Lenses on the post-oil economy: integrating entrepreneurship into sustainability education through problem-based learning

ABSTRACT

In the context of enormous global challenges such as climate change, poverty, and the unequal distribution of wealth, sustainability education within higher education has gained momentum as a tool to train a new generation of change agents. Previous research has examined the relationship between sustainability education and entrepreneurship education. There is however a knowledge gap regarding course development strategies that can integrate entrepreneurship competencies into sustainability education. Following a classroom action research (AR) approach, we developed a three-week graduate course aimed at an interdisciplinary cohort of students in the social sciences from partner universities in Brazil and Norway. The course integrated a problem-based learning (PBL) framework. Working in groups of four to five members, the students provided business solutions framed in a post-oil development context. The results indicate tension points in the integration of the learning principles of PBL along the different phases of PBL, namely during the group formation and problem analysis phases. To tackle these tensions, we suggest early group formation and integrate formative feedback and progressive problem analysis. Our framework contributes to the debate on competence-based frameworks within the sustainability education literature. The framework can also serve as an inspiration for course designers in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability education
• entrepreneurship education
• problem-based learning
• action research
• higher education
• interdisciplinarity

Acknowledgments

We thank the students who shared their time during the semi-structured interviews. From the institutional side, we thank the commitment of: Nord University, Federal Fluminense University, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Sul, Engage - Centre for Engaged Education through Entrepreneurship, Nordland Research Institute and Salten Science Park. Earlier versions of this paper received valuable feedback from Miranda Welbourne Eleazar during the Sustainability Ethics and Entrepreneurship (SEE) Conference 2020, San Juan, Puerto Rico. We extend a special thanks to the two EAR anonymous reviewers for helping us improve the manuscript and to Sarah Freire-Gibb for the language support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education (DIKU) [UTF-2017-two year/10123].