016) reviewed EE studies covering the period 1991–2014 and reported an emerging structure of the collective intellectual inquiry in the field; that is, studies tend to focus only on a few themes at the cost of losing a comprehensive picture of the diverse and complex nature of EE and its practical value to EE practitioners.

The academic institutionalization of EE research has also impacted methodological practices in the field. Multiple reviews have pointed out the substantial methodological challenges (Blenker et al., 2014; Fayolle et al., 2016; Hlady-Rispal and Jouison-Laffitte, 2014; Pittaway and Cope, 2007). Lack of diversity is a critical one. In quantitative and qualitative studies on entrepreneurial pedagogies, evaluating or assessing the benefits and drawbacks of the pedagogies under investigation is the predominant focus (Blenker et al., 2014; Fayolle et al., 2016). Specifically, in quantitative research, most of the studies focus on a posteriori contributions of teaching experiences, assuming a homogeneous landscape of various EE programs in which teachers, students, materials, pedagogies, goals, and contexts are actually all different. In qualitative studies, contextually sensitive descriptions and pedagogical descriptions of EE programs prevail, relying on EE teachers’ self-reports or syllabi without examining their actual practices. In the increasing body of EE literature, very few classroom-based empirical studies are available to inform us how one specific pedagogy is genuinely practiced by teachers in specific contexts, due to the tendency of researchers to focus on the outcomes of a pedagogy while ignoring the process of implementing the pedagogy (Fayolle et al., 2016). Neck and Corbett (2018: 9) caution that entrepreneurship classrooms still remain a “private space” to practitioners and researchers.

To unhide the “private space,” it is necessary to closely examine the real dynamics of EE classrooms by examining individual teachers’ discourse, in that it is individual instructor’s classroom discourse that informs us how one particular pedagogy is actually being implemented. This qualitative study, based on a larger classroom-based research project, delves deeply into six narratives of nascent entrepreneurs narrated by one Chinese teacher illuminating the concept of entrepreneurship. This article aims to contribute some new understanding about entrepreneurial narratives in the classroom, such as to what extent the entrepreneurial stories narrated by the teacher are different from those narrated by entrepreneurs; what the stories can inform us about the teacher’s conceptualization of entrepreneurship; and how they can facilitate concept teaching and learning in EE classroom settings.¹ Due to its process-oriented nature, this study also provides practitioners and researchers with a space to critically examine the participant teacher’s discursive practices and perceptions in order to reflect on how story-based pedagogy can be improved.

Literature review

Narrative and entrepreneurship

Storytelling is human universal and human specific, as Barthes (1975 [1966]) states—“narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative” (p. 237). In any human community, narrative is ubiquitous. Consciously or unconsciously, we tell stories to one another or with another in various types of social encounters. Bruner (2004) even argues that life imitates narrative and narrative imitates life (p. 692), because “there is no such thing psychologically as life itself” and “only narratives capture the sense of lived time” (pp. 692–693). Bruner (1986, 1991) treats narrative as an epistemic activity. To him, narrative is a way of knowing, supplementary to logical-scientific knowing, to make sense out of ambiguity, and the complexity of human experience. Linde’s (1993) analysis of life stories reveals that they not only capture our previous life experience but also orient future behavior for other members in a group, because stories can create a coherence system textually or socially which functions as an exemplar for other community members to follow. Linde’s insight can help us understand why certain stories—some famous entrepreneurs’ autobiographies for example—are widely circulated worldwide.

In the field of entrepreneurship research, various narrative approaches have been used. The popularity of narrative in entrepreneurship research is mainly due to its ubiquity and functionality. First, a wide variability of narratives is prevalent in our social lives. A narrative can be defined narrowly as “a sequence of two clauses that are temporally ordered” (Labov, 1972: 359–360) or broadly as a story that contains a plethora of types. It can be an individual’s autobiography, a community’s collective story, or even a grand story of our human society. From small story² to big story, narrative is ubiquitous. The ubiquitous nature of narrative allows a wide variability of forms.

Second, the ubiquity of narrative also provides a wide range of practicalities for exploration by researchers of assorted human phenomena and experiences for different purposes. Researchers can use narrative as material, linguistic activity, or route, or all of these, to understand social phenomena (Squire et al., 2013). Narrative approaches have been accepted as valid methods in entrepreneurship research (Hjorth and Steyaert, 2004, Rae, 2005). Scholars have employed narrative approaches to gain in-depth understanding of the entrepreneurial process (e.g. Fiol, 1989), legitimacy building (O’Connor, 2002, 2004), resource acquisition (Martens et al., 2007), entrepreneurial identity construction (Down, 2006; Down and Warren, 2008; Foss, 2004), entrepreneurial learning (Rae, 2005), and so forth. Narrative approaches continue to increase our understanding about venture creation and entrepreneurship (Gartner, 2007), because narrative is central to making sense of entrepreneurship (Rae, 2013).

Third, narrating or storytelling is also a critical linguistic activity or skill during the entrepreneurial process. The literature has informed us that new ventures and nascent entrepreneurs face massive challenges during the process of their emergence because they suffer from the liabilities of newness and smallness (e.g. Rutherford et al., 2009; Williams Middleton, 2013). Nascent entrepreneurs or start-ups have to overcome these challenges, through a process called a quest for legitimacy. Before stakeholders view the firm as a legitimate enterprise, the entrepreneur will have great difficulty acquiring the resources, networking with prospective investors and customers, seeking employees, and so on. Many scholars argue that the entrepreneurial process is indeed a process of legitimacy building (O’Connor, 2004; Rutherford et al., 2009; Tornikoski and Newbert, 2007). In this process, it is storytelling that mediates between the current extant stocks of resources and sequential capital acquisition and wealth creation (Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001). It is also through storytelling that the entrepreneur connects with his or her other prospective stakeholders. The role of narrative in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship studies, whether it is used as a way of knowing or as a symbolic activity, cannot be underestimated.

Story-based pedagogy and EE

Story-based pedagogy, subsuming case studies, live cases, or story-based learning is receiving growing attention. It is used in a wide range of subjects. Researchers have pinpointed several reasons for its popularity and advantages. First and foremost, humans are narrating creatures (Gottschall, 2012). During the long process of evolution, humans have developed a natural disposition for recounting their experiences as stories and are predisposed to remember stories rather than facts, concepts, relationships, and theories. Stories are acts of meaning, and they provide opportunities for discovery, learning, and sensemaking (Rust, 1999). Second, in classroom settings, stories are not abstract or theoretical; instead, they can be used as links between broadly-related concepts. They can convey multiple concepts, common threads of understanding, values, beliefs, cultural norms, and so on. In this sense, they can personalize content and facilitate understanding (McNett, 2016). Third, stories allow emotions to be incorporated, and they can appeal to both a storyteller’s and a listener’s emotions. Thus, they can create empathy, containing enough details to make the main characters memorable and relatable to the reader. Fourth, storytelling provides an authentic and engaging communication through which students can learn in a classroom (Karanian et al., 2016). Last, stories can push students to move beyond dichotomous thinking or reductionist reasoning to interdisciplinary analysis, systems thinking, and reflection from multiple perspectives (Sprain and Timpson, 2012), and they can eventually increase students’ tolerance for ambiguity and working under situations of uncertainty.

In EE, it is through the pedagogy of case study that narratives are institutionalized in various EE programs (Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001: 545). Story-based pedagogy is reported to be one of the most common pedagogies in entrepreneurship classrooms (Carroll and College, 1993; Solomon et al., 1994; Taatila, 2010). Narratives can be used by teachers to introduce entrepreneurs, describe a new venture’s emergence, illustrate concepts, and exemplify various phenomena that commonly take place in the entire entrepreneurial process. They can also be used by students to engage in various learning activities, such as mock negotiation and business plan presentation. However, very few classroom-based empirical studies focus on story-based pedagogy, even though researchers believe that entrepreneurial narratives can facilitate entrepreneurial learning (Johansson, 2004); that real-life cases allow students to build their own perception of the reality of entrepreneurship in a holistic manner (Taatila, 2010); and that classroom narrative provides a means by which entrepreneurial learners construct, revise, and reconstruct their narrative identities (Harmeling, 2011). Fayolle et al. (2016) insightfully point out that instructors’ narratives are often based on implicit, taken-for-granted assumptions about learning theories with little reflection, theoretical, and didactical knowledge. Most importantly, narratives used by a teacher in a classroom setting are qualitatively different from those reported in entrepreneurship studies because the stories narrated by the teacher are non-participant life stories (Linde, 1996), whereas the stories studied by entrepreneurship scholars are narrated from the perspective of entrepreneurs or new ventures.

This study examines how a Chinese EE teacher constructed six nascent entrepreneurs’ narratives in a classroom setting. According to the teacher’s self-report, these narratives were used to illustrate the concept of entrepreneurship. The term “nascent entrepreneur” refers to young practicing entrepreneurs who are not known to the audience. In this article, I employ a thematic analytical framework to address two main research questions: what are the thematic components constituting the narratives under investigation, and how do the narratives facilitate entrepreneurial teaching and learning?

Methodology

The participant teacher

This study is part of a larger qualitative case study project that aims to gain in-depth understanding about how a teacher perceives formal EE and implements it in a classroom setting throughout one semester. This qualitative project takes a single-case study design to obtain some degree of local understanding about EE (Stake, 2006). Increasing rigor has been recognized by methodologists with regard to single-case design, especially when the case is revelatory and exemplary and offers extremely rich details of a particular case (e.g. Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007; Yin, 2009). This project focuses on one introductory entrepreneurship course at LFTC (a pseudonym for the participating university), a private local university located in the Northeast of China. One participant teacher, Ms Ying (pseudonym), volunteered to participate in this research project. Ying has been teaching at LFTC for 19 years. Before she started teaching EE in 2013, she was a political science teacher. Meanwhile she also served in multiple management positions on campus, such as department chair, and the head of the graduate employment office. Since 2006, Ying has taught a compulsory course entitled “Guidance for Employment.” From 2013, she attended a professional development training program “Know About Business” (KAB), sponsored by the Chinese government. In the fall semester of 2013, Ying started teaching “Introduction to Entrepreneurship Education". She explains that she developed this course herself, based on the curriculum of the KAB program and the national curriculum issued by China’s Ministry of Education. Currently, the only course she teaches at LFTC is EE. She also serves on multiple committees concerned with college students’ entrepreneurial activities: for example, she is a permanent judge in campus start-up competitions. She is also a mentor in a business incubator in the city where LFTC is located. She regularly delegates a team of LFTC students to participate in start-up competitions at municipal or provincial level.

The data

In the case study project, guided by Yin’s (2009) principles for collecting case study evidence, a chain of data from multiple sources was collected: documents (course syllabus, Ying’s teaching materials, and relevant official documents issued by the government at different levels), interviews (three 60-min interviews conducted in March, May, and December 2016), classroom observations (taken from three field trips to Ying’s classes in May 2016), and video-recorded classroom interactions (around 15 h). In total, the participant teacher videotaped 14 weeks of her classroom teaching in a multimedia classroom equipped with cameras. From Ying’s self-report, entrepreneurial cases were constantly introduced in her classroom teaching. After collecting the semester-long classroom teaching videos, the researcher viewed all the videos and completed video logging, in which the video content was indexed. Scanning through her classroom video logs, the researcher confirmed the participant’s self-report that many live cases of entrepreneurs were used in different modules in her classroom teaching. In total, the researcher identified 16 entrepreneurial cases. All these cases are narratives in nature, because they all contain real-life experiences lived through by entrepreneurs. These narratives were then located on the original video footage. The narratives under analysis in this article were identified based on two criteria. First, all narratives are genuine experiences that entrepreneurs have lived through. Second, they are all narrated by the instructor. Thus, the narratives produced in students’ learning activities and hypothetical narratives used by the teacher are excluded.

Reviewing all these 16 entrepreneurial narratives, the researcher noticed that there were two types of protagonists: well-established entrepreneurs and young practicing entrepreneurs who had graduated from LFTC. The narratives about well-established entrepreneurs were used in modules such as marketing, venture management, and risk management, serving the purpose of problem-based instruction (McNett, 2016). In contrast, the narratives about the LFTC nascent entrepreneurs were intensively used in the first module of the course, the main objective of which is to “provide a general introduction to entrepreneurship” (Interview 1 and syllabus). In total, the participant teacher introduced seven such cases of various length and detail. But one entrepreneur’s story introduced to her class was presented in video format, because a state TV broadcaster had already covered his success story nationwide. This nascent entrepreneur’s narrative was excluded in the final analysis, because the story does not meet the selection criteria mentioned above. The finalized six stories under analysis were not interactive, because they were narrated in a whole large section of the teacher’s talk. Students did not contribute a single turn of discourse to the storytelling process. Thus, a broad verbatim transcription, instead of a narrow transcription, was practiced. The narration was transcribed in Chinese initially and then translated into English. The English translation was presented to the participant teacher to check the accuracy. The participant teacher’s English literacy skills were sufficiently strong for her to identify discrepancies between the researcher’s translation and her intention. Revisions were made wherever such discrepancy was noted.

Data analysis

Narrative analysis has developed into a methodology with many forms, employing a variety of analytical approaches, and is rooted in different social and humanities disciplines (Creswell, 2013: 70). In this article, narratives are treated as materials for the researcher to make sense of the teacher’s conceptualization of entrepreneurship and how narratives facilitate teaching and learning in EE classrooms. A thematic approach to narrative analysis (Riessman, 2008) was practiced in order to answer the two research questions. Multiple steps were conducted. At first, I familiarized myself with the data by reading through the entire transcription a couple of times in order to have a general sense of the data (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Next, I coded the thematic components in each narrative and compared them across the six narratives to identify shared plot patterns. Third, I focused on each of the components across the narratives, concentrating on both thematic construction and structural features, to make sense of the roles the narratives played in facilitating concept teaching and learning. The analysis was conducted on the Chinese transcription because some Chinese linguistic features and meanings might be lost in translation. The findings in this article are presented in English.

Findings

In this section, I address the first research question and report the emergent components of the entrepreneurial narratives used by the participant teacher. The identification of these components is based on the common themes in the six narratives.

Emergent components of the entrepreneurial narratives

Although they vary in length and detail, these narratives are extremely similar in plot structure. The plots of the six narratives are summarized below. Due to space limitations, only keywords in each case are listed, to give the readers a general sense.

Protagonist 1

Identity: An information management major of Class 2011.

An owner of an education company and a media company.

A winner of multiple awards: Public Credibility Award, Role Model Youth Award, Entrepreneurial Star Award, YBC Youth Entrepreneur Award.

Process: Started working part-time when he was a freshman in college.

Identified many opportunities during his part-time working experience.

Started his first company when he was a senior in college.

Expanded his business from education to media.

Evaluation: Simple, hardworking, unwearyingly diligent, willing to act.

Protagonist 2

Identity: A business administration major of Class 2014.

An owner of six education companies and a wedding service company.

A winner in a province-wide start-up competition.

Process: Started working part-time when he was a freshman.

Identified opportunities during his part-time working experience.

Set up his first education company when he was a senior in college.

Expanded his business to six franchising schools.

Evaluation: Visionary, really cultured, willing to act, talented, passionate, able to take advantage of, and restructure available resources.

Protagonist 3

Identity: An IT major of Class 2006.

An owner of a mobile game company and a garment company.

A popular entrepreneurial icon in many local newspapers.

Process: Worked in a reputable IT company on graduation.

Earned enough experience and business resource networks.

Took first move strategy and started his mobile game company very early.

Expanded his business by franchising a garment company.

Evaluation: Hardworking, diligent.

Protagonist 4

Identity: A female business English major of Class 2008.

An owner of a company specialized in snail cosmetic products and snail farms.

A winner of multiple awards: Female Role Model Award of Nascent Entrepreneurs, Forerunner of Entrepreneurship.

Process: Identified opportunities by accident, when she ate snails for the first time in her life.

Identified potential market.

Conducted market research.

Consulted experts in snail farming and snail products.

Expanded her business from selling products to owning her own farms.

Evaluation: Hardworking, an ordinary girl who succeeded in making a great business.

Protagonist 5

Identity: A diploma program student of Class 2004.

An owner of a food import and export company.

Process: Started his career with a diploma only.

Committed to improving his English skills in order to connect potential clients.

Owned his own company.

Evaluation: Very diligent, committed to learning English to avoid his reliance on interpreters.

Protagonist 6

Identity: A major of international trade.

An owner of a data recovery company.

An entrepreneurship award winner: YBC Youth Entrepreneur Award.

Process: Identified a potential market.

Incubated his project in a municipal high-tech incubator.

Evaluation: Phenomenal achievement.

The plots presented above reveal that all the stories are minimally constituted of three components: portraying the protagonists’ identities, describing their entrepreneurial processes, and evaluating the protagonists or their achievements. The components of each protagonist’s identity and entrepreneurial process are temporally ordered. But evaluation can occur anywhere in the stories, instead of being at the end only. The identified plot structure in this study shows some variation from those reported by previous researchers. Fiol (1989) reports that entrepreneurial narratives contain three essential elements: a narrative subject, an object or ultimate goal that the subject is in search of, and a set of forces that enable or impede the subject from attaining the desired object or goal. By contrast, the entrepreneurial narratives used by Ying in the classroom seem to include the necessary component of evaluation of the protagonists, which is unlikely to occur in Fiol’s entrepreneurial narratives. In addition, Ying’s stories were all narrated in the third person. These variations suggest that real-life entrepreneurs’ narratives in the business world and EE teachers’ narratives in classroom settings are two different processes. Entrepreneurial stories used by the teacher are non-participant life stories (Linde, 1996) in nature. Stories narrated by entrepreneurs and teachers also differ in terms of authorship, audience, context, and purpose. These various factors allow entrepreneurial stories to exist as different types. However, in entrepreneurship and EE research, the distinction of different types is missing. The variability of entrepreneurial narratives allows narrators to achieve different purposes, employing diverse structure and content. In the following sections, I focus on analyzing the content of each thematic component.

Constructing nascent entrepreneurs’ identities

Constructing a nascent entrepreneur’s identity is particularly necessary in classroom narratives, because the audience lacks knowledge about the entrepreneur’s status, achievement, and legitimacy. Ying, when introducing the main characters in these six narratives, always assigned multiple identities to the protagonist, such as a former LTFC student, a business owner, and a nascent entrepreneur legitimized by external authorities. The external authorities might be start-up competitions (in Narratives 1, 2 and 4), local newspapers (Narrative 3), or business incubators (Narrative 6). Among these identities, the identity of a LFTC graduate was always introduced first. For example, the teacher introduced Zhao as follows:

As for self-actualization, I will show you one person. He is Zhao Hongyu, a student of Class 2011 from our university. He majored in Information Management. At present, he owns two companies: one is Huacheng Education Company; the other is Yiguan Media. At first sight, he was just an average person. He was so common that he didn’t stand out among so many students. But he was unwearyingly diligent and very hardworking. What you are looking at is a picture when he was honored with some awards, the tall boy in the picture. He came from a village in Chaoyang city. His family was very poor. I taught him. He was a very simple person. But he was really hardworking and willing to act. When he was a freshman, he started to work part-time, and he continued throughout his college life. (Narrative 1)

This short excerpt is the beginning of Narrative 1. In the second and third sentences, Ying assigned one identity of Zhao—a former LFTC student—by introducing his major and year of graduation. Immediately after this, she assigns Zhao’s entrepreneurial identity by explicitly naming the companies³ that he owns concurrently. Then Ying provided her own evaluation of the protagonist, in greater detail portraying him as an “average person.” After her evaluation, she projected a picture, showing Zhao receiving awards. In doing so, Ying portrayed Zhao as an award-winner in entrepreneurship, though she did not specify what awards Zhao had received at this stage of the narration. Her follow-up narration provided her first-person knowledge about Zhao’s family background—a poor family from a village in the most underdeveloped city (Chaoyang) in the home province, where LFTC is located. She further provided extra evaluation of the protagonist—as simple but really hardworking and willing to act. The last quality actually forms the beginning of another component in Narrative 1—the protagonist’s entrepreneurial process. In Narrative 1, the most important identities are an average LFTC student, a business owner, and an award-winner. This pattern of identity construction is also found in the other narratives, except Narrative 5. Consider the following excerpt, taken from Narrative 4, the protagonist of which specializes in snail cosmetic products and snail farming. The excerpt reproduces the beginning and end of Narrative 4. The entrepreneurial process is omitted, in order to ensure the analysis remains focused on identity construction:

Okay, here is one female student. She was our student, majoring in Business English. She was granted honors such as Female Role Model Award of Nascent Entrepreneurs and Forerunner of Entrepreneurship. By the way, Huang Dong [the protagonist in Narrative 3], the previous example we’ve just seen, during that period of time, many Dalian [home city of LFTC] newspapers, such as Peninsular Morning, New Commerce, Evening Paper, have reported Huang Dong’s success stories, a lot of coverage about him. I keep all the clippings about him.⁴ As for this girl, what business does she do? What she is doing is snail products […] She is really hardworking. Currently, in Lushun [a college town], she has built her own snail farms. She is really doing great. She is not eye-catching, just an ordinary girl, right now her business is doing great. (Narrative 4)

Similar to the treatment of Zhao in Narrative 1, Ying assigned three identities of the female protagonist. The sequential ordering of the identities of an LFTC student and a practicing entrepreneur is significant. The significance lies in the fact that these two identities contribute to the anchoring of two temporal references: the self of the protagonist in the past and his or her current self. These two references create a temporal structure in a narrative, which further determines that the narratives are about the protagonist’s transformation from a student into a practicing entrepreneur. The membership assignment plays a critical role in Ying’s local classroom, because the status of an ordinary LFTC student links Ying’s current students with the protagonists in her stories. It creates a local community, going beyond the physical boundary of the classroom setting.

From the analysis presented in this section, we notice that it is the temporal feature and the thematic construction of the protagonists’ identities that reveal Ying’s personal conceptualization of entrepreneurship—an ordinary LFTC student can achieve transformation into an entrepreneur. After setting the tone for the six narratives, she is able to continue her narration about how the protagonists transformed themselves in a coherent manner.

Narrating the entrepreneurial process

From the plots presented earlier, it can be seen that when narrating the protagonists’ entrepreneurial processes, Ying selectively narrated critical milestone events lived through by each protagonist. These critical events include opportunity identification, business expansion, legitimacy building, and events reflecting the protagonist’s entrepreneurial spirit and moral qualities. These temporally connected events allow listeners to track the protagonist’s trajectory of entrepreneurship. In Narratives 1 and 2, the protagonists share an extremely similar trajectory—through part-time working experience they identified opportunities to set up their first education companies. In Narrative 3, the protagonist started working in a well-known IT company on graduation and then set up his first mobile game company after establishing his business resource network. The female protagonist in Narrative 4 identified an opportunity by accident. Supported by her mother, she embarked on her entrepreneurial path. In Narrative 5, Ying provided fewer details about the protagonist’s trajectory. In Narrative 6, Ying mentioned that the protagonist materialized his transformation from an international trade major to an IT venture creator through a local incubator. In this component, one narrative strategy constantly used by Ying is to switch from the third-person perspective to the first-person perspective to embed some contextualization or elaboration to legitimize the protagonist cognitively. In doing so, she manages to create an opportunity to verbalize why certain entrepreneurial behaviors were successful during the entrepreneurial process. Take, for example, the following excerpt concerning Zhao in Narrative 1:

He was a very simple person. But he was really hardworking and willing to act. From the first year of college, he started to work part-time. During this process, he discovered a lot of opportunities. What did he do when he started his part-time job? It was related to the first company he created, which is, education and professional training. Many of you consider getting some credentials and certificates, relevant to your employment, with some credentials, right, such as qualification certificates, professional training certificates, to increase your opportunities. Initially, he was working part-time in such training companies, to recruit students. He would get some commission, if he managed to recruit one student. After working for a while, he discovered the market was actually pretty big and very promising. For example, in Lushun college town alone, there are tens of thousands of students. So when he was a senior in college, he himself created his own education company. During these years, he has obtained many many honors. All the honors are shown on the projector, such as Public Credibility Award, Role Model Youth Award, Entrepreneurial Star Award, YBC Youth Entrepreneur Award, and so forth. He has obtained many many honors. (Narrative 1)

The first two sentences in the excerpt are Ying’s evaluation of Zhao after identity construction. From the third sentence to the end, she narrates Zhao’s entrepreneurial process, in which the critical events are his part-time working experience, opportunity identification, the creation of his first venture, the expansion of his business by creating an advertisement company, and his award-winning experiences. The temporal feature of these events allows the audience to interpret their causal relationship (Linde, 1993); that is, it is the protagonist’s part-time working experience which led him to the opportunity identification, then to his first business creation, and eventually to his business expansion with increasing social recognition. The underlined text indicates how Ying changes from the third-person perspective and embeds her own voice. In Linde’s (1993) analytical approach, the underlined text is identified as explanation, an important discourse unit in life stories. What Ying elaborates is a justification of the niche market identified by Zhao, which validates his first venture as desirable. Similar narrative features, such as identity formation and contrasting evaluations of the protagonist’s ordinariness and his or her business achievement, are seen in Wang Jing’s story:

As for this girl, what business does she do? What she is doing is snail products. As early as 2008, the year Wang Jing graduated, she had started to explore snail products. Snail products became popular only in recent years, right? For example, facial cream, and other snail cosmetic products. After her mother was laid-off, she set up her own business. So her mother influenced her tremendously. Upon graduation, she became obsessed with starting her own business. Once, her mom’s friends gave her family some snails to eat. They hadn’t had them before. What to do then? She started to learn and search online. Then, Wang Jing noticed snails were pretty nutritious. As she researched more, she also realized the market was pretty blank. Then she talked to her mother to see whether it was possible to develop snail products. Her mom invited a panel of experts to conduct market research. And they concluded that snail business could be profitable. Then her mom invited specialists to develop snail products. At the beginning, she herself ran marketing. She herself was the sales assistant. This is very important, because you can know why customers don’t like the product. Is it because of price or other reasons? Only after knowing why people don’t buy, could you potentially do marketing better, improve the product. She is really hardworking. Currently, in Lushun, she has built her own snail farms. She is really hardworking. She is really doing great. She is not eye-catching, just an ordinary girl, right now her business is doing great. She is really doing great. (Narrative 4)

Although in Narrative 4 Ying selected different events and projected a different trajectory from those in Narrative 1, she also embedded an explanation to justify Wang Jing’s marketing strategy.

In some narratives, Ying selected events reflecting the protagonist’s moral qualities. From the excerpts presented above, readers may already have a sense of important characteristics of the entrepreneurial spirit common to all cases—such as diligence and a willingness to act. In Narrative 2, Ying embedded three small stories about the protagonist’s innovative marketing practices to promote his talent school’s visibility:

He invested 300 thousand RMB and built a studio [together with his business partner]. They started the new company. When kids enrolled in the school, they put the kid in the studio, recorded a clip of the kid, his voice, appearance and so forth. After training, they recorded the same kid with another clip of video, and presented the two video clips to his or her parents. Viewing the video clips, parents could see substantial changes after enrolling in the school. Parents could feel that it was worthwhile to invest money on their children to study at this school. Focusing on the high-end market, he is really being very successful. Once he invited CCTV (China Central Television) TV host, Dong Hao, the host from a kids channel, to visit his school and interact with his students. It saved him a lot of money to advertise his school […] He also contacted a lot of charity organizations. If they had a plan to have any public activities, he would volunteer some children’s performances. It provided children a real-life stage to perform, it also gave the school a chance to promote itself. If the viewers of the charity show were impressed by the children and they’d like to know more about the talent school. (Narrative 2)

The first embedded story is about the entrepreneur using video portfolios to document the children’s growth in talent after enrolling in his school. The second is about inviting a famous TV host from a kids TV channel to interact with his students. CCTV is regarded as the highest authority among all Chinese TV broadcasters. The last embedded story is about the entrepreneur’s collaboration with charity organizations. These embedded stories contribute to revealing the protagonist’s innovative strategies in marketing and restructuring resources.

Narrative 5, the shortest of the six under analysis, is fully presented below. The protagonist graduated with a diploma in international trade. Back in 2004, LFTC graduates with a diploma were most likely to find one of the lowest-paying positions in a trading company. When narrating his story, Ying used a large section of the narrative to embed a story about the protagonist’s commitment to improving his English. Although the embedded story has nothing to do with his entrepreneurial process, it does unfold and highlight his spirit of diligence, perseverance, and independence. Such qualities, in the eyes of Ying, are the key to his business success:

Also this student, he is a graduate of Class 2004. What he is doing right now is food trading, food import and export. He did really well, really well. He is also a very industrious student. In the past, every time he went on a business trip to meet clients, he had to take an interpreter with him. For example, to attend commodity fairs, to go abroad to negotiate with clients, he had to hire an interpreter. But later, he didn’t need to hire an interpreter. He told me: ‘Taking an interpreter could have many problems. It also increased costs. I feel like the best solution is to improve my English speaking skills.’ It is not easy. He was a graduate with a diploma, but later he could negotiate with his clients without relying on interpreters. It is not an easy task. He is very industrious and hardworking. (Narrative 5)

In this section, I have presented my analysis of the entrepreneurial process component. It is the temporality, embeddedness, and content of narratives that allow Ying not only to present divergent trajectories of business creation and development but also to elaborate why some behaviors are important and how essential an entrepreneurial spirit was to the protagonists’ success. Researchers have proposed that critical events or learning episodes (Cope, 2003, 2005, Rae, 2005; 2013; Rae and Carswell, 2000) embedded in entrepreneurial narratives could stimulate challenging, deep reflection and create higher-level entrepreneurial learning. In this sense, Ying created learning opportunities for her students to make sense of various means of achieving transformation and the success factors.

Teacher’s evaluation of the protagonist

I have shown that evaluation can occur anywhere in a narrative. Ying’s evaluations can be coded into three different themes: the moral qualities of the protagonists, the ordinariness of the protagonists when they were students, and the teacher’s comments on the protagonists’ business accomplishments. These three themes are often interwoven into one narrative with a homogeneous pattern; that is, the protagonists’ ordinariness was contrasted with their outstanding business achievement, which further foregrounded the roles that an entrepreneurial spirit played in the transition. In Narrative 2, the protagonist was described as an average student, with Ying stating that “his academic performance was just average.” After she had finished describing the protagonist’s entrepreneurial process, she commented on his business success and moral qualities:

In the first semester of his senior year, he already set up a school, Wuhai Langtong Talent School. Right now, he has six branch schools in the city. Six schools. Wow! I should say he is an extremely diligent and very hardworking guy. He works hard. He works really hard. (Narrative 2)

From the excerpt above, we notice that the protagonist’s business achievement is contrasted with his mediocracy in academic performance. The modal should indicates that the teacher felt obliged to give credit to his diligence for his success. It also reveals that in the eyes of the teacher, the quality of diligence was a prerequisite for the protagonist’s success. Across the six narratives, Ying’s evaluations of the protagonists follow the same pattern, which not only highlights the importance of an entrepreneurial spirit but also conceptualizes the entrepreneurial spirit as an important enabling factor. Thus, the six narratives reveal a complete picture to the students; that is, ordinary LFTC students can transform themselves into entrepreneurs, there are various trajectories and strategies to follow, and exhibiting an entrepreneurial spirit characterized by diligence and willingness to act is decisive.

Discussion

In the previous section, I have addressed the first research question, relating to how the narratives are thematically constructed. In the following, I focus my discussion on the second question, relating to how entrepreneurial narratives facilitate concept teaching and learning in EE classrooms. Building on the analysis presented, I argue that narrative is an important tool for EE teachers to personalize their own conceptualization of entrepreneurship. Such conceptualization is embedded in both the structure and content of narratives. In this particular case, Ying, using her first-person knowledge about the six nascent entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial processes, conceptualized entrepreneurship in her own way, targeting specific groups of students for specific purposes. To elaborate, in the component of identity construction, the teacher conceptualized entrepreneurship as a process in which ordinary LFTC students transformed into successful entrepreneurs. In the component of the entrepreneurial process and evaluation, Ying further conceptualized entrepreneurship as a process in which LFTC students followed different trajectories and strategies but achieved the same goal, due to similar enabling factors (entrepreneurial spirit and entrepreneurial behaviors). Such personalized conceptualization facilitates teaching and learning, for the following reasons.

First, conceptualizing entrepreneurship in narratives allows EE teachers to interweave multiple related concepts; therefore, it facilitates entrepreneurial learning in a holistic manner (Taatila, 2010). We have already noticed that a thread of common knowledge about entrepreneurship has been intertwined in Ying’s narratives, such as opportunity identification, legitimacy building strategies, entrepreneurial spirit, and marketing innovation. Illuminating the concept of entrepreneurship in narratives moves beyond reductionist reasoning (Sprain and Timpson, 2012) and provides a more authentic and holistic picture about the reality of entrepreneurship. In this sense, narratives also play an important role in mediating between abstract concepts and actual practices in reality. As shown in the analysis, Ying, using concrete events, conceptualized entrepreneurship as a story of change, provided the possible trajectories and means to achieve self-realization, and institutionalized values, beliefs, and norms that are widely held in entrepreneurship into her concept teaching. Thus, story-based pedagogy not only facilitates students’ learning of multiple concepts at the same time but also cultivates a mindset, which requires a holistic understanding of entrepreneurship. Story-based pedagogy can play such a role, because narrative imitates life (Bruner, 2004) and functions as a way of knowing how to make sense out of ambiguity and the complexity of our experiences (Bruner, 1986, 1991).

Second, conceptualizing entrepreneurship in narrative allows EE teachers to tailor their concept teaching for specific students. In this study, Ying deliberately conceptualized entrepreneurship in six LFTC students’ stories. Using such narratives, she linked all the entrepreneurs with her students and created a local community with the same membership. In doing so, Ying made these narratives more relatable and impactful to her students. Therefore, the stories are more likely to create empathy, allowing the students to enter easily into the narrative world created by the teacher and experience the protagonist’s life in a “more authentic and instantiated way” (Ying, Interview 2). Such narratives also provide a possibility and invite them to start their own entrepreneurial narratives in the future, because life stories can be used as exemplars for other members (Linde, 1993). In this sense, story-based pedagogy goes beyond concept teaching, because it can potentially inspire and ignite students’ interests and intentions. In this particular study, what also matters is whose stories the teacher chose to tell and how the stories were constructed, because it was the shared group membership constructed by the teacher that made the stories more meaningful to the target listeners.

Lastly, the feature of embeddedness in narratives allows teachers to narrate another story or voice personal views. It also provides students additional opportunities for discovery, learning, and sensemaking (Rust, 1999). In this study, Ying used this feature, allowing her students to make sense of why a certain market niche was desirable in Narrative 1, how to target a high-end market using innovative marketing strategies, and why running marketing was critical at the beginning of the entrepreneurial process in Narrative 4. All this evidence shows that story-based pedagogy allows teachers to create additional learning opportunities through the intentional or unintentional design of a story. These learning opportunities are created not only due to the variability of narrative structures but also because of the way a storyteller designs the stories.

Conclusion

The first time I interviewed Ying for data collection, the participant teacher explicitly expressed her difficulty in providing a definition of entrepreneurship to her students. In class, she simply defined it as “a process of venture creation.” However, it is through the nascent entrepreneurs’ life stories that the teacher presented a holistic conceptualization, involving both the personality of the entrepreneur and the behavioral approach to entrepreneurship. This article does not claim any generalization of the findings, nor does it claim that the participant teacher’s narration is the optimal. Instead, it makes the following critical reflections about entrepreneurial narratives, story-based pedagogy, and EE research.

First, entrepreneurial stories can exist as different types. A fine-grained distinction of various entrepreneurial stories is necessary in future research. In this study, I have demonstrated that multiple factors such as authorship, audience, structure, content, and context allow a variety of entrepreneurial stories to be told for different purposes. Even making the assumption that entrepreneurial narratives used by EE teachers as one story type will be a mistake. As mentioned in the methodology section, the participant teacher narrated 16 entrepreneurial narratives in her semester-long classroom teaching. The six nascent entrepreneurs’ stories analyzed in this study were used to illuminate the concept of entrepreneurship, whereas some well-established entrepreneurs’ stories were narrated for problem-based instruction. The thematic construction of the well-established entrepreneurs’ stories may be different from that of the nascent entrepreneurs’ stories. To be specific, the identity construction for well-established entrepreneurs might be different because her audience might have more knowledge about those well-known entrepreneurs. Ying also narrated some business blunder stories to elaborate marketing risks in another module. Such stories could be radically different in thematic construction in the component of the entrepreneurial process, because negative events will be unavoidable, whereas the narratives analyzed in this study are all success stories. Both well-established entrepreneurs’ stories and blunder stories narrated by the same teacher should not be assumed to have the same thematic construction or story type as illustrated in this study, because protagonists, contents, and pedagogical goals are all different. However, the EE teacher’s discursive practice is the common locus in which various types of entrepreneurial narratives are formulated. Therefore, it is also the locus that EE researchers can examine to gain deeper understanding about entrepreneurial narratives used by EE teachers.

Second, examining an EE teacher’s classroom discourse is beneficial. It not only reveals the teacher’s beliefs and perceptions but also provides an opportunity to reflect critically on his or her perceptions and discursive practices. In this study, the participant teacher overwhelmingly emphasized the decisiveness of diligence and willingness to act. Are these two qualities sufficient? How do these stories help to cultivate students’ innovative spirit, which is strongly emphasized by the Chinese government, particularly for those with higher degrees? As described in the data subsection, all the stories were narrated by teacher’s talk, and students did not contribute a single turn. The critical reflection is how can EE teachers change their discursive practices to engage students as co-participants of storytelling, rather than as recipients only? Can we involve students in the evaluation of the main characters in narratives in order to create active learning opportunities? Obviously, EE teachers’ classroom discourse is a factor we can reflect on in order to improve our pedagogical practices.

Finally, for EE studies, it is important not only to seek a rigorous measurement to quantify the outcomes of a specific pedagogy but also to gain new insights about the process of implementing the pedagogy. Through an analysis of the process of the participant teacher’s construction of six narratives, this study has demonstrated the complex dynamics in a real classroom setting. The study provides an understanding of a specific type of entrepreneurial narrative, and opportunities to critically reflect on an EE teacher’s beliefs and discursive practices. Such studies may not contribute to the ongoing debate about the validity of an assessment or evaluation method. But they are meaningful and relevant to EE practitioners—important stakeholders in the field. Thus, this article concludes with a call for more in-depth analysis of teachers’ pedagogical practices in classroom settings.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions. I also thank Dr Kathryn Roulston and Mr Courtney Grant for reading the drafts. Lastly, I wish to thank the participant teacher for participating in this research project. Any errors are my own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Longlong Wang

Notes

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