International Educational Innovation and Public Sector Entrepreneurship 9781781907092, 9781781907085

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INTERNATIONAL EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION AND PUBLIC SECTOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP

INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATION AND SOCIETY Series Editor: Alexander W. Wiseman Recent Volumes: Series Editor from Volume 11: Alexander W. Wiseman Volume 11: Educational Leadership: Global Contexts and International Comparisons Volume 12: International Educational Governance Volume 13: The Impact of International Achievement Studies on National Education Policymaking Volume 14: Post-Socialism is not Dead: (Re)Reading The Global in Comparative Education Volume 15: The Impact and Transformation of Education Policy in China Volume 16: Education Strategy in the Developing World: Revising the World Bank’s Education Policy Volume 17: Community Colleges Worldwide: Investigating The Global Phenomenon Volume 18: The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Education Worldwide Volume 19: Teacher Reforms around the World: Implementations and Outcomes Volume 20: Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2013 Volume 21: The Development of Higher Education in Africa: Prospects and Challenges Volume 22: Out of the Shadows: The Global Intensification of Supplementary Education

INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATION AND SOCIETY VOLUME 23

INTERNATIONAL EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION AND PUBLIC SECTOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDITED BY

ALEXANDER W. WISEMAN Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA

United Kingdom
North America
Japan India
Malaysia
China

Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2014 Copyright r 2014 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78190-708-5 ISSN: 1479-3679 (Series)

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CONTENTS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

vii

PREFACE

ix

PART 1: THE ROLE OF INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN EDUCATION WORLDWIDE INTERNATIONALLY COMPARATIVE APPROACHES TO INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN EDUCATION Alexander W. Wiseman 3 YOUTH ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION AND TRAINING FOR POVERTY ALLEVIATION: A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE AND LOCAL EXPERIENCES Aryn Baxter, David W. Chapman, Joan DeJaeghere, Amy R. Pekol and Tamara Weiss 33 SOCIO-EDUCATIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP WITHIN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: LEVERAGING TEACHER-DRIVEN INNOVATIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT Vijaya Sherry Chand 59

PART 2: DEVELOPING EDUCATION AND SOCIETY WORLDWIDE THROUGH PUBLIC SECTOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP DEVELOPING INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS IN YOUTH THROUGH MASS EDUCATION: THE EXAMPLE OF ICT IN THE UAE Alexander W. Wiseman and Emily Anderson 85 v

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CONTENTS

THE IMPACT OF PUBLIC SECTOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION ON SKILLED MIGRATION: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CANADIAN AND AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION Radu Daniel Prelipcean, Mir Nazmul Islam, Andrea Peebles, Thomas Barakat and Jianming Yao 125 SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES IN ECUADOR: EXAMPLES AND OPPORTUNITIES Matthew Aruch, Ana Loja and James B. Sanders 157

PART 3: THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN EDUCATION WHAT ABOUT STUDENTS’ RIGHT TO THE “RIGHT” EDUCATION? AN ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTITUDE TO TEACHING AND LEARNING Eva Leffler and A˚sa Falk-Lundqvist 191 ENTREPRENEURS IN PRIVATE HIGHER EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY OF EDUCATION ENTREPRENEURS IN A MIDDLE INCOME ECONOMY Seng P. Yeoh 209 PROMISES AND CHALLENGES FOR INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN EDUCATION Alexander W. Wiseman 251

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

275

SUBJECT INDEX

281

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Emily Anderson

Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

Matthew Aruch

University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

Thomas Barakat

University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

Aryn Baxter

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Vijaya Sherry Chand

Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India

David W. Chapman

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Joan DeJaeghere

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

A˚sa Falk-Lundqvist

Umea˚ University, Umea˚, Sweden

Mir Nazmul Islam

Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration, Toronto, Canada

Eva Leffler

Umea˚ University, Umea˚, Sweden

Ana Loja

Universidad de Cuenca, Cuenca, Ecuador

Andrea Peebles

University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

Amy R. Pekol

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Radu Daniel Prelipcean Ontario Public Service, Toronto, Canada James B. Sanders

University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

Tamara Weiss

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA vii

viii

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Alexander W. Wiseman Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA Jianming Yao

University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

Seng P. Yeoh

Asia e University (AeU), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

PREFACE Despite the influence of globalization on educational innovation and social entrepreneurship, there is no universal model for developing an innovation infrastructure or capacity for social entrepreneurship that benefits education. Perhaps one reason is because these systems are so closely linked with contextualized economic demands, social norms, and value systems. However, international educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship have reoriented to reflect global educational trends such as a shared emphasis on access to quality schooling. One example of innovation and social entrepreneurship in education worldwide is the organization known as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). With the simple mission to alleviate poverty and injustice, BRAC has made significant, large-scale and sustainable impacts on communities worldwide through the largest, secular education system in the world. This kind of innovative thinking and entrepreneurial spirit is the focus of this volume examining international educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship. This volume in the International Perspectives on Education and Society series focuses on the ways that social entrepreneurs innovatively contribute to the development and implementation of education worldwide. The internationally comparative perspective of this volume’s theme frames educational innovation and social entrepreneurship using both the globalization and contextualization of educational quality and opportunity in disadvantaged communities worldwide as a foundation. Through the use of both empirical research reports and case study examples, this volume will examine the contributions of social entrepreneurs through educational programs, projects, and systems worldwide, and how the social, cultural, and political communities in each nation contextualize educational innovations
particularly in marginalized or exploited communities. Chapters will examine evidence to assess the impact of social entrepreneurship in education and to make recommendations for innovative educational change that is contextualized enough to be locally sustainable, but that is standardized enough that it provides an innovative model for similar communities worldwide. This volume will also highlight the importance of ix

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PREFACE

theory in both understanding and guiding innovative ideas in every stage of entrepreneurial development of education from research-to-practice. In particular, chapters will address the ways in which social entrepreneurs manoeuvre socially and politically charged contexts to build a resource infrastructure; reconcile the role of public/private partnerships in educational capacity-building; create and sustain real-world educational innovations; and then institutionalize those innovations for long-term sustainability. The audience for this volume includes and expands beyond the scholars and professionals who already consider themselves part of the field. This volume, for example, brings together scholars, professionals, and the stakeholders connected to education at the local, national, and international levels to highlight those developments in the field that are of particular relevance to educational innovation and public sector (or social) entrepreneurship. This makes this volume particularly important not only in the academic community, but for those international development education professionals in aid or development organizations, research institutes, professional educators, and others. It is the thread from theory to research to policy to practice that connects comparative and international education scholars and professionals to stakeholders beyond the field itself. Again, we extend a sincere and heartfelt thank you to the many supporters who made this volume possible, and who contributed to enhancing the quality and rigor of each chapter, the volume, and the International Perspectives on Education and Society series as a whole. The development of international educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship is not only important to those of us who do the work relevant to the field, but to all who are invested in youth and dedicated to the development and improvement of education worldwide. It is our sincere wish that this volume and all that follow it will serve the field and all who participate in it as a tool for meaningful reflection and understanding. Alexander W. Wiseman Series Editor and Volume Editor

PART 1 THE ROLE OF INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN EDUCATION WORLDWIDE

INTERNATIONALLY COMPARATIVE APPROACHES TO INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN EDUCATION Alexander W. Wiseman ABSTRACT Evidence suggests that international comparison has become a ubiquitous component of educational innovation and entrepreneurship in spite of significant variation among educational contexts worldwide. This chapter provides an overview of educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship from an internationally comparative perspective. The influence that the global shift from natural resource and industry-based economies to knowledge-based economies has had on the development of educational innovation and entrepreneurship is explained. Several examples of educational innovation and education-oriented public sector entrepreneurship highlight the discussion, which concludes with an

International Educational Innovation and Public Sector Entrepreneurship International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 23, 3
31 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1108/S1479-3679(2013)0000023009

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ALEXANDER W. WISEMAN

examination of specific knowledge society issues related to educational entrepreneurship and its reciprocal effect on innovation. Keywords: Educational innovation; international education; educational entrepreneurship; public sector entrepreneurship; comparative education; social entrepreneurship

Little research directly addresses the global impact that educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship have had on education. Even rarer are theoretically framed empirical analyses of innovation and entrepreneurship in education worldwide (with a few notable exceptions; e.g., GhaffarKuchner, Gherardi, Lafuente, Pagen, & Zakharia, 2005). Instead policy reforms and change management processes are more frequent foci in the research literature (Brest, 2010; Carnoy, 1998; Christensen, Baumann, Ruggles, & Sadtler, 2006; Drayton, 2006; Ganz, 2010; Heifetz, Kania, & Kramer, 2004; Kotter, 1995; Man & 萬頴恩, 2010; Mintrom & Norman, 2009). But, policy reform and change management are not necessarily as innovative or entrepreneurial as they are cloaked revisions of existing educational policies and practices. The problem with simply reintroducing old policies and practices in different forms is that there are few policy reforms that are innovative or that motivate sustainable change in practice the way that innovation and entrepreneurship promise to do. As a result, innovation and entrepreneurship are not only important, but also necessary to implement change that resonates from the policy level through to classroom practices. It is difficult, however, to make innovative and entrepreneurial changes in classrooms, schools, and especially national educational systems when there is no consistent or clearly defined understanding among educators, educational policymakers, or education researchers regarding what innovative teaching and learning or entrepreneurial systems of education look like. In the sections that follow, the characteristics of educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship are reviewed and defined within a global context. The international perspective is not a gimmick to make educational innovation and entrepreneurship phenomena seem more important or influential than they are. The international perspective is largely mandatory; especially in the 21st century when cross-national educational system comparison is de rigueur for most educational policymakers and the public at large (Wiseman & Baker, 2005). Educational decision-makers deal everyday with internationally comparative information about student

Comparative Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Education

5

performance, resource expenditures, and enrollment percentages as part of their array of data (Wiseman, 2010b), which is available to inform decisions and provide them with a data evidence base for specific decisions as well as general reforms. The processes and products of educational innovation closely mirror the processes and products of educational entrepreneurship
particularly public sector entrepreneurship
with the significant difference that education is a universalized mass institution that has been disseminated and institutionalized worldwide (Hess, 2007a). The unique mass and institutionalized components of education worldwide are what have made international comparisons of education possible because at least the structure and often the standards and expectations for education are shared across otherwise dissimilar and diverse educational systems and contexts. Although an internationally comparative perspective frames this discussion of educational innovation and entrepreneurship, particular attention is paid to the origins of and resources required for the development and sustainability of innovation and entrepreneurship in public sector educational systems worldwide. Next, the role of knowledge acquisition, management, and creation are established as productive frameworks for explaining the phenomenon of educational innovation and entrepreneurship. Knowledge and information systems are other key elements in either identifying or building the necessary infrastructures, capacities, and sustainable practices necessary for educational innovation and entrepreneurship. And, finally, the discussion presented here explores the impact of stratification and resistance to innovation and entrepreneurship in education.

THE NEXUS OF INNOVATION, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND INTERNATIONALIZATION The nexus of innovation, entrepreneurship, and internationalization results in a dynamic constellation of factors, which encompass the origin, growth, and sustainability of new ideas, structures, and processes for education worldwide. To investigate the relationship between innovation, entrepreneurship, and internationalization with a specific focus on education, each component is examined below and then brought together. The nexus of innovation, entrepreneurship, and internationalization is both a symbiosis and a dynamic development of a unique condition for effecting productive and sustainable change in education worldwide.

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ALEXANDER W. WISEMAN

Educational Innovation Innovation is the development of something new or unique (Dees, BattleAnderson, & Wei, 2004; Drucker, 1985; Martin & Osberg, 2007). Educational innovation is the development of fresh thinking, or the development of either new and creative ideas for solving problems or ways of doing things that are common and taken-for-granted in a radically new or fresh and creative way (Ellison, 2009). Innovation carries with it the connotation of entrepreneurship
of an idea, product, process, or behavior. Innovation is perceived as being more aligned with science while entrepreneurship is expected to be more aligned with business. Both have a private sector inclination, which make the relationship to the public sector more tenuous or negotiated. This is a valid potential incongruity to recognize and address. There is a large literature on private sector entrepreneurship (Kearney, Hisrich, & Roche, 2009), which is geared toward meeting market demands in ways that were either not recognized before or had not been brought to scale in previous applications. Likewise, public sector entrepreneurship also is often developed in response to unmet demands or to bring to scale innovations that had previously only been implemented in limited or specific situations (Bradach, 2003). A key difference is in the motivation and outcome for private versus public entrepreneurship. In the private sector, profit and the development of a sustainable market are key considerations, whereas in the public sector sustainability of the innovation and maximizing social benefits
not profit
are the marks of entrepreneurial success (Kearney et al., 2009). There are, in fact, several characteristics that distinguish private from public entrepreneurship.

Public Sector Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship is often assumed to mean doing something new and risky, which has the potential to create something important, popular, and often profitable (Dees, 2001; Drucker, 1985; Martin & Osberg, 2007). Yet, the assumption of risk is somewhat of a misnomer for social or public sector entrepreneurs of education. People who are entrepreneurs are doing something that nobody thought could be done before, and they are solving problems that were previously thought to be unsolvable or that were not recognized as problems before. The emphasis is on innovative action
not necessarily on risk. Public sector entrepreneurship often refers to government or civil service-related institutions, which would include

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Comparative Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Education

education
particularly government-sponsored schools and national educational systems. Schools, however, can also be part of public sector entrepreneurship because of the mass or universal nature of education systems worldwide, which do make education a largely public venture. Public sector entrepreneurship for mass education, therefore, is a uniquely innovative, but not necessarily a risky phenomenon. The caveat of mass education is its universality. This is not to say that mass education is universally applied, but rather to emphasize that (1) expectations regarding mass education are shared across communities, systems, and cultures worldwide even though the application of mass education may significantly vary (Wiseman, Astiz, & Baker, 2013a) and (2) because of these globally shared expectations for mass education, sustainable innovations that fill a demand must be brought to scale rather than limited to locally contextualized situations only. Table 1 lists some of the more frequently observed characteristics of private, public, and educational entrepreneurship. For each of the characteristics, Table 1.

Characteristics of Private, Public, and Educational Entrepreneurship.

Characteristics Develops or activates innovative ideas Brings innovations to scale Builds on existing infrastructures by reimagining them Responds to market demands in unique ways Creates something of sustainable value in the community Seeks to maximize profit Is large scale and organizationally complex Is legislated by a government entity Provides trained and publicly certified professional staff Is accountable to the public at large Maintains low or no differentiation between units

Private Public Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship

Educational Entrepreneurship

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes Yes

Yes Yes

Yes Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes Maybe

No Maybe

No Yes

No/Maybe

No/Maybe

Yes

No/Maybe

No/Maybe

Yes

No

No/Maybe

Yes

No

No

Yes

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ALEXANDER W. WISEMAN

there is an indication of whether this characteristic is observed in the entrepreneurship sector (private, public, educational). Entrepreneurship in all three sectors is characterized by (1) developing or activating innovative ideas, (2) bringing innovations to scale, (3) building on existing infrastructures by reimagining them, (4) responding to market demands in unique ways, and (5) creating something of sustainable value in the community (Hess, 2007a, 2007b). Although the exact way these characteristics are demonstrated and observed will vary from sector to sector, there is evidence of each in the three sectors listed in Table 1. It is also important to note that the distinction between private and public sector entrepreneurship relates to how value is measured (profit vs. social value), whereas the difference between public sector and educational entrepreneurship is more in the institutional activities and social value outcomes. This is a much less contrasting comparison than the private/public comparison, as can be seen by the fact that (6) “seeks to maximize profit” exists only in the private sector. The remaining five characteristics are all observable in educational entrepreneurship, but either are not or may not be observable in the private and public sectors. In other words, these are unique to the educational entrepreneurship sector, which (7) is large scale and organizationally complex, (8) is legislated by a government entity, (9) provides trained and publicly certified professional staff, (10) is accountable to the public at large, and (11) maintains low or no differentiation between units. While it is possible that private and public sector entrepreneurship can be large scale and organizationally complex, it is guaranteed that educational entrepreneurship will have to contend with this institutional context because it is working through public mass education systems. The fact that educational systems must interact with government bureaucracies as well as addressing all of the potential needs of the public at large makes it virtually impossible for educational entrepreneurship to be brought to scale and become sustainable without addressing the large and complex organizational structure of a national, regional, or local educational system. Educational entrepreneurship is at some point going to be subject to legislation by a government entity. Public mass education has become a responsibility of the government in most countries worldwide. This is due to the ability of the government to provide resources for mass education beyond the capacity of other smaller or more specialized institutions. It is also because the government has its own best interests at stake in educating the youth population due to the demonstrated impact of education on social, civic, and economic participation and productivity. Also, legislation

Comparative Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Education

9

by government is one of the ways that equitable access or monitoring for equitable access and delivery can be implemented across an institutional system as large and complex as public mass education. Trained and publicly certified professional staff are a common characteristic of public mass education systems, particularly those that are more tightly coupled with state governance. The training and certification of teachers will vary from system to system both within and across national educational systems, but the expectation that those personnel and staff working as educators or administrators in public mass education will be professionally trained and publicly certified is a fact that educational entrepreneurs must recognize and account for. This means that any innovation, which an educational entrepreneur would like to implement in public mass education, is going to have to be implemented or monitored by professional educational staff. So, no entrepreneurial innovation can go to scale within a mass public education system without having professional staff being part of the process. Mass public education is accountable to the public at large because the total population of an educational system are the constituent stakeholders. The nature of public mass education is therefore one of accountability to the stakeholders (i.e., public) at large. Educational entrepreneurship must account for the public and mass characteristics of education in both the implementation and sustainability of an innovation. For example, an innovation that is developed to serve only one particular segment of the total population will have to be rationalized or justified in terms of the benefit (or at least the absence of any impact) that it will have on the rest of the population. Will it divert resources away from one group to provide an innovative educational opportunity for another? Will it benefit the entire student population of an educational system equally? There are few innovations that will do the latter simply because the scope of the entire public is too broad; however, it is a necessary component of educational entrepreneurship to at least build a rationalized model for innovation implementation that benefits the larger population either directly or indirectly in order to become sustainable. Finally, educational entrepreneurship is built upon a mass public educational system that officially and formally maintains low or no differentiation between units (i.e., schools or system components). While there are certainly informal and unofficial distinctions between the quality and resources available to students in different units within a mass public educational system, the phenomenon of mass education officially reduces, masks, or ignores those distinctions in the formal educational system. Educational

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entrepreneurship that is to be brought to scale and sustained must also reduce, mask, or ignore distinctions between units. Therefore, while most educators and administrators readily recognize that marginalized populations and schools exist within the formal educational system, an innovation cannot be implemented, brought to scale, and sustained based upon the expectation that there is recognizable differentiation between the schools and populations that these schools serve. Instead, innovations are more likely to be sustained when they eliminate differentiation and align the informal or unofficially recognized distinctions among communities and schools with the formally and officially recognized status of educational system egalitarianism.

Internationalization of Educational Innovation and Public Sector Entrepreneurship Why is the combination of educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship an internationally comparative phenomenon? To use an internationally comparative framework, it is first important to distinguish between globalization and internationalization since comparative perspectives often hinge on a particular approach to one or the other (Wiseman, 2012a). Globalization has been variously defined from political, economic, social, and other perspectives to include the exchange of people, ideas, information, culture, values, norms, goods, and services across traditional political, economic, and social boundaries (Astiz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002). Discussions about globalization from comparative and international education perspectives often include a distinction between what is “global” and what is “local” (Wiseman & Anderson, 2013b), and in the more critical literature the suggestion is that hegemonic influence often biases globalization in ways that marginalize and disenfranchise individuals, groups, organizations, cultures, societies, and other entities that have less dominance worldwide (Wiseman, Astiz, & Baker, 2013b). Implemented innovations, particularly at the national educational system level, are often identified as a part of the “comparative imperative” (Wiseman & Chase-Mayoral, 2013). International comparison provides confirmation of an innovation’s legitimacy (Wiseman & Baker, 2005). Entrepreneurship seeks to take chances for success, while reducing direct risk. International comparatively confirmed innovations reduce entrepreneurial risk, and in fact comparison of national education policy and its

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implementation is often cited as a rationale for comparing educational systems (Wiseman & Anderson, 2013b). As Fig. 1 suggests, explaining the nexus of innovation, entrepreneurship, and internationalization requires an understanding of the impact that globalization has on innovative and entrepreneurial processes, especially in the public sector. Surprisingly, what is often left out of the scholarly discussion in comparative and international education research is the distinction between globalization and internationalization. Granted that the distinction between comparative education and international education is a frequent topic of discussion in scholarly debates about the definition and characteristics of the field of comparative and international education (Wiseman & Anderson, 2013a, 2013b), the distinction between globalization and internationalization is under-discussed from comparative and international education perspectives. In short, internationalization takes a much gentler approach to sharing across traditional borders and emphasizes the respect or at least attempt to understand people, ideas, information, culture, values, norms, goods, and services that vary from one individual, group, organization, culture, or society to the next (Brickman, 1960; Epstein, 1994). Globalization, as contrasted to internationalization, is characterized in the literature as a much more purposeful, overt, and aggressive form of economic, social, cultural, political, and ideological imperialism, at least among those whose ideological and theoretical perspective is more critical in approach (e.g., Arnove & Torres, 2003; Stromquist & Monkman, 2000).

NEXUS = Globallylegitimized, reduced-risk, innovative ideas enacted to maximize scalability, sustainability, and marketability

Innovative Ideas

Innovative Entrepreneurial Action

Entrepreneurial Spirit

Fig. 1.

Globallylegitimized & comparatively marketable

Comparatively confirmed reduced-risk actionability

Internationalization

The Nexus of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Internationalization.

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ALEXANDER W. WISEMAN

As suggested in Fig. 1, the nexus of innovative ideas, entrepreneurial spirit, and internationalization is a globally legitimized, reduced-risk, innovation enacted to maximize scalability, sustainability, and marketability. Some of the more negatively characterized elements of globalization are suggested by this nexus; namely, that ideas are legitimized and marketed worldwide. To some this will be too neoliberal in orientation, and will suggest the more negative effects of the application of private sector rationalizations and methodologies to a public sector institution (i.e., education). The critiques of neoliberalism regarding educational policy and practice assert that when private sector approaches are imposed upon mass public education, the educational system and particularly the already marginalized peoples and groups within that system are further marginalized, subordinated, and discriminated against (Olssen, 2004). And, the empirical evidence suggests that this is a valid critique, especially concerning World Bank policies and practice related to education worldwide (Alexander, 2001; Bonal, 2002; Colclough, 2000; Jones, 1992). However, global legitimization and marketability of an innovation are not inherently tools of oppressor groups, although a plethora of published research suggests they are. The nexus of innovation, entrepreneurship, and internationalization has the potential to also liberate and bring equilibrium. This is a much less investigated phenomenon, although it would appear to be just as important to comparative and international education researchers. To move past (or at least temporarily suspend) the critiques, it is first helpful to conceptualize how the nexus of innovation, entrepreneurship, and internationalization might contribute to the development, scalability, sustainability, and dissemination of an innovative idea through educa-tional entrepreneurialism. In other words, what is a conceptual framework for the implementation of educational entrepreneurship worldwide? Theoretical approaches to public sector entrepreneurship have been largely from public policy, political science, business, and organizational administration perspectives (Klein, Mahoney, McGahan, & Pitelis, 2009). These perspectives have focused on the nature, incentives, and constraints of the public sector or social entrepreneurship broadly speaking, but none have theoretically or conceptually framed the phenomenon from educationspecific or comparative and international education perspectives. Thus, Fig. 1 represents one approach to conceptually framing educational entrepreneurship worldwide. From a comparative and international education perspective, there are three main components: innovative ideas, entrepreneurial spirit, and internationalization. The nexus of these core components is the foundation for educational entrepreneurship worldwide.

Comparative Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Education

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Each of the components of educational entrepreneurship worldwide intersects with each other both individually and collectively. When innovative ideas intersect with entrepreneurial spirit, the result is innovative entrepreneurial action. When innovative ideas and internationalization intersect, an outcome is globally legitimized and comparatively marketable innovations. And, when entrepreneurial spirit intersects with internationalization, a key outcome is comparatively confirmed reduced-risk actionability. Each of these outcomes may occur as unique phenomena or in tandem with each other; however, when innovation, entrepreneurship, and internationalization all intersect each of these outcomes contributes to a globally legitimized, reduced-risk innovation that is enacted to maximize scalability, sustainability, and marketability of the innovation in educational systems, schools, and classrooms worldwide. Each of the outcomes is explained in more detail below. Innovative entrepreneurial action arises where innovative ideas and an entrepreneurial spirit intersect. When innovative entrepreneurial action is implemented in educational systems, schools, and classrooms, it moves through the phases of concept development, process planning, implementation and management, production, and outcome analysis. Concept development is the foundation for innovative ideas because it is at this stage that the relationship between expectation and outcome leads to a solution for a demonstrated need. In the case of education, the expectations for high achievement and transferability of knowledge to the labor market, in particular, are matched to the outcomes of education. When innovators develop a new way of teaching, learning, or facilitating either, the innovational concept is developed. Process planning is the first stage of integrating an entrepreneurial spirit with innovative ideas because it is at this phase that the seeds of action are planted. Implementation of the idea that has already been conceptualized is planned. Implementation and the management of the implemented (or acted on) idea will take place in a way that is fresh or unlike what has happened before, but also in a way that addresses the existing need. Finally, production and outcome analysis are the phases of innovative entrepreneurial action where the innovation is held accountable for meeting the demonstrated need. In short, innovative entrepreneurial action accounts for each of the phases by which innovation and entrepreneurship are implemented in education. The ways that innovation and entrepreneurship are implemented in education occur in three types of infrastructures, capacities, and practices: new, hybrid, and existing. Educational innovations are new or hybrid combinations of existing elements, but are often not wholly new. This is why

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ALEXANDER W. WISEMAN

providing new technology, such as iPads or e-readers for students who do not already own them, is often a short-lived innovation with little sustainable impact on education, learning, or performance. The question of why innovations that do not have a complementary existing component are often unfeasible and less sustainable has to do with the institutional character of education (Levin, 2006). The shared norms and values, which comprise the legitimized characteristics of educational systems, are often based in complex and deeply rooted ideas about what is mass or public about education, how education reflects the ideology and stability of society at large, and ways that these norms, values, ideas, and ideologies are takenfor-granted not only by educational policymakers, educators, and administrators within an educational system, but also by the public and external stakeholders that rely on educational systems. The intersection of innovative ideas and internationalization results in ideas that are globally legitimized and comparatively marketable. Internationalization is a way to comparatively envision the potential for an innovation’s scalability, sustainability, and dissemination worldwide. One of the functions, which internationalization serves, is to comparably assess an innovation’s potential by both identifying similar innovations in other contexts worldwide and investigating the conditions under which that innovation was developed and implemented compared to other (often one’s own) contexts. Innovative ideas that are implemented in an unfamiliar context, but have not been implemented in a familiar context, may be innovative simply because the context in which they were implemented differs. In other words, the action may not be innovative because it has been implemented before in another system, context, or situation; however, the action becomes innovative when it is implemented in a new system, context, or situation. The legitimacy of an educational innovation, therefore, is tricky to establish. It must relate somehow to what is expected or taken-for-granted about education, yet also be legitimate in that there is some evidence that this new idea or action will meet a demonstrated need. International comparison is one of the key ways that educational ideas are legitimized; therefore, the intersection of innovative ideas and internationalization results in globally legitimized and comparatively marketable innovations. Marketability is another way of representing the attractiveness or potential for a particular innovation to scale up and disseminate worldwide. Marketability, therefore, can indicate the potential for a particular innovation to spread through imposition, imitation, or enactment (Wiseman, 2010a). When entrepreneurial spirit and internationalization intersect, the result is comparatively confirmed reduced risk actionability. How will a particular

Comparative Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Education

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intervention or innovation fare if implemented in a new context or when implemented for the first time? This question is important to entrepreneurs because
contrary to much of the more theoretical literature on entrepreneurship
those who bear the costs for an innovation actually want to minimize the potential risk as much as possible. Minimizing risk is necessary because the resources and opportunity to implement an innovative practice, program, or other action are finite. The goal of entrepreneurship is to maximize benefit with the least possible expenditure, and since the investment on the front end of any innovation is typically costly, a return on that initial investment is important whether it be financial, political, or social capital that is at stake. By having international examples and comparisons to consult before implementing an innovative idea, entrepreneurs have evidence of the potential for an innovation to either achieve the desired outcome or not in the other system or country. In other words, entrepreneurs can confirm whether or not an innovation will succeed as they expect or fail, using the comparative case as evidence. This is not a perfect method, and the real potential of risk always exists, but the risk associated with a particular innovation can be comparatively confirmed as reduced (or not). Some might argue that the business framework for educational entrepreneurship is
like mathematics
already universally contextualized. This argument requires an assumption that public and private entrepreneurship share fundamental characteristics that make public sector (i.e., social) entrepreneurship as widely applicable as private sector entrepreneurship. Although this rationale contradicts the assertion that education is universally disseminated but more localized in its implementation, it is still reasonable to expect alternative explanations. In this case, several questions arise. How is educational entrepreneurship related to social entrepreneurship and business entrepreneurship? In other words, how can the domain of educational entrepreneurship be differentiated from the others, and where is it impossible (or unwise) to differentiate (Man & 2010)?

ORIGINS OF INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN EDUCATION Much social entrepreneurship is crisis-driven (Bessant, Rush, & Trifilova, 2012). Crisis-driven social entrepreneurship is defined as an urgent need coupled with severe resource limitations. This link between crisis and

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entrepreneurship suggests that innovation is a response to needs. The needs of education worldwide, however, are defined by what is lacking or missing versus what is expected or taken-for-granted. In short, the gap between what the legitimized expectations for education are and what the observed educational outcomes are is an estimation of the innovation need. The equation below represents a conceptual representation of the need for educational innovation: INNOVATION NEED = LEGITIMIZED EXPECTATIONS − EDUCATONAL OUTCOMES

In other words, the need for an innovation is represented by the difference between what the legitimized expectations for education are compared to what the observed educational outcomes are. Traditional approaches to educational innovation attempt to address the need by implementing innovative content, programs, behaviors, technologies, or pedagogies that more closely align educational outcomes with the legitimized expectations for education. In other words, the traditional approach is based on examining the gaps between what is expected versus what the outcomes of public education are. This approach to innovation addresses needs, which are commonly recognized and shared among community members by developing, implementing, and sustaining innovative interventions to align outcomes with expectations. There is, however, an “alternative” approach to innovation, which shifts the paradigm. From an alternative perspective, instead of innovation in education filling gaps between educational outcomes and legitimized expectations by introducing innovations that shift outcomes, innovation in education is instead shifting the expectations. An example of legitimized expectations is the growing standards and accountability models that have come to define educational systems worldwide. These legitimized expectations are a reason why large-scale, standardized test performance is the dominant measure of educational quality in most countries. An innovation that shifted expectations away from standards and accountability models could fundamentally change the legitimized expectations for education worldwide, which would also recalculate and perhaps reconceptualize the alignment between educational expectations and outcomes. This means that there are two approaches to innovation and entrepreneurship in education. A traditional innovation would address the gap between institutionalized expectations for student achievement at the national as well as individual levels by proposing a new way of preparing for taking the tests, or a new way of teaching the knowledge content

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measured on the test. These types of innovations are the most common in education, and account for all of the most well-known examples of educational entrepreneurship worldwide, including the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and Ashoka. But, an alternative innovative approach would be to develop a method for shifting expectations about what quality education is. This could be through the development of new metrics for educational outcomes (other than large-scale standardized tests) or by decoupling expectations about education from expectations about employability, labor market participation, or economic productivity. In either case, reducing the gap between what is expected and what is performed or practiced would be a key objective. The traditional approach has been to change how education is performed or practiced in order to meet expectations (e.g., Alexander, 2001; Barber, Mourshed, & Whelan, 2007; Colclough, 2000)
often by explicitly buying educational innovation using private sector resources. Rarely, have innovators changed the expectations side of the equation. This would, however, be a relevant task for public sector entrepreneurs because they have a unique advantage over private sector entrepreneurs. Private sector entrepreneurs are tied to profit-seeking as the ultimate goal of all private ventures. Public sector development, however, is not beholden to the same goals. Public sector development seeks to build capacity and provide for the development of improved social relationships and participation. The options for public sector or social entrepreneurs implementing innovations in mass public education systems are many. For example, educational entrepreneurship could include improving the ways that mass education facilitates labor market participation through employability. It could include facilitating the development of public sector phenomena to reduce the gap between educational expectations and achievement on standardized tests as well. Or, it could focus on shifting the expectations about what the role and goals of mass education are. This is a much more challenging task, but one that certainly is worthwhile to consider. Public sector entrepreneurship requires cutting across organizational, sectorial, and disciplinary boundaries with innovations (Bornstein & Davis, 2010). This entrepreneurial process creates new relationships, diffuses the innovation, embeds the innovation, and replicates the innovation
in other words, it institutionalizes the innovation. In this way, public sector innovation and entrepreneurship builds on inherent capacities of individuals, communities, and societies. Educational innovations cannot be implemented in entrepreneurial ways if there is no support, however. Often

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the resources available for innovation implementation determine the degree to which educational entrepreneurs can maximize social and educational benefit.

RESOURCES FOR EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION AND PUBLIC SECTOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP If educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship do not seek to maximize profit, how do they fund or resource innovations and their implementation? Public sector entrepreneurship maximizes social and educational benefits, but these are not necessarily financial. Therefore, educational entrepreneurship needs a resource support system. This support can come from the private sector or the public sector, but must be available and adequate to fund the innovation and its implementation at the start-up phase, growth phase, and then sustaining phase. As shown in Table 2, Smith and Peterson (2006, p. 18) outline these two types of financial support (private or for-profit and public or nonprofit) and the three stages of capital development (start-up, growth, and sustaining). In the for-profit (i.e., private) sector, resources for innovation and accompanying entrepreneurship typically come from equity and capital investment (Hannaway & Sharkey, 2004). These investments are provided by venture capitalists or others who expect the entrepreneurial innovation to maximize profit and, therefore, provide them with a maximized financial return on their investment. Equity and revenue from sales of the product or service that was innovated and implemented then serve as the sustaining resources Table 2.

Entrepreneurship Resources by Sector and Phase of Innovation Implementation (Smith & Peterson, 2006, p. 18). Phases of Implementation

Sector For-profit (private) Nonprofit (public)

Start-up Equity investments Venture capital “Angel” investors Grants from individuals, foundations, and public sources

Growth

Sustaining

Equity from later stage venture capitalists

Revenue from sales of product or service

Grants

Continued fundraising and grants Revenue from sales of product or service

Program-related investments

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for private sector entrepreneurship (Young, 2013). In other words, as long as the innovation continues to maximize profit, it will be able to sustain itself. And, as soon as it stops maximizing profit, it is likely that it is no longer meeting the need for innovation by closing the gap between what is legitimately expected and what the measurable outcomes are. From a private sector perspective, the life cycle of entrepreneurship is self-regulating through the return on investment. For example, when the innovation begins to start doing what it promised to do and as it hits its peak of influence, the maximized profits support both equity and revenue creation for further implementation of the innovation. As soon as the innovation’s influence wanes, so does its resource base. This resource-based self-regulation model is not a workable solution for public sector, nonprofit entrepreneurship, though, because resources do not align with the need for innovation when the innovation itself does not maximize profit. In contrast to the private sector model, public sector entrepreneurship, especially regarding mass public education, is rarely a profitable venture. In fact, liabilities often exceed assets when educational innovations are brought to market. The benefit that educational entrepreneurship reaps is public, social, and nonprofit, yet it maximizes educational potential and society’s ability to solve problems, which benefits society as a whole as well as individuals. So, what is the role of resources in the origin, growth, and sustainability of education-oriented social or public sector entrepreneurship? “Social entrepreneurs don’t control major resources, and, unlike governments, they can’t command compliance. They have to leverage resources that others control and influence people by articulating goals that are meaningful” (Bornstein & Davis, 2010, p. 35). Smith and Peterson (2006) note that grants are often the source for resources that educational entrepreneurs use to start, grow, and sustain the implementation of innovations in education. The problem for educational entrepreneurs is that grants are often time period specific and do not respond to the innovation’s ability to maximize society’s benefit through a self-regulation process. Grants instead are most often awarded in response to specific agendas of individuals, foundations, or other public sources (Smith & Peterson, 2006). These agendas from grant-making entities are often driven by the primary funding organization’s industry focus, and are tied into close networks of researchers, scientists, or policymakers. Access to these networks of grant-making entities and their community is frequently a scarce resource itself, which is the focus of much competition among entrepreneurs and researchers attempting to launch their innovations. So, where do resources for educational

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innovation and entrepreneurship come from? The answer lies more in how resources are leveraged than how to develop new supports or resource sources, and is part financial support and part community initiative. The phases of innovation implementation outlined by Smith and Peterson (2006) are indicative of three stages of entrepreneurial development. In the start-up phase of any educational innovation and its entrepreneurial implementation, there has to be both an identification of infra-structure needs and an effort to secure the technical as well as organizational infrastructure that will be able to support the implementation of the innovation as well as sustain it through growth and institutionalization. For example, in the early 2000s in the Western Cape of South Africa, the principal and teachers in a primary school in a marginalized community became acutely aware of a problem with their students (Wiseman, 2012b). Many students were not eating anywhere except at school because their families could not afford to feed them at home. The problem was that the school was limited in resources itself. The principal managed to get a local philanthropic organization to provide one meal for the school’s students over the weekend, but they were still left with the problem of students only getting one small meal per day. As much research literature shows, student health is a key predictor of social and economic participation and potential employability (Wiseman & Glover, 2012). Nutritional deficiencies in poverty-stricken communities is one of the ways that student health can either suffer or benefit, which then affects students’ ability to learn and perform academically (Wiseman, 2012b). Therefore, the South African primary school principal and teachers mentioned in the example above sought ways not only to feed their students in order to improve their potential contributions to society, but also to raise their academic potential as well. One way to do this was through the development of a school garden to grow food that could be then served to students, but funding the community garden was a challenge. Using initial start-up funds from an individual donor, they began a school garden under the guidance of a local nonprofit organization. This organization helped the students and teachers learn how to plant, tend, and harvest the garden, but it also taught the teachers how to incorporate activity in the garden with educational learning in the required subjects. So, now the students and teachers were both developing a new food source for the students who did not have enough to eat and building their academic skills and achievement potential. Bornstein and Davis (2010) observe that social entrepreneurs always struggle with resource issues because that is the nature of the nonprofit public sector. The problem with this innovative solution to one marginalized and extremely poor South African school’s dilemma was that the

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school garden was not sustainable precisely because of resource issues. Even though the nonprofit organization’s support was not profit seeking, there were still recurring expenses incurred as part of the garden maintenance and sustainability. These expenses could not be covered by the initial start-up funding; the benefit from the school garden was measured in social, health, and educational impact rather than in realized profit; and there was no local champion at the school to push the program forward or to find new funding for it. In other words, resources were entwined with innovation outcome and entrepreneurship ownership issues. To compensate for the lack of financial resources, Bornstein and Davis (2010) assert that social entrepreneurship requires a champion to drive the innovation forward and to make extreme sacrifices in order to see that the innovation becomes sustainable. Although the school principal and teachers recognized the need for new food sources for the students attending the school, the school garden innovation was never championed by the principal or teachers. It was simply a solution, but not the solution to the problem from the perspective of the school personnel. The school garden was never owned by the school principal or teachers; they were simply willing participants. Resources, therefore, are a key to the scalability, sustainability, and marketability (i.e., dissemination) of entrepreneurial innovations in education, yet these resources are not all financial. Other things of value can support educational innovation. In particular, the outcomes of educational systems and the functions of education through schooling are often non-monetary, even though the relationship between educational outcomes and economic productivity is often a focus of comparative and international education research. Instead of financial resources, anything that can be commodified can also be established as a resource for entrepreneurship. In education, the product of schooling is ideally the transfer, management, and eventually production of knowledge. In short, knowledge is the primary resource available to public sector entrepreneurs in education, and is valued because of the enlarging role of knowledge economies in global markets (Allen & van der Velden, 2011; Hart, 2003; Young, 2010).

KNOWLEDGE AS AN AGENT OF CHANGE BOTH IN AND FOR EDUCATION WORLDWIDE The commodification of information, which translates the conventions and expectations of an information society into a legitimate knowledge

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economy, has changed the nature of 21st century innovation and entrepreneurship. Nowhere is this more recognizable than in the education sector because in this sector knowledge is both transferred and created. The education sector is both the institutional and conceptual space where knowledge becomes foundational to all other interactions, relationships, and participation in social, economic, political, and other institutions. In short, the education sector is where the information society and a knowledge economy originate. An information society bases all of its social functions and relationships on information transfer and management; whereas, a knowledge economy means that knowledge is the commodity
both that is developed and is used to resource and support the innovation. The key defining characteristics of an information society and knowledge economy are that (1) the production and exchange of knowledge is the basis for social and economic change (Anderson, 2008; Drucker, 1969) and (2) change or development in society is based on intergovernmental organizations’ (IGOs) or cross-nationally dependent agendas as much as or equal to nation-states (Jakobi, 2007). There have been three major education-related transformations associated with the rise of the information society and knowledge economy. 1. The expansion and infusion of education both horizontally and vertically across the lifecourse The expansion and infusion of education across the lifecourse can be particularly seen in the 21st century through the expansion of both the institution and integration of higher education in society. Schofer and Meyer (2005, p. 900), for example, “ … argue that a new model of society became institutionalized in [the post-World War 2] period, reflected in trends toward increasing democratization, human rights, scientization, and development planning. This global institutional and cultural change paved the way for hyper-expansion of higher education.” The expansion of education worldwide has been explained as the “great rationalization project,” which encompasses the basic building blocks of a knowledge society through the division of labor, ritualized categories, and centralized management. The division of labor suggests how education expands both horizontally and vertically across the lifecourse through the development of a routinized pedagogy, the establishment of official knowledge, and the training of skilled workers to support this infusion of education at every stage of the lifecourse (horizontally) as well as throughout the lifecourse (vertically).

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2. The categorization and differentiation of “education” knowledge worldwide The knowledge society shapes education as (a) research-oriented, (b) evidence-based, and (c) as a laboratory-like environment. In this context, testing and empirical results become part of the expert knowledge base for education as both a science and a profession. The “great rationalization project” of educational expansion profoundly influences and is influenced by the knowledge society through the development of ritualized categories (Fuller, 2003; Meyer, Boli, & Thomas, 1987). “Sacred” subjects are established, which teach content in a vacuum from other subjects and from realworld application of the content. Social norms become integrated into the academic content so that the behavior and activities that are considered educational are clearly delineated from those that are not legitimately educational. Age-defined grade levels demarcate the horizontal expansion and infusion of education into the lifecourse, but individual competition divorces knowledge from context or culture. 3. The internationalization of education governance Educational governance becomes internationalized through the effects of many phenomena, including globalization. Drori, Jang, and Meyer (2006, p. 220) suggest that “the effects of globalization … [are] … the dual process of a global consolidation of a field and of a shared script, as well as the penetration of that globalized script into a growing number of countries.” The generation and dissemination of these “globalized” or “universalized” scripts occur through the development of shared expectations and values regarding what education is and how it should be structured or studied. In this way, universalized scripts construct education in a rationalized way that enhances capacity, diversity, and efficiency within the boundaries of shared expectations for education as an institution, a field of study, and a profession. One way that the scripted rationalization of knowledge develops is through the centralization of education management. This occurs through the standardization of physical space, personnel, textbooks, etc. as well as the incorporation of all educational facilities and communities (e.g., schools) into the educational system regardless of how rural or provincial they are. Finally, the internationalization of education governance assumes “civilization” and nationalization processes through uniform decisionmaking, which is linked to universalized scripts. This does not mean that a homogeneous world culture or uniform model of education governance

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develops, but that there is a globally shared decentralizing shift in education governance where decision-making moves “from one large public commons to small yet networked public squares” (Fuller, 2003, p. 22). How can we trace construction of a knowledge society using examples from formal education? The construction of a knowledge society can be traced using examples from formal education in several ways. First of all is the legitimization and transmission of expert knowledge about education. Another way to trace the construction of a knowledge base is through discourse trends about education accompanied by the construction of education as a technical science in universities worldwide. Educational discourse is important because the institution of education is a universal institution shaping both individual lives and community development (Jakobi & Martens, 2007). The discourse or narrative that education as an institution provides is important because of the scope of its reach
into every home and every student
and because of the power of educators and educational policies to set agendas for how whole communities think. It is an indicator of modernization, citizenship, political authority, and economic influence (Jakobi & Martens, 2007), and as a result there is a significant impact on the construction of a knowledge base due to discourse and agenda setting by both national and transnational groups. For example, Vavrus (2004, pp. 141
142) asserts, Up to now, the process of externalization has been considered primarily from an international perspective that looks at how educational models and policy language in one state are appropriated by another … an equally compelling approach to the study of borrowing and lending explores how the language of policy
in education and in other sectors
is externalized without reference to a specific lending country or agency. Thus … the intensification of global networks in recent years has contributed to the universalization of keywords.

Policies are, therefore, concrete as well as symbolic expressions of principles and ideologies, and, accordingly, education policies are institutional indicators of national and transnational ideology, which represent ideologically formed efforts to effect educational substance and which confound the boundaries between what is global and what is national or community specific. Discourse trends include the development of scientific rational inquiry as a basis for research and policymaking about education as a phenomena as well as a tool for the understanding of other disciplines and phenomena. There is also evidence that a shift in discourse from educational equity to educational accountability accompanies the rise of the knowledge society

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because it indicates a shift from structural to knowledge-driven expectations (Sahlberg, 2010). When access to and opportunity for education is no longer an issue (due to rapid or hyper-expansion of education worldwide), the discussion about equity gives way to discussions about accountability for expected performance or activity in knowledge-driven educational systems. For example, McNeely (1995, p. 489) asserted, The constitution of UNESCO, written in 1945, declares that the wide diffusion of culture and the education of humanity “constitute a sacred duty which all nations must fulfill in a spirit of mutual assistance and concern.” The constitution stipulates three primary principles and goals for education: world citizenship and international collaboration, democracy, and equality. These are world-level ideological prescriptions for education objectives and policies and, when a country joins the organization, it formally accepts an obligation to promote these principles through education policy.

The world-level ideological prescriptions that McNeely defines above identify several areas where knowledge society issues exist within the global discourse. The challenge is to measure these key issues and attempt to confirm them by developing accountability systems. This raises several questions. How are knowledge society problems related to education framed and investigated? What are some potential overlapping or integrated projects that have the potential for innovation and entrepreneurial implementation? The scientization of teacher education provides some answers.

The Scientization of Teacher Education There are historical shifts between teacher training (normal) schools and university education programs, and the balance between training and scholarship on education is still under debate. The research literature on the profession shows that to induct members into a field, there must be “a cohesive transmission of a particular and identifiable body of knowledge” or “legitimate knowledge base” through specialized university degree or training programs (Abbott, 1988; Larson, 1977). There are questions regarding how to investigate the incorporation of universalized scripts in education, which address the issue of measurement versus impact, including: (a) Do we measure levels or degrees of participation? (b) Do we construct variables measuring impact of education resulting from technification of teacher training? (c) Will we simply be scientizing education ourselves and measuring what we created rather than an independent phenomenon? (d) Does education as a technical field enhance its external legitimacy when aligned with a social science discipline?

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International Education Policy Convergence Humphreys (2002, p. 54) asserts that various stimuli for international policy convergence through international policy promotion are often “[n]on binding international agreements or propositions on … goals and standards that national policies should aim to achieve, institutionalized peer review and identification of best practice (benchmarking) as well as the construction of league tables ranking national policies in terms of performance to previously agreed criteria.” For example, Martens (2007, p. 54) notes that “since rating and ranking activities … appear to be based on objective criteria, scientifically researched by experts and presented in an easily accessible manner, it puts states under pressure to import and apply models for education which seem to have worked better in other countries instead of continuing on their own path.” Holzinger and Knill (2005) suggest that there are several mechanisms for bringing about policy convergence, which can be investigated as part of the operationalization of knowledge society through education. These mechanisms include imposition, international harmonization, regulatory competition, transnational communication, and independent problem-solving. There is already evidence of educational convergence through empirical data showing a global tendency toward increased school autonomy (similar to the idea of “small-yet-networked public squares”), a rise in external evaluation of schools and systems, consistency in the diversification of types and content of education, and increasingly controlled regulation of teaching (Maroy, 2009).

ICT-Based Education and Training in the Knowledge Society Nobody knows the extent to which “smart” schools and information and communication technology (ICT)-based instruction have developed in the European educational space compared to other countries and regions worldwide, yet the importance of developing a knowledge society that uses information-based technology is declared by policymakers in every nation to be of the utmost importance not only for individual achievement but also for national economic development and international political legitimacy (Barber et al., 2007; Ong & Ruthven, 2010; Yen et al., 2005). Therefore, a first research question asks to what extent have “smart” schools developed in the European educational space compared to peer and target comparison groups, as evidenced by the resource and support

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level for ICT in schools. This research question specifically addresses the increase of ICT resources for instruction in the European context. A second research question asks whether or not there are measurable differences between the instructional usage of ICT among teachers who have been trained to use ICT versus those who have not. Therefore, our second research question asks whether there are differences in ICT-based instructional use among those teachers who have had ICT-related professional development compared to peer and target comparison groups. The training and education of teachers in ICT-based instruction is a key component to the implementation of inquiry-based pedagogy in the classroom. By examining data related to teacher training and professional development, we can estimate the impact that certain emphases in teacher training programs have on science teaching and learning. A third and final research question asks to what extent student learning is affected by teachers’ training in and use of ICT-based instruction. This research question investigates the relationship between teachers’ training and use of ICT for instruction in secondary science classes. These analyses are supported by the literature discussing teachers’ training and professional development from the pre- to in-service levels concerning ICT knowledge and transfer. Information and knowledge are also agents of change both in and for education worldwide, which is important to public sector entrepreneurs implementing innovations in education because change that maximizes the benefits of education to society and those people and groups in it is the primary goal or target. Yet, the difficulty comes in realizing, observing, or measuring change that is intangible in terms of direct returns on investment (i.e., a direct return on the original resources that is invested). For this reason, knowledge itself has become both the resource supporting educational entrepreneurship and the agent of change, which facilitates the implementation and then assessment of an innovation. In short, knowledge society problems related to education are increasingly promoted as rationales for developing innovative approaches to education worldwide as well as the outcomes of educational entrepreneurship when it occurs. In addition, the innovations that are being developed are increasingly unrelated to practical applications of technical skills and increasingly related to demonstrations of knowledge, most frequently measured by student achievement scores on standardized tests. Internationally comparative approaches to innovation and entrepreneurship in education build on both the ubiquity of comparison and the taken-for-granted expectations about education worldwide. The nexus of

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innovation, entrepreneurship, and internationalization is built upon globally legitimized, reduced-risk, innovative ideas enacted to maximize scalability, sustainability, and marketability. And, the development of a knowledge society through educational innovation and entrepreneurship worldwide is the most frequent outcome of these phenomena. Questions to answer further include the impact of public versus private sector entrepreneurship on education, the ways that public sector mass education and privatized educational activities and opportunities differently enact entrepreneurial education, and how social and cultural environments contextualize these phenomena.

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YOUTH ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION AND TRAINING FOR POVERTY ALLEVIATION: A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE AND LOCAL EXPERIENCES Aryn Baxter, David W. Chapman, Joan DeJaeghere, Amy R. Pekol and Tamara Weiss ABSTRACT Entrepreneurship education and training are an increasingly widespread component of governmental and nongovernmental efforts to address the interrelated challenges of youth unemployment and poverty reduction. In the absence of consensus regarding how best to design learning opportunities that effectively prepare youth to improve their livelihoods, this chapter explores the central debates surrounding three components that are integrated into most entrepreneurship training initiatives: learning, earning, and saving. Drawing on existing literature and considering three entrepreneurship training programs underway in East Africa, the authors

International Educational Innovation and Public Sector Entrepreneurship International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 23, 33
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argue that the effectiveness of any particular youth entrepreneurship program is highly dependent on a variety of contextual considerations, many of which are beyond the control of individual youth and program managers. Implications of this are that (a) program managers need to be modest in their expectations of program effects and avoid overpromising, (b) training is needed to help prepare youth to recognize, understand, and cope with various contextual factors that impact their livelihoods, and (c) NGOs and other private organizations that implement such programs are in a position to address certain contextual factors. By highlighting key debates relevant to the design of entrepreneurship training programs, this chapter contributes to the development of entrepreneurship training initiatives that are responsive to contextual realities, thereby increasing the potential effectiveness of entrepreneurship training as a poverty alleviation strategy. Keywords: Youth entrepreneurship; entrepreneurship education; contextual factors; program design

OVERVIEW Entrepreneurship education and training are an increasingly widespread component of governmental and nongovernmental efforts to address the interrelated challenges of youth unemployment and poverty reduction. In the absence of consensus regarding how best to design learning opportunities that effectively prepare youth to improve their livelihoods, this chapter explores the central debates surrounding three components that are integrated into most entrepreneurship training initiatives: learning, earning, and saving. Drawing on existing literature and considering three entrepreneurship training programs underway in East Africa, the authors argue that the effectiveness of any particular youth entrepreneurship program is highly dependent on a variety of contextual considerations, many of which are beyond the control of individual youth and program managers. Implications of this are that (a) program managers need to be modest in their expectations of program effects and avoid overpromising, (b) training is needed to help prepare youth to recognize, understand, and cope with various contextual factors that constrain their opportunities, and (c) nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other private organizations that implement such programs are in a position to address certain contextual

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factors. By highlighting key debates relevant to the design of entrepreneurship training programs, this chapter contributes to the development of entrepreneurship training initiatives that are responsive to contextual realities, thereby increasing the potential effectiveness of entrepreneurship training as a poverty alleviation strategy.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRAINING AS AN APPROACH TO IMPROVING YOUTH LIVELIHOODS Entrepreneurship education has emerged among international donors, NGOs, and governments as an innovative solution to three interrelated problems facing youth in many developing countries, particularly Sub-Saharan and Eastern Africa. These countries face a growing youth population that is unable to secure sustainable employment due to low labor market growth. In addition, while more young people are attending secondary education, they are not learning the knowledge and skills needed for the changing market economy. Moreover, many young people in these countries live in extreme poverty, and development initiatives to foster economic growth must also attend to poverty alleviation. In response to these overlapping challenges, social entrepreneurs are leading initiatives to provide market-relevant education and training alongside efforts to develop life skills and social networks. This chapter draws on the experience of three international NGOs
Swisscontact (Switzerland), Fundacion Paraguaya (Paraguay), and CAP (India)
all of which are implementing innovative entrepreneurship education and training programs in Eastern Africa. These NGOs had each previously demonstrated considerable success in designing and delivering skills development and job training programs for youth from low-income backgrounds in other country settings. Each program uses a slightly different approach toward youth entrepreneurship education. Programs differ in duration, the youth they intend to serve, and the relative importance each places on life skills, mentorship, and formal credentials. In addition, the three different programs are being implemented in three different countries, each with different operating procedures and unique challenges and opportunities for participants to pursue employment upon completion of the program. The differences among the programs may have important implications regarding the nature and extent of outcomes each program achieves. While they are each unique, they also share some common programmatic features. Each program conducts a local market scan to

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determine the specific skills and enterprise areas in which to educate and train youth; they provide skills development along with practice-based learning, either through school-based microenterprises, internships, or work in local businesses; they complement the skills-based learning with life skills that include peer and adult mentoring, along with social skills needed for work environments, such as communication; and finally, they provide financial literacy and training in savings and lending groups. For purposes of this literature review, the training that is being offered by these NGOs will be referred to as entrepreneurship education or training. Our use of this term refers to the particular training of these NGOs that is intended to lead to either employment in an existing enterprise, self-employment (in either the formal or informal economy), or further education. • Swisscontact’s U-Learn model focuses on out-of-school youth and delivers a program that emphasizes an apprenticeship model of technical and vocational training using community and business mentors and experts. Participants develop vocational skills through participation in relatively small learning groups (∼20 participants) and savings groups that are linked with financial service institutions. Each program lasts approximately 9 months. • CAP’s Basic Employability Skills Training (BEST) model provides vulnerable and disadvantaged youth (school dropouts, unemployed secondary school graduates, migrant youth, and youth from resettlement communities) with market-oriented skills and competencies. Their program emphasizes life skills, mentorships, internships, and posttraining support. The typical duration of training is 3
4 months of skills training followed by posttraining support (of variable lengths) of internships and career counseling to transition them into the jobs. • Fundacion Paraguaya’s program operates within the formal education system (e.g., works within existing secondary schools) to develop financially self-sufficient secondary schools by integrating practical, entrepreneurial, financial literacy, and leadership skills into the school curriculum with experience in microenterprises operated by the school. Students in these formal schools will participate for a duration of four years after which they receive either secondary school or technical and vocational education and training certificates. While programs differ in terms of location, target groups, emphasis, and duration, the anticipated outcome in all cases is that youth from lowincome backgrounds will be able to improve their livelihood opportunities.

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This variety of approaches to entrepreneurship training raises two researchrelated questions: First, how do variations in program design, focus, and context yield different outcomes for participants? Second, how does the economic, social, political, and regulatory context influence an NGO’s ability to successfully transfer and scale up a program that was successful in a very different environment? In sum, what do program managers, such as those implementing these programs, have to consider when implementing entrepreneurship education and training programs that aim to both contribute to economic growth and alleviate poverty? It is possible that all of these different approaches will yield positive results for the youth involved. Alternatively, some program designs may be found to be more effective than others. In all cases, contextual factors are expected to play a role in shaping program outcomes, though the nature and magnitude have yet to be determined. The subsequent sections lay out the debates about various contextual factors that may affect the successful implementation and outcomes of such entrepreneurship education and training programs.

KEY DEBATES IN THE LITERATURE Strategies for Promoting Learning, Earning, and Saving: The Central Debates All three NGO programs generally followed a three-part “learn, earn, save” framework for linking different aspects of learning to the livelihood outcomes that the NGO organizations seek to achieve. Learning, in this context, is specifically directed toward utilization of skills for marketrelevant economic activities and for life choices. Learning includes both basic knowledge and skills and higher order knowledge and skills that require continued learning and adaptability to changing social and economic contexts. Earning represents the immediate path, either in the formal labor market or in one’s own microenterprise, through which youth will be able to improve their economic standing and move beyond poverty. Finally, savings are necessary if youth are to achieve future gains in assets that can help ensure their personal resiliency and security. In other words, developing the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that allow youth to enter and succeed in the labor market creates opportunities for them to earn an income. Earning creates the opportunity to save and accumulate resources. These savings, in turn, provide a degree of economic security and, over

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time, create a wider set of opportunities for the youth. In each of these programmatic areas of learning, earning, and savings, there are different views and ongoing debates about how best to accomplish these goals and who should take the main responsibility for doing so.

Debates about Learning Prominent debates around the learning component of the initiative include: (1) What should be the balance between the development of basic skills and vocational skills? (2) Which life skills should be emphasized in the training? (3) Should training emphasize preparation for the local economy or the global economy? 1. Basic education versus vocational skills. The central argument here concerns whether youth are better served by being trained in specific vocational skills,1 for which demand may vary, or whether they are better served by more foundational preparation in literacy and numeracy and other higher order learning and transferable skills, which presumably provides them with the basic preparation they need to adapt to new demands of a shifting labor market and a wider range of job opportunities. This argument is an old one. Foster (1965) dubbed it the “vocational school fallacy.” The fallacy is the assumption that the failure of academic programs to produce employable graduates justified a shift in the orientation of secondary education toward more explicitly vocational programs (Chapman & Windham, 1985). Foster (1965) argued that a more reasonable response would be to improve the quality of secondary education, not abandon it. Critics of vocational training argue that it is expensive, is often of limited relevance in a rapidly changing labor market, and has a high opportunity cost. In many countries, the unit cost of vocational education tends to be considerably higher than the unit cost of academic training. Several youth can receive a year of secondary education for the cost of one youth attending one year of a vocational program. If vocational training was highly successful, such cost differences might be justified, but some evidence suggests that is not the case (see, e.g., Psacharopoulos, 1991). One reason is that the labor market demand for specific vocational and technical skills cannot be estimated reliably, largely because the technologies being employed by private sector enterprises tend to change rapidly as companies modernize and globalize to stay competitive. Even when market

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demand can be reasonably anticipated, vocational and technical training programs have difficulty keeping up with current technologies as it takes time and money to update equipment, redevelop curricula, and train teachers on the new technologies. Advocates of vocational training offer counterarguments. Too often, formal secondary schooling has failed to deliver the literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills that graduates need in order to succeed in a changing labor market. At the same time, a shortage of workers with strong vocational and technical skills can slow economic development. The World Business Environment Survey (World Bank, 2000) identified the quality and supply of skilled technicians as the third-leading constraint on competitiveness (behind taxes and regulations) (ADB, 2008). Employers frequently complain that they are unable to find sufficient numbers of people with the technical skills they need. A further argument is that, in settings in which there is only a weak private sector to absorb workers, the greatest opportunity for recent school dropouts (those who haven’t completed a secondary education) will be in the informal sector of the economy (ADB, 2008). The informal sector will continue to absorb the majority of new entrants to the workforce in these countries. These workers will not have the benefit of employer-sponsored on-the-job training. Moreover, small enterprises have limited abilities to train their staff (ADB, 2009). New entrants to the predominantly informal labor force in Sub-Saharan Africa will need to develop necessary skills from other sources, highlighting a need for more vocationally oriented education for youth in this region. A salient debate centers on the appropriate mix of skills development
academic, technical, and life
that will best equip all youth, including those in poverty, to compete effectively for employment or, alternatively, create their own employment opportunity so as to both promote economic growth and alleviate poverty (UNESCO, 2012). The three NGO programs approach these decisions from quite different perspectives. The training programs offered by CAP, Fundacion Paraguaya, and Swisscontact have a slightly different focus and emphasize different skills and types of support to help youth transition successfully into the labor market (e.g., from labor market skills training in CAP to a mix of formal academic and technical skills training in Fundacion Paraguaya). It is possible that several or all of these approaches will yield positive results for the youth involved. Some research suggests that the special attention and extra support these programs provide for youth can lead to positive outcomes (a Hawthorne effect) regardless of the specific design features of each program. On the

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other hand, the values that the different communities and labor markets give to certain skills will likely affect the outcomes. For example, a secondary school certification (whether from formal or technical and vocational) is regarded as necessary for entry into any job in the formal labor market in Tanzania; however, some labor markets may value technical skills more highly than the formal academic training, and vice versa. 2. Life skills matter, but which matter most? While there is considerable support for integrating both basic education and vocational training into learning programs, they still fall short of helping marginalized youth transition effectively from school to work. The teaching of life skills is another critical component to fostering youth’s transition into productive employment (or self-employment) and achieving financial resiliency. Given the multiple sources of disadvantages facing youth in which these initiatives are implemented, the development of life skills is expected to play a very important role in shaping youth’s livelihoods opportunities. Life skills cover a broad variety of purposes, and there are a number of different life skills that are considered important for helping youth transition to employment. Life skills can include the development of skills, behaviors, and attitudes conducive to helping youth develop and manage interpersonal relationships, negotiate and solve problems, identify employment opportunities, and obtain and maintain employment. Concrete behaviors such as good personal hygiene and punctuality, in addition to attitudinal characteristics such as assertiveness and personal efficacy (the belief that your actions can bring about the ends you seek), are also considered important. The debates center around the questions of: which “life skills” are most important to help transition youth to the workforce and how are these life skills most effectively taught (e.g., how are they best integrated into the other dimensions of training?). A wide variety of factors, ranging from age and gender to cost and parent involvement, can influence decision making about life skills programs (Mangrulkar, Whitman, & Posner, 2001). Some argue that for youth living in poverty with extreme economic insecurity, resilience is a critical emphasis for life skills, yet questions remain about how to teach or, more broadly, foster resilience (Awogbenle & Iwuamadi, 2010; Theron & Dalzell, 2006). Others elaborate on social competencies (sometimes referred to as social learning outcomes), which range from managing emotions to negotiation and refusal skills, as necessary to help youth to understand their relationships to familiar social networks and to build new associations with potentially unfamiliar authorities (Mangrulkar et al., 2001). It is not clear whether helping youth

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develop the ability to form new positive associations with unfamiliar institutions will translate into being able to access microfinance. Neither is it understood whether social competence can impact youth’s ability to transform short-term locally based necessity entrepreneurship into a preferred earnings option for their foreseeable future, given the broader socioeconomic environment. Little consensus exists in the literature or among development practitioners as to which life skills actually improve the abilities of vulnerable youth populations to seek, gain, and sustain employment in the midst of poverty and economic uncertainty. In the absence of such conclusions, educational programs will vary greatly in their emphasis and training of life skills, which are also shaped by the unique opportunities and constraints of the communities in which the programs are implemented. In Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, amidst concerns of scarce youth employment opportunities, HIV/AIDS, and gender discrimination, youth negotiate multiple obstacles to pursue employment or self-employment. Households may depend on youth to contribute financially, and expectations of financial and familial obligations often vary by gender. Life skills training in these contexts is therefore tasked with responding to the many unique and pressing demands, but given limited time and space within training programs, choices must be made. For example, the three NGOs identify somewhat different life skills for attention within their programs. Swisscontact emphasizes, among other things, reproductive health education, equipping youth to deal with challenging situations, creating an internal locus of control that includes a plan for their professional and private life, working as part of a team, and being engaged with their community. CAP gives special attention to managing risk and accessing nonexploitative opportunities, self-reliance, goal setting, and workforce preparation. Fundacion Paraguaya focuses on future orientation with a special emphasis on cooperative peer group relationships, gender equity, reproductive health education, as well as human rights and environmental stewardship. All of the life skills addressed are important and it remains to be seen which of them will be most beneficial for youth in SubSaharan Africa. Each NGO is implementing a unique life skills component to a different community of marginalized youth in Sub-Saharan Africa. The different life skills that are emphasized and their transfer to new contexts may lead to remarkably different outcomes across the NGO programs. 3. Preparation for the local economy versus the global economy. Another area of debate in the literature concerns whether or not education should emphasize knowledge and skills aligned with the local market or those more aligned with the global market (Robertson et al., 2007). This

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distinction is messy, however, because local and global markets are intricately linked. Locally oriented training emphasizes the development of skills for local needs and demand. Such training tends to prioritize basic education and poverty alleviation. However, an orientation to local needs may be most closely aligned with necessity entrepreneurship where youth start microenterprises to sell small goods or services as a means to get out of poverty, but such work may not be sustainable or offer longer-term employment nor economic growth. The Swisscontact program offers an example, with participants learning skills in local demand and developing business plans to open their own local businesses. Globally oriented training, in contrast, focuses on developing skills needed by enterprises oriented toward an export economy. Globally oriented training could take the form of more transferable and higher level skills (e.g., language, computer, and problem-solving skills) or focus on specific vocational skills in demand from international companies. While gearing their skills training toward local or global markets, programs also need to consider competing demands from national development priorities and sectors where governments are developing policies and providing financial incentives. For example, if the fishing industry has local demand but national policies inhibit the growth of this industry, these competing priorities affect the possible success of these skills development programs. This is particularly important for the CAP program, which attempts to provide youth with skills for work in local enterprises and global markets by explicitly preparing them for employment in export processing zones (EPZs) in which many international companies operate. Local and global enterprises also expose youth to different social and economic risks. For example, global companies are likely to undergo more rapid change, creating an uncertain employment situation for youth who may find that their skills are no longer relevant or their jobs have been moved overseas. Thus, the shifting and competing demands for skills that promote local, national, and global economic development have farreaching implications for individual youth livelihoods and national development and merit further investigation. Debates about Earning The debates around earning, as they relate to youth learning and entrepreneurship programs, center around questions such as (1) What kinds of employment opportunities should be emphasized? (2) How long does it

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take to prepare students for employment opportunities? (3) Does teaching financial literacy lead to financial capability? 1. What kinds of employment opportunities should be emphasized? There is little debate about the importance of earning as a means of moving out of poverty. There are, however, differences of opinion about where earning opportunities are most likely to be found. It matters, because different earning contexts may require different knowledge and skill sets. Different types of employment, and employment sectors, have implications for what they need to know, and hence, what youth training programs need to teach. A key distinction is between necessity entrepreneurship and opportunity entrepreneurship (Block & Sandner, 2009; Schoof, 2006). Opportunity entrepreneurship is when individuals start a business because they perceive favorable circumstances for launching an enterprise and they seek to exploit those opportunities (Roodman, 2012; Schoof, 2006). Necessity entrepreneurship, on the other hand, is not undertaken to take advantage of a particular opportunity, but is driven by the necessity to survive. It bears little resemblance to the form of entrepreneurship considered to be a critical contributor to economic growth. Consequently, opportunity- and necessity-driven entrepreneurship do not contribute equally to national development goals (Block & Sandner, 2009). While opportunity entrepreneurship is widely promoted as a way to create more jobs and contribute to the national economy, necessity entrepreneurship more often involves individual or family-owned businesses that are unlikely to grow or create more jobs and often coincide with high failure rates. These three NGO programs are intended to help participants create an income stream either by finding employment or by creating their own businesses. Both routes face serious challenges. As previously discussed, the formal sector is marked by high rates of youth unemployment. There are few jobs to be found. In addition, youth in these programs come from marginalized situations and tend not to have networks that link them to formal employment opportunities. These networks have to be constructed through the program. Given this, it may seem like the most promising route to economic security will be for participants to create their own opportunities in the informal sector. However, developing an income-producing activity within the informal sector requires a broader set of entrepreneurial and personal skills (rather than working for an employer) that youth from marginalized backgrounds are unlikely to have developed. Employment in the informal sector also exposes youth to uncertain risks as such businesses

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operate largely outside of the legal and regulatory framework. Furthermore, preparation for self-employment will require business management skills that would not necessarily be needed by those preparing to work in an established enterprise. 2. How long does it take to prepare students for employment opportunities? A second, closely related, debate concerns how long it takes to prepare youth to a sufficient level of skill and self-confidence to start and manage their own business. While considerable literature addresses the knowledge and skill sets needed by entrepreneurs, there is wide diversity of views about how long it might take to accomplish these ends, probably because the answer depends on the specific goal and context of each training initiative. The diversity of views is reflected in the three NGO training programs, which range from three months to three to four years. The literature offers little guidance in these debates. That said, one key factor in determining length is the end-goal the program seeks to achieve in preparing youth to find or create employment. Programs that intend to provide youth with skills to find employment presumably could be shorter than programs that seek to prepare completers to start and manage their own businesses over the long term. 3. Does teaching financial literacy translate to financial capability? Participation in these programs will not yield the same results for all youth, as they enter the program with different characteristics and circumstances. Financial literacy, while important, is not a sufficient condition for youth to be able to determine their financial well-being and participate fully in the economy. Johnson and Sherraden (2007) therefore make the distinction between financial literacy and financial capability, which they define as “knowledge and competencies, ability to act on that knowledge, and opportunity to act” (p. 122). Such ability and opportunity are shaped by teaching methods and access to financial services as well as internal abilities, such as motivation to earn, and external conditions, including family demands on earnings. In this view, incorporating financial literacy into the curriculum will be of limited utility unless it coincides with appropriate teaching practices and increased access to financial services for youth of all backgrounds. In addition, employment laws and financial regulations are needed to allow marginalized youth to develop a full range of capabilities in order to achieve well-being (Johnson & Sherraden, 2007).

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Debates about Saving Debates surrounding financial capabilities from entrepreneurship training programs point to the particular challenges facing youth in these contexts. The opportunity to participate in the programs comes at a pivotal time for youth that could position them for long-term financial stability (Storm, Porter, & Macaulay, 2010). However, youth living in poverty face multiple challenges that shape how they make decisions to save. They have responsibilities for immediate personal expenses and new pressures to contribute financially to households. At the same time, they are negotiating their independence, investing in new relationships and setting goals for the future. Their young age is both a unique and timely asset as well as a period of immense vulnerability with serious long-term consequences attached to their decisions and behavior. Key debates and questions to consider include: (1) How and why do youth in Sub-Saharan Africa save? (2) What are the different institutional forms of savings available to youth? (3) What are the options available to youth for borrowing and what risks do they present? 1. Saving for short-term needs versus long-term goals. For individuals living in poverty, their daily income is barely sufficient to meet their daily needs. The situation is even more severe for youth who are the primary income-earners for their family. These demands may make the prospect of saving seem unreasonable. Youth living in poverty lack the capacity to cope with the costs of illness, unexpected injury, or major life events such as marriage, childbirth, or funeral expenses. Using current earnings for immediate needs is a rational approach. Yet, as this approach solves one set of problems, it creates another. It undercuts “financial resilience,” which can be defined as the ability to absorb irregular shocks and expenses while maintaining systems for saving. Immediate and unforeseen expenses may make establishing individual budgets and savings plans challenging for youth. Entrepreneurial training programs that concentrate on the present and future individual savings needs of a young person may ignore broader family and community obligations engendered by lifelong relationships that have enabled those youth to survive growing up. Particularly for youth who have grown up in poverty, circumstances may cause youth to see fulfilling family obligations as critical to their livelihoods (Ssewamala, Karimli, Han, & Ismayilova, 2010). Because youth may

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have benefited from mutual care relationships in their extended family, and benefitted from the support of extended family throughout childhood, they may now play an important role in contributing to these household incomes (Abebe & Skovdal, 2010). The HIV/AIDS epidemic and the increased rate of youth living with extended family has expanded the use of family funds for the care of ill relatives or survivors (Ssewamala, Karimli et al., 2010). On the one hand, youth have benefitted from the support of others within their support network. On the other hand, they may face pressures to significantly contribute to that network and to make personal sacrifices to do so. Household decisions that determine who receives education and who seeks employment may constrain the options for youth to decide whether and how to save, and for whom. This dependency on youth income may inhibit their ability to achieve financial resiliency. Programs must, therefore, anticipate and account for the varied constraints on savings that youth will likely encounter after completing the program if they are to promote long-term change. The multiple forces that influence youth savings decisions tend to overshadow the importance of self-esteem and risk avoidance. Not only do youth have to learn how to delay gratification, often for the benefit of others or for unguaranteed results, they must identify risks, predict consequences, and evaluate options. Youth’s financial decisions may be affected by social relations and conditions external to the family as well. For example, predatory actors may undermine youth’s incentives to engage in employment for earnings and savings by offering barter exchanges. Transactional sex is a commonly used mechanism to gain financial benefits. In Tanzania, rates of transactional sex have been reported at 80% for young girls 14
19 years old, and in Uganda, 90% of young girls 15
19 years old are reported to engage in transactional sex (Maganja, Maman, Groves, & Mbwambo, 2012). The true cost of these forms of earning, including the devastating impact on self-esteem and exposure to deadly health risks, may go unrecognized by youth. Entrepreneurship programs must decide how to approach youth financial decisions within these constraints. In advocating for savings from earnings, these initiatives must recognize and address the multiple pressures that youth have to spend, to conform, to protect themselves, and to take risks. 2. Different forms of savings available to youth. In addition to the broad array of considerations that inform youth financial decisions, youth must decide how to save, with whom, and where. Many youth may by necessity engage in individual savings, but others may be involved in a

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form of saving through social systems by contributing to a family savings plan or a savings group. Once the “unit of saver” is determined, youth then begin the process of deciding how and where to save. As discussed earlier, many African societies place enormous importance on family ties. As any member prospers financially, they face strong social pressures to attend to the economic and personal welfare of both immediate and extended family members. It is not uncommon for an individual with paid employment to be expected to pay school fees for relatives of even distant connection. Accumulation of wealth without sharing may be seen as selfish, perhaps even hostile to family interests. On the other hand, the system has important benefits. This network of family obligations operates as a social security system, and has long provided a level of financial security that governments are unable to provide. Nonetheless, for many individuals, this system of obligations may undermine personal financial advancement. One way to negotiate this system is to quickly convert monetary assets into nonmonetary assets less easily shared. Buying a goat or a cow or starting to build the foundation for a house, one wall at a time, are common strategies. Communities may share property, livestock, gardens, and other goods. Family members may benefit from these assets in the short term while the owner keeps better long-term control of their capital asset. The main benefit is also its downside; such assets are not as liquid, meaning they cannot be quickly converted to cash when an alternative use for the money emerge. In addition, any liquid asset savings may be used in the upkeep of these communal investments (Ssewamala, Karimli et al., 2010). Other forms of social savings systems are through initiatives implemented at a community or group level. Village banking is a model that provides microfinance services to those living in poverty, and may include earnings on interest from savings (Ssewamala, Sperber, Zimmerman, & Karimli, 2010). Savings groups allow members to save toward individual or group goals, and these groups commonly link to a broad range of associated programs aimed at increasing responsible money management and decreasing risk-taking behavior (Storm et al., 2010). Each form has benefits from building social capital and contributing to the creation of broader group success and drawbacks from depending on the decision making and the financially responsible conduct of others. The literature and international experience suggest that programs aimed at promoting savings may be of limited success if they do not take into account these social pressures that work against saving money. International experience suggests that savings programs are unlikely to be successful

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unless they help participants find ways to honor their family obligations while still saving money in a form that protects the individual from social and familial pressure that would dissipate the savings. By using varying approaches to social savings, Swisscontact, Fundacion Paraguaya, and CAP appear to have each addressed this necessary consideration. While Swisscontact has designed their program to promote savings groups among youth, CAP emphasizes bridging the participants’ access to microfinance institutions, and Fundacion Paraguaya concentrates on savings to establish a financially self-sustaining school. Each approach will have distinct results and may have important outcomes for youth livelihoods in the long term. 3. Borrowing opportunities and risks. All three of the NGO programs recognize the need for youth to access financial services, particularly when starting a new business. As budding entrepreneurs, youth may need to access credit or capital in order to “grow their businesses,” which is often difficult for youth from low-income backgrounds who have little or no credit history or collateral and a limited income stream. To counter this, the NGO partner programs intend to familiarize youth with and facilitate access to different forms of microfinance services, such as small savings accounts and loans. Fundamental debates are whether it is wise to encourage these youth to borrow and for what kinds of uses (e.g., to start a business or to cover immediate needs). While small businesses may need capital to grow, it is also true that the majority of new small business ventures in these countries fail (Acs, Arenius, Hay, & Minniti, 2004; Dessing, 1990). Closely related to the high failure rate of new businesses, default rates on loans are also high across Africa (Adrianova, Baltagi, & Demetriades, 2011). Against this backdrop and given their already precarious economic situation and often substantial family and community obligations, it may not be wise to encourage youth to borrow money for risky business ventures. A separate but related debate concerns where to borrow. Given that assets are often necessary to start a business or to secure a loan that might be needed to start a business, are some types of financial institutions more responsive to the needs and vulnerabilities of youth than others? The main options for youth to borrow from include family members, banks, microenterprise organizations, and street lenders. While family members are likely to provide money with the least stringent conditions, family members of low-income youth are unlikely to have resources to lend and lending what little money they have to risky business ventures places the economic situation of the entire family at great risk. Street lenders may offer the easiest

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access to loans, but may carry the greatest risk of exploitation. Banks may be safer lenders, but are less likely to see youth as desirable clients and, in turn, may raise interest rates and collateral. This places youth at an even greater risk of economic hardship and default. Youth need greater access to financial services, but they also need more protections to minimize their risk and vulnerabilities. Efforts to promote microfinance services for youth must simultaneously educate youth on the different options and risks and improve the legal and regulatory framework to ensure youth are not exposed to undue hardship.

CONSIDERATIONS IN PROGRAM DESIGN International literature and grounded, localized experiences identify a series of decision points that face the designers of entrepreneurship programs. Among the more important decisions are whether the program is designed as a stand-alone activity (as illustrated by the CAP and Swisscontact programs) or integrated into formal schooling (as seen in the Fundacion Paraguaya program). Programs must also determine the appropriate mix of vocational, business, and life skills that compose the curriculum, and the extent that trainees will have opportunities to practice their new skills (e.g., learning centers in Swisscontact, internships in CAP). Another important factor is the nature of the certification that participants receive, which influences how prospective employers perceive the training and qualifications. Program design, however, cannot fully overcome the larger contextual constraints within which youth must work. Regardless of the quality and relevance of the training, high unemployment, an unfavorable regulatory environment, limited access to capital, high interest rates, and corruption can limit youth’s success in applying their skills and achieving their aspirations (Pellowski-Wiger, Chapman, Baxter, & DeJaeghere, 2012). These factors are largely outside the ability of program managers to influence. Nonetheless, youth entrepreneurship programs can take some steps to help prepare trainees to anticipate and respond to these challenges. For example, programs might provide youths with an overview of their rights as employed or self-employed workers, show them how to fill out legal forms associated with establishing their own enterprises, and help them develop negotiating skills. To do this, however, program managers themselves need to understand the context.

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In some cases, however, programs are adopted from other cultures and settings. Indeed, cross-border sharing of educational materials and programs is widespread and big business internationally (Chapman & Sakamoto, 2010). On one hand, it makes economic and strategic sense to adopt programs of proven success. On the other hand, the possibility of important differences in contextual factors inadvertently constraining program success in the new setting is a real concern. In such situations, program implementers must negotiate between fidelity to a program design that worked well elsewhere and demands of a local culture that may vary in important ways from that in which the program found its original success. This was the case for both the CAP and Fundacion Paraguaya programs.

Country Context Matters, but How? In addition to the debates in the literature and among educational practitioners about entrepreneurship programs, the local and national macroeconomic policy and regulatory environments also matter. Sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly eastern Africa, is a region of both great potential and great need. It is one of the fastest developing regions of the world, fueled by the progress many countries are making toward political stability, improved governance, a stronger civil society, a more liberal, marketoriented economy, and economic growth (World Bank, 2011). Yet, despite considerable progress in the region, significant challenges remain. Economic policies and politics affect employment opportunities. The growth of employment opportunities is constrained by lack of investment needed to support new enterprises, which, in turn, is limited by a severe shortage of savings in the region (Oatley, 2012; World Bank, 2011). Between 1970 and 2006, the average savings rate, as a percent of GDP, in Sub-Saharan Africa was a mere 16.9. In contrast, the average savings rate as a percent of GDP was 21.7 among high-income Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Besides low savings rates, the total pool of savings in the region is further limited by overall low incomes. The small pool of savings from which these countries can draw upon for investment and economic development seriously limits employment generation (Oatley, 2012). In addition, corruption and weak legal and regulatory environments are common barriers to entrepreneurship development in the region. Despite recent political and economic progress in many Sub-Saharan African countries, corruption remains a serious challenge and barrier to doing business

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throughout the region, which also severely constrains economic growth. According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), which measures levels of perceived corruption in the public sector, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda all ranked in the bottom half of the 183 countries ranked (Transparency International, 2011). Efforts to combat corruption are hindered by a lack of leadership and accountability as well as limited civil society participation (Chene, 2009a, 2009b). These challenges and the ability of governments in the region to effectively address them will shape the experiences and outcomes of the learning, earning, and saving initiative programs and participants. The regulatory environment, consisting of laws, rules, and regulations that govern business activity, can also impact program outcomes and youth livelihood opportunities. Many countries require individuals to be 18 years of age or older in order to access financial services such as a savings account or a loan. In addition, financial service providers in Sub-Saharan Africa are often informal and unregulated and NGOs themselves often face restrictions, making service provision in the region limited and costly (YFS-Link, 2011). According to the World Bank’s Doing Business Report (2012), starting and running a business in Sub-Saharan Africa is costlier and more complex than any other region in the world. Weak legal institutions, lengthy bureaucratic procedures, high costs associated with getting electricity connections, and inadequate access and transparency regarding regulatory information all hinder the regulatory environment in this region. Out of the 183 economies measured, Kenya ranks 109, Tanzania ranks 127, and Uganda ranks 123 in terms of the cost and ease of doing business. However, Sub-Saharan Africa has been making progress in the past eight years and between June 2010 and May 2011, as 34 out of 46 governments in the region (78%) have implemented regulatory reforms to make it easier to do business in their respective country (World Bank, 2012). Youth are particularly affected as they represent a large and growing percentage of the population at a time that national economies are not creating enough jobs to absorb them. As a result, the informal sector has become an important source of employment for youth throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. In order to better prepare youth with the necessary knowledge and skills to compete in both the local and global economies, governments have taken a renewed interest in technical and vocational education and training (TVET), though such initiatives will need to be accompanied by concentrated efforts to raise the public perception of TVET, which has historically been perceived as a second rate, alternative form of education throughout the region (Maclean & Rauner, 2009).

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While the reasons for poverty are crosscutting, solutions are often shaped by specific national contexts. The entrepreneurship initiatives described in this chapter are shaped by the unique needs and characteristics of the countries in which they are being introduced: Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. An overview of the economic, social, and political context of these countries provides a backdrop for understanding the operation of each program. Kenya is experiencing rapid economic growth and shows potential as an emerging market economy. It is pursuing greater regional integration and export-led development, in which EPZs are expected to play a significant role in attracting domestic and foreign investment, creating employment, diversifying exports, and providing opportunities for transfer of skills to Kenyans (EPZA, 2011; United States State Department, 2011). Yet Kenya’s socioeconomic growth is held back by high unemployment rates and an inability to absorb its high youth population into the economy (Government of Kenya, 2007). Though official statistics vary greatly by country, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (2012) estimates that 40% of the Kenyan population is unemployed. This number jumps to 67% when under- and unemployed youth aged 15
30 (approximately 30% of the total population) are included in the estimate. As only 25% of the approximately 5,000,000 youths completing tertiary education each year are expected to be absorbed into the job market, youth face dim prospects in the existing labor market (Government of Kenya, 2007). Moreover, the formal employment sector accounts for only 14% of the Kenyan labor force (Pollin, 2009). In responses to these challenges, the Kenyan government has incorporated youth entrepreneurial training, microcredit schemes, vocational training, and information and communications technology (ICT) skills training into its youth employment strategy within its most recent Poverty Eradication Plan (1999
2015) (Government of Kenya, 2007). CAP Foundation is responding to these development needs by implementing the Basic Employability Skills Training (BEST) model in and around Nairobi to help out-of-school and disadvantaged youth make informed choices, develop labor-market-oriented employability skills and access job placement, savings, and enterprise development support. Tanzania is also experiencing economic growth and reforms. To further promote this growth, the government has initiated a number of economic development reforms over the past 30 years aimed at privatization, attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), curbing inflation, increasing human services, and reducing corruption. More recently, the government has

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begun focusing on skills development and the improvement of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to foster job creation, income generation, and competitiveness. The government envisions that by 2025, it will have created a strong, diversified, resilient, and competitive economy that can effectively cope with the challenges of development, and that can also easily and confidently adapt to the changing market and technological conditions in the regional and global economy (Tanzania Ministry of Industry & Trade, 2003). However, many of these reforms are targeted at established businesses and people, and not necessarily marginalized youth. While the future for the country looks bright, the future for many individuals still looks bleak. The Tanzanian government’s ability to realize its development goals is constrained by an estimated 40% unemployment rate among youth (World Bank, 2009) and what many consider to be a crisis in secondary education in which a decreasing number of graduates have the requisite knowledge and skills (Wedgwood, 2007). Despite government support of quality education for all, the provision of secondary schools is not sufficiently meeting demand for education. Furthermore, strict national curricula and high stakes national assessments make student-centered learning a distant goal (Mbilinyi, 2003; United Republic of Tanzania, 2008, p. vii). Fundacion Paraguaya’s program addresses some of these challenges by fostering provision of education through a model of financially self-sufficient private schools in Tanzania and adding educational-production units to both private and government schools to make education more learnercentered and relevant to jobs in the labor market. By infusing the national curriculum with practical learning experiences, Fundacion Paraguaya aims to provide students with knowledge, skills, financial literacy, and savings habits necessary to succeed and contribute to Tanzania’s growing economy. The Swisscontact program, operating in the Lake Victoria region of Tanzania and Uganda, also aims to tackle these development challenges and improve youth livelihoods through a nonformal, alternative educational model that provides students with savings, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship skills and connects them to mentors and financial services. This will be examined in greater detail in the next section on Uganda. Uganda has also undertaken significant market-oriented reforms yet struggles to educate and provide employment opportunities for its large youth population. With 48% of the population below the age of 15, Uganda has the world’s youngest population (CIA, 2011). As a result of a remarkably high youth population, an expanding education system, and an underperforming economy, skilled and unskilled youth alike are facing a growing unemployment and underemployment problem. Current estimates

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place unemployment for Ugandan youth aged 15
24 at 83% (Uganda Youth Forum, 2010). Contributing factors include insufficient capital to pursue selfemployment and a mismatch between the school curriculum and labor market demand (Republic of Uganda, 2010; Ssempebwa, 2008). To address these concerns and promote socioeconomic development, the Ugandan government is taking important steps to attract FDI and support entrepreneurship development (Museveni, 2008; Republic of Uganda, 2010). Although Uganda is considered a highly entrepreneurial country, the high number of entrepreneurial activities in Uganda is marked by high failure rate, as many Ugandans are pushed into entrepreneurial activities out of necessity with very little education or experience (Namatovu, Balunywa, Kyejjusa, & Dawa, 2010). Swisscontact’s program intends to address this skill mismatch and strengthen entrepreneurship and life skills training in order to help the high youth population achieve sustainable livelihoods. While the three different NGO programs featured in this chapter respond to different challenges and needs in each country, their success in helping youth achieve improved livelihoods is partially constrained by the broader educational, political, legal, and regulatory environment of the countries in which they operate. Despite their unique challenges and needs, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda face similar social and economic difficulties, which have crosscutting implications for the implementation of entrepreneurship education programs. Across the region, steady economic growth is overshadowed by high population growth rates, particularly of the youth population. The swelling youth population puts tremendous pressure on the current education systems and labor markets. Secondary schools struggle to accommodate the increased demand for secondary education, and there are not enough jobs for the growing number of graduates entering the labor market. Entrepreneurship education is an increasingly popular policy solution, in part because these initiatives are implemented as public
private partnerships, in which NGOs and businesses are working with governments to reform education by linking learning with labor market demands. However, entrepreneurship education takes many forms, and there is a shortage of research on which forms are most likely to yield successful outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The three programs described in this chapter are being implemented against a backdrop of inadequate education and high unemployment and poverty rates for youth, where entrepreneurship development is promoted as a solution yet remains constrained by corruption, limited access to finance, and weak regulatory environments. While the different approaches being undertaken are promising strategies for

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assisting youth to find a path out of poverty, these programs have to recognize how the complex interplay between the programs and the broader social, political, economic, and legal environments in which they operate shapes and limits the eventual outcomes for youth.

CONCLUSION The challenges facing youth in Sub-Saharan Africa are substantial and multidimensional. Not only are youth disproportionately affected by poverty and unemployment, but also the very mechanisms available for expanding their livelihood opportunities are rife with vulnerabilities and risks. As youth seek education, employment opportunities, and (for some) access to the capital they need to start their own businesses, they are constrained by social, political, and economic circumstances which are beyond their control. National governments and international organizations are supporting entrepreneurship education as a strategy for ameliorating some of these challenges and generally welcoming NGO efforts to assist in the design and delivery of these programs. However, wise program design decisions can only be made as program managers demonstrate a clear understanding of the contextual and personal challenges facing the youth they intend to serve. Even then, the design of effective programs requires charting a careful course among a series of debates and different points of view regarding the most appropriate content and the best way to deliver entrepreneurship training. Program designers need a clear understanding of the choices they confront and the alternatives available to them. These choices are guided not only by program objectives, but also by an understanding of past research and experience regarding the nature of these debates and an appreciation of what is at stake in pursuing the alternative courses of action at each point. This chapter has drawn on the literature and the current experience of three particular entrepreneurship training programs as a way to illustrate these debates and the alternatives available to a wider circle of those who seek to use entrepreneurship training as a way to alleviate poverty among economically disadvantaged youth.

NOTE 1. “Vocational skills” is used in a general way to also include business skills, agricultural skills, high-end technical skills, and basic and transferable skills.

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Mangrulkar, L., Whitman, C. V., & Posner, M. (2001). Life skills approach to child and adolescent healthy human development. Washington, DC: Pan American Health Organization. Mbiliny, M. (2003). Equity, justice and transformation in education: The challenge of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere today. HakiElimu Working Paper Series No. 2003.5. HakiElimu, Tanzania. Retrieved from http://www.hakielimu.org/hakielimu/documents/document48equity_justice_ transformn_edu_en.pdf. Accessed on March 27, 2012. Museveni, Y. (2008). Foreign investment benefits Uganda. Retrieved from http://www.africaata.org/eg_foreign_investment.htm. Accessed on November 24, 2011. Namatovu, R., Balunywa, W., Kyejjusa, W., & Dawa, S. (2010). Global entrepreneurship monitor (GEM) Uganda 2010 executive report. Kampala, Uganda: Makerere University Business School. Oatley, T. (2012). International political economy (5th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson. Pellowski-Wiger, N., Chapman, D. W., Baxter, A. & DeJaeghere, J. (2012). Training is the solution only if lack of training was the problem: A model of the factors associated with youth entrepreneurship training. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society, San Juan, PR, May. Pollin, R. (2009). Labor market institutions and employment opportunities in Kenya. Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). Amherst: University of Massachusetts. Psacharopoulos, G. (1991). From manpower planning to labour market analysis. International Labor Review, 130, 459. Republic of Uganda. (2010). National development plan (NDP). Kampala: National Planning Authority. Retrieved from http://www.npa.ug/docs/finalndp.pdf. Accessed on March 27, 2012. Robertson, S., Novelli, M., Dale, R., Tikly, L., Dachi, H., & Alphonce, N. (2007) Globalisation, education and development: Ideas, actors, and dynamics. Bristol: Central Research Department of the Department for International Development. Roodman, D. (2012). Due diligence: An impertinent inquiry into microfinance. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Schoof, U. (2006). Stimulating youth entrepreneurship: Barriers and incentives to enterprise start-ups by young people. SEED Working Paper No. 76. International Labour Office, Geneva. Ssempebwa, J. (2008). Graduate unemployment in Uganda: Socio-economic factors exonerating university training. The International Journal of Education Management, 5/ 6, 105
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SOCIO-EDUCATIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP WITHIN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: LEVERAGING TEACHER-DRIVEN INNOVATIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT Vijaya Sherry Chand ABSTRACT This chapter presents a model of innovation in the public elementary schooling system by drawing on ongoing work on an “Educational Innovations Bank” in India, which seeks to make available a freely accessible forum for innovative teachers and a grassroots innovations resource for administrators. How do some teachers in government elementary schools, working in contexts of socioeconomic and educational deprivation, achieve their educational goals in spite of facing the same constraints as thousands of other teachers? What lessons do they offer for policy reform? The answers draw on the social entrepreneurship and workplace innovation literature to first locate the incentive for innovation in the social value that socio-educationally entrepreneurial and innovative behavior of teachers creates. Next, an examination is presented of how

International Educational Innovation and Public Sector Entrepreneurship International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 23, 59
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this social value leads to learning for an identity of competence, which in turn provides an incentive for further educational innovation. Finally, the evidence is presented to argue for policy entrepreneurship and a formal framework to help in the diffusion, adoption, and adaptation of both the enabling innovations that result from socio-educational entrepreneurship and the in-school or in-class educational innovations. Such a “bottomup,” peer-learning-based approach to innovations that also “improve” provides a unique way of visualizing educational reform in resourceconstrained public educational systems. Keywords: Educational innovation; employee-driven innovation; teacher-driven innovation; socio-educational entrepreneurship; public sector innovation

INTRODUCTION In developing countries, the state-run and state-supported public schooling system continues to play a critical role in reaching out to large sections of society. For instance, even in a country like India whose gross domestic product has been growing at over 7 percent for more than a decade and a half, 80 percent of the more than 1.25 million schools, and 74 percent of the 134 million children in grades one to five, are served by the government system (NUEPA, 2009). This system has often been criticized for its poor performance.1 Enrolling marginalized groups, making children attend school for a certain number of years, and achieving quality learning continue to be problematic. In response, a number of policy initiatives, like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All Campaign), which seek to inject an element of innovation into the planning and delivery of education, have been introduced (www.ssa.nic.in). However, such centrally driven, top-down attempts are bound to be constrained by the barriers imposed by the nature of the public sector (Aiyar & Dongre, 2012). Even granting that “innovation is not an elemental context for the public sector” (Potts & Kastelle, 2010, p. 124), a number of barriers to innovation in this sector have been identified
the structure of the sector, the risks associated with experimentation, the price that is paid for mistakes, the absence of an association of rewards with success, and the inherent characteristics of the people running the public sector (Birley, 2002; Kirby, 2006; Ozcan & Reichstein, 2009; van Duivenboden & Thaens, 2008). Yet, in spite of these factors, innovation does happen in the

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public sector, and much more often than it is realized (Gupta, 2010; van Duivenboden & Thaens, 2008). Given that the public system lacks the key context of market competition that provides an obvious rationale for innovation, the key to understanding public sector innovation lies in identifying the incentive for innovation in the less obvious and intangible aspects of the system. In this chapter, I present a model of innovation in the public schooling system which locates the incentive for innovation in the social value that socio-educationally entrepreneurial and innovative behavior of teachers creates, which then leads to an identity of competence that in turn provides an incentive for further educational innovation. I then argue for the diffusion, adoption, and adaptation of both kinds of innovations, the enabling innovations that result from socio-educational entrepreneurship and the second-order in-school or in-class educational innovations, through policy entrepreneurship. I illustrate this approach from ongoing work in India with elementary2 school teachers in the public sector to construct an “Educational Innovations Bank” (EI Bank),3 a freely accessible forum for innovative teachers and a grassroots innovations resource for policy makers and administrators. The question with which the EI Bank began was a very simple one. How do some teachers in government elementary schools, working in contexts of socioeconomic and educational deprivation, achieve their educational goals in spite of facing the same constraints as thousands of other teachers? The answer to this question lies in the innovations that such teachers evolve, often using their own creativity and their immediate contexts as their only resources. I begin here by describing the understanding of innovation in the public elementary education system that underpins this study, and then present a brief account of the EI Bank and the kinds of innovations that have been identified, validated, and included in the EI Bank. I then develop a theoretical framework which links the literature on the antecedents of innovative behavior with the incentive for innovation that can be derived from an application of social entrepreneurship theory to the work of the teachers represented in the EI Bank. My key proposition here is that learning orientation (Gong, Huang, & Farh, 2009), defined as a commitment to developing one’s own competence, a key antecedent of innovative behavior, can be understood as the identity of competence that results when a socio-educationally entrepreneurial teacher creates social value in contexts of deprivation in the public system. That is, while the social value provides an incentive for entrepreneurial behavior, the identity of competence that follows the creation of social

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value serves to reinforce innovative behavior and promotes further innovation within the classroom. Following this, I examine how the local construction of innovation within the public system can be embedded in wider structures for infusion and then diffusion. I present a case for the role of policy entrepreneurs who are sensitive to a “bottom-up” approach to innovations that work in situations of educational backwardness, and will encourage the process of translating these local innovations into solutions that can be unpacked and modified for practice elsewhere. Given the constraints that the public educational system faces, both in terms of the historical baggage of barriers to the achievement of educational goals and the imperative to “do more with less for more” (Prahalad & Mashelkar, 2010), such an approach would result in an inclusive approach to educational reform in developing countries.

INNOVATION AND THE EDUCATIONAL INNOVATIONS BANK For the purposes of this chapter, I define an innovation as an educational practice
including a classroom method, a teaching-learning aid, or an extra-school education-related action
that is a “step change” (Hartley, 2008, p. 199) from previous practice and has resulted in the achievement of certain contextually relevant educational goals of the teacher developing the innovation. Thus, to be considered for the EI Bank, an innovation should have had the following characteristics: “a novel and/or unique response to a problem or need; a stage of initial development by the teacher, followed by a stage of trial and monitoring (implementation); an evaluation, followed by continuation or modification; and finally, a set of results which constitute an improvement” (Chand, 2004). This understanding of innovation is in line with the definition of and requirements for innovation in public services (Hartley, 2008). Especially in the case of innovations in contexts of deprivation, innovation implies a change in relationship between the users (communities) and the service providers (teachers), and so embraces not just the product but the processes and outcomes that result from the teachers’ actions. This is very important in the case of a public service innovation and is different from the focus on product innovation in the economic arena. Second, while it may appear that the definition used here conflates innovation and success
the argument being that success-based definitions fail to address why innovations fail

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(Moore, 2005)
it must be noted that innovation and improvement are distinct conceptual categories. Hartley (2008) makes a useful distinction between the two concepts and combines them in a 2 × 2 matrix, using two levels for each dimension: high and low. It is possible that innovation and improvement may be low, as in stable environments, or as in the case of many state-run schools which have earned the label of under-performing and of under-delivering due to nonperformance. Also, some schools can be driven by external interventions like teacher training to achieve higher improvement without any innovation. There are examples of teachers who try to achieve “step change” but without demonstrable improvements. The fourth quadrant, where innovation is high, in the sense that significant “step changes” have been introduced, and the educational landscape has been changed as a result, is the focus of our attention, since a fundamental assumption made here is that the innovations from within which make up this quadrant afford a way out of the stagnation in which many public system schools in developing countries find themselves. This approach is also consistent with the increasing attention being paid to employee-driven innovation in the economic sphere (Høyrup, BonnafousBoucher, Hasse, Lotz, & Møller, 2012). Høyrup (2012), Price, Boud, and Scheeres (2012), and Billett (2012) note that employee-driven innovation, in keeping with the classic conception of innovation, contributes to innovation in informal ways that are not part of the organization’s stated goals and strategies, and is often initiated without innovation in mind. While the focus here on teachers in Hartley’s innovation-improvement quadrant does not imply a disjunction between the stated educational goals of the state and the goals of the teachers, it is in line with the understanding that actions in the public sector are often initiated without the goal of innovation in mind, though the outcome is innovation (Price et al., 2012). Another feature of employee-driven innovation is that it involves a remaking of organizational practices through interaction among employees, all of whom may not be directly connected with the task. Teachers in contexts of socioeconomic deprivation usually work in isolation, depending on their own resources, intellectual as well as material. Thus, while the “bottom-up” criterion
starting at the job and at the worker levels
is satisfied, the interaction element is usually weak in the public schooling system. The EI Bank aims to address this element so that the outcomes of innovation in the public system can benefit from what Høyrup (2012) calls a “second-order employee-driven innovation,” which is a mix of bottom-up and top-down processes in which significant innovation processes can be

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formalized. In other words, attention to this second-order employee-driven innovation will bring into focus the mechanisms available at present for diffusion, and call upon policy makers and administrators to play a more facilitative role in leveraging grassroots innovations. Diffusion is an important feature of public sector innovation (Rogers, 2003) since it enhances the perception of the public value that accrues from an innovation. This is perhaps the most under-recognized feature of teacher-driven innovation, since the impact is usually confined to localized contexts, and the potential to create public value on a wider canvas is missed out. The compulsions to protect innovations that often operate in the economic sphere are not applicable to public sector contexts, and therefore policy entrepreneurship can play an important role in establishing open collaborative networks of sharing for adaptation and adoption, the “second-order employee-driven innovation” referred to above.

CONCEPTUALIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF AN EDUCATIONAL INNOVATIONS BANK The EI Bank was conceptualized as a clearing house for educational innovations of innovative elementary school teachers working in the public system. The work of about 800 such teachers has formed the nucleus of the first phase of the EI Bank (2004 onward, up to now). The outputs of this phase were contextually grounded innovative practices that were available to other teachers working in public schools. The innovations represent solutions that are usually different from those that teacher training programs would prescribe. In other words, the effort was to move toward the “open collective cycle” identified by Huberman (2001, pp. 149
156) as an alternative teacher development approach. The “closed individual cycle” and the “open individual cycle” involve the teacher innovating within the boundaries of his or her own experiences or reaching outside the classroom; the closed collective cycle, which the first phase of the EI Bank represented, is a collective enterprise, but without resources from outside the group. This phase has relied on traditional modes of dissemination and networking like printed case studies, training material, and decentralized peer-driven networks which rely on face-to-face meetings. An effort is underway to scale up the work and expand its scope with the help of information and communication technologies.4 This should lead to the “open collective cycle,” which would draw in external

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resources like teacher trainers and administrators by facilitating exchanges and analysis through the EI Bank. Case studies of the teachers (Onwuegbuzie & Leech, 2005; Yin, 2009) constituted the input to the EI Bank. These were prepared using a mix of data collection methods that included interviews, observation, peer interviews, and expert validation reports. The raw material was in several different Indian languages. The final case studies, however, were prepared in English to facilitate dissemination to a wider audience. The process of preparing the case studies followed three steps. The first was identifying innovative teachers and obtaining their accounts. Nominations by teachers and education departments, and newsletters put out by governments, were used to reach the teachers. The criteria specified were “the innovation should have been developed (or modified after borrowing) in response to a specific problem; the work should have been monitored; and the intended outcomes should have been achieved”; the identified teachers then described their work using the following guidelines: “the inspiration for the idea, the process of developing the work, evolving criteria for monitoring the intervention, modifications made over time, and the spread effect of the work” (Chand, 2004). The responses were then screened for information gaps. The second step involved studying “the outcomes in the context of the constraints the teachers had faced, the innovativeness of the work, and the impact on schooling and on the community. An expert committee which also included a number of outstanding teachers undertook the screening. The criteria used for screening were novelty in the activity, the context as indicated by the school’s history and location, and the socioeconomic status of the village, the scope of any single activity in terms of the number of aspects which would be affected or the number of children benefiting, the complexity of the activity, the origin of the idea and the spread effect of the teacher’s work” (Chand, 2004). The third step of validation involved visits to the schools and discussions with groups of teachers.

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE EDUCATIONAL INNOVATIONS BANK In order to provide our readers with an idea of the kinds of issues tackled and the solutions that have been designed, a few innovations under four of the categories of issues that the EI Bank covers, are presented below.5 The problems underlying the issues represented here would

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figure as barriers to the universalization of elementary education in most developing countries.

Enrollment of Marginalized Groups In India, unlike many other developing countries, the enrollment problem has become less serious in recent times as a result of state intervention over the last two decades. However, enrollment continues to be an issue in certain geographical pockets and certain marginalized communities
especially those belonging to certain caste6 groups in India and among girls belonging to certain sections of society. The range of solutions documented is very broad; from among these, I illustrate the use of culturally significant events or days, by innovative teachers, to address the issue of nonenrollment. The festival of Rakshabandhan (literally, “ties of security”) is celebrated in many parts of northern India; on this day women tie sacred threads around the wrists of men; these “brothers” then present their “sisters” with gifts. The “gift” which one teacher demanded of each village man was his daughter for her school. Cultural norms preclude the turning down of such requests; a breakthrough was thus achieved in the enrollment of girls. Other teachers have set aside days of religious or cultural significance to the community (examples from India include certain days of the lunar calendar) for interaction with parents on this issue. Festivals which bring girls together have been used by many teachers to mobilize nonenrolled girls. Yet another teacher designed a school-readiness program around birthday greeting cards for a community of salt-pan workers in which education was nonexistent. He sent birthday greeting cards to children below the age of 6 on their birthdays, till the time came for the parents to send the children to school. This particular innovative practice has been adopted by nearly 200 teachers, with impressive results.

Irregular Attendance The elementary curriculum in developing countries assumes a linear systematic progression through the various topics specified in state-designed textbooks, and therefore regular attendance on the part of the children. The latter assumption is usually violated because of unavoidable socioeconomic circumstances like the migration of the children, their need to work during the harvest season, and so on. The result is that the quality of

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learning
defined in terms of achievement of basic skills like literacy and numeracy
is affected. The problem is compounded by the lack of home support due to parental illiteracy. Again, the range of solutions documented is quite broad. For illustrative purposes, one response which has combined an incentive with grounding in local culture is described. A teacher instituted a system of honoring the children with the highest attendance every month and those with the greatest improvement over the previous month. He took them to the houses of influential members of the village, in a procession led by the selected children with coconuts in their hands and accompanied by a children’s band. This effective innovation is not the kind that would find a place in the usual teacher training programs.

Involving Children and the Local Community in School Management Among the many examples in this category, noteworthy are the following: the attempts of many teachers to rework the official school calendar to suit local time cycles; activities to promote peer support among children (various methods of pairing or grouping children for out-of-school support); mechanisms for homework support
especially important for firstgeneration learners; student committees to make up for what the state cannot provide
for instance, the state cannot provide for gardeners or guards for the school; so a few teachers encouraged children to plant trees around the school, name these after their parents, and take care of the trees. Another set of innovations deals with building school
community relationships through a variety of mechanisms like youth and women’s associations, cooperatives, establishing links with the wider bureaucracy to promote village development, creating village libraries, and mobilizing resources for the school. In India, over the last 20 years, the state has paid particular attention to augmenting the resources available to a basic school. As a result, school infrastructure and resources for teaching-learning material have improved. Still, in many areas, teachers do seek additional funds for the school from the community. They may seek donations from individuals,7 organize fund-raising events, or develop “earn while you learn” schemes. One aspect of community involvement in schooling that is especially significant in regions where the education of girls is problematic is the role that the mothers can play. State-driven schooling programs nowadays recognize the critical role of committees that have both mothers and teachers, especially for activities like the mid-day meals provided to the children.

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However, irrespective of state directives, many teachers have, on their own, organized special forums for women or created specific roles for them. For such teachers, raising the importance of mothers in the public sphere which does not accommodate women as significant actors is a strong counter to an overall cultural environment that hinders the schooling of girls.8

Innovating to Improve Quality of Teaching When a teacher believes that exposing children to the outside world is essential but cannot make the children pay for their travel on account of their poverty, creating a fund by auctioning the leaves and branches of trees in the school compound has proved to be one way out. There are similar instances of teachers using their creativity to generate funds to increase the diversity of learning opportunities. Various forms of peer group learning and cooperative learning, by creating study groups both inside and outside the classroom, have helped augment the teachers’ efforts. Using their own skills in toy making, singing, song writing, puppetry, drama, carpentry, pottery, and many other areas is perhaps one of the most important ways in which such teachers make their educational practice more interesting and entertaining. The output ranges from toys and educational aids to elaborate science kits. A related area is the use of one’s hobbies
for example, stamp or coin collections and collections of archeological artifacts
to teach subjects in the curriculum. Yet another facet of building on prior skills is the use of the alternative knowledge systems
about plants for instance
that the children possess. One teacher sent his pupils to the marginal lands of the village to collect varieties of thorns which were then organized into an exhibition and used to teach the classification and properties of materials. Sometimes, the research that innovative teachers undertake leads to practical solutions that are not often part of formal teacher training inputs. One teacher found that the very young children he taught could read out a two-digit number correctly, but often inverted the order of digits when they wrote it. His research led him to believe that the names of the two-digit numbers (in the Indian language in which he taught) resulted in the child’s hearing the units digit first. For example, 26, when called out would be heard as six-twenty, resulting in the children putting down 6 first. He devised a new system of calling out such numbers and also developed a remedial program.

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The above are illustrations of the kinds of innovations developed as responses to just four issues. Other categories which the EI Bank uses to classify teacher-led innovations include inclusion of differently abled children, developing school
community relations, extracurricular activities, education of girls, and resource mobilization and creation. Taken together, these issues illustrate the variety of innovations that teachers working in the public schooling system have developed in response to the specific problems posed by their difficult socioeconomic and educational contexts. The innovations described above belong to the innovation-improvement quadrant referred to earlier (Hartley, 2008). That is, they have been included in the EI Bank because they represent both a “step change”
a significant change in approach over current solutions and an improvement in terms of achievement of outcomes
enrollment, retaining children in school, or quality of education. How do teachers generate such innovations and what can be done to encourage the processes that lead to these innovations?

ANTECEDENTS OF TEACHER-DRIVEN INNOVATION In this section, I draw on work that is in progress to relate the antecedents of individual workplace innovation to the impact that the innovative teachers make on their children. I first draw on a preliminary framework that has been applied to an analysis of 58 teachers who are part of the EI Bank. I will then link this discussion with an analysis of the EI Bank teachers that draws on the social entrepreneurship framework to show that learning orientation, a key antecedent of innovation, can be related to the social value that educationally entrepreneurial teachers working in contexts of deprivation create, and the identity of competence that results. The definitional distinctions between creativity and innovation are no longer a matter of debate. While creativity focuses on idea generation (Anderson, Carsten, & Nijstad, 2004), innovation includes implementation of ideas (Patterson, 2002). “Essentially creativity and innovation are seen as overlapping constructs” (Patterson, 2002, p. 116), but the distinction between creativity as the first stage of the innovation process, where the focus may be on absolute novelty, and workplace innovation as a second stage of implementation, where the focus may be on relative novelty (West & Farr, 1989), is useful. Consistent with Hammond, Neff, Farr,

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Schwall, and Zhao (2011) and Farr, Sin, and Tesluk (2003), innovation is seen as a broader process that includes ideation-creativity and the implementation of ideas in a work setting. Workplace innovation is defined in the context of “organizational products, services, processes, and procedures and focuses on the production of new and useful ideas … Operational definitions … focus on the production of outcomes or responses reliably evaluated as creative by informed individual judges who serve as judges” (Egan, 2005, p. 162). The latter refers to the consensual assessment technique described initially by Amabile (1982). This technique views creativity as a continuous dimension
that is, there are degrees of creativity, so that it is possible to say that some products are more creative than others. Workplace implementation is the set of practices that are observable and constitute “step changes,” which in turn result in desired educational outcomes. This understanding of creativity and implementation constituting “innovation” is borne out by the descriptions of the illustrative examples from the EI Bank provided earlier, where the focus on innovation and improvement helps in appreciating the use of creativity for concrete results in enrollment, school completion, and quality of schooling. While the observation that “there has been a distinct lack of clarity regarding individual differences in the propensity to innovate” in organizational contexts (Patterson, 2002, p. 115) may continue to be valid, it has to be noted that over the past few decades a strong literature base has been developed on the factors influencing individual innovation at the workplace (see the reviews by Hammond et al., 2011; Zhou & Shalley, 2003; Egan, 2005; Patterson, 2002; Crossan, & Apaydin, 2010). Egan (2005) identifies three individual creativity factors that are evident in research (a general creative personality, the “Big Five” model, and self-perception) and five external influences, namely creativity goal setting, evaluation and feedback, team work, role models, and leadership and supervision. What constitutes “creative personality” is well established: “aesthetic sensitivity, an attraction to complexity, broad interests, intuition” and a tolerance of ambiguity. Also, of the “Big Five” personality factors, lower levels of conscientiousness and more openness to experience are related to higher creativity, under certain conditions (George & Zhou, 2001). For instance, high conscientiousness is detrimental when the situation “simultaneously encourages conformity, being self-controlled, meeting predetermined expectations, and lacks support for creative behavior” (George & Zhou, 2001, p. 521). Self-perception and creative self-efficacy (a belief that one can be creative at work) are

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positively related to creativity, with creative self-efficacy also being associated with job complexity and job self-efficacy (Tierney & Farmer, 2002). Hammond et al. (2011), in their review of workplace innovation, reinforce the general emphasis of the literature on creative self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation as key factors that explain individual workplace innovation. Motivation demonstrated stronger relationships with workplace innovation than personality factors. Personality factors were not very strong correlates of innovative performance, though both creative personality and openness to experience were related to innovation moderately strongly. Demographic factors were found to be weakly associated with innovation. Among the individual factors, the concept of creative self-efficacy has been noted to have a stronger relationship with creativity. Tierney and Farmer (2002) used creativity-specific self-efficacy factors to develop the concept of creative self-efficacy, which predicted creative performance. They also noted that job tenure, job self-efficacy, supervisory behavior, and job complexity contributed to creative self-efficacy. Examining this concept carefully, Gong et al. (2009) identified a learningrelated personal variable, learning orientation, which was positively associated with employee creativity, with creative self-efficacy mediating the relationship. Learning orientation is defined as a dedication to developing one’s competence (Dweck, 2000; Dweck & Leggett, 1988). Gong et al. (2009) did not, however, include intrinsic motivation in their model, and wondered whether “creative self-efficacy would still serve as a mediator if employee intrinsic motivation were included in the model” (p. 775). Prabhu, Sutton, and Sauser (2008), however, tested the mediating effect of intrinsic motivation on the relationship between self-efficacy and creativity, and found that intrinsic motivation “completely mediated the relationship between creativity and self-efficacy” (p. 61). It is reasonable, therefore, to include intrinsic motivation as mediating the relationship between creative self-efficacy and creativity. Thus, learning orientation, understood as dedication to developing one’s competence, is a key primary factor that can influence innovative behavior through creative self-efficacy and motivation. Following from this, a reasonable proposition that can be formulated is that a stronger dedication to developing one’s competence is a key factor that distinguishes innovative teachers from the many others working in the same public system. Two factors necessary for an expression of this factor are creative self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation. Returning to Egan (2005), who discusses the role of five external influences on workplace innovation, it is reasonable to assume that four of the

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five factors
feedback, team work, role models, and leadership, the exception being creativity goal setting
would impact the teachers under discussion here in a similar way. Even with creativity goal setting, Egan (2005) notes that while the presence of a goal increases creative output, it is not clear when goal setting can begin to inhibit such output. What is proposed to be added here as an external influence on workplace innovation in the public system is the context of socioeconomic and educational deprivation that often acts as a trigger for the development of the dedication to developing one’s competence identified as an individual factor in generating workplace innovation. It is my contention that in contexts of deprivation, the teachers in the EI Bank have been called upon to generate two kinds of innovations. The first includes enabling innovations constructed through socially entrepreneurial behavior. Many of the out-of-school innovations described earlier, for instance, developing youth or women’s associations, building a drinking water facility, or using cultural symbols for social and educational goals, are examples of this kind. These generate “social value,” which is an articulation of an outcome of value to the local community resulting from a combination of the social and educational missions of the teacher. The social value base then becomes the motivation for the development of identities of competence or the learning orientation that the literature on workplace innovation cites as an important antecedent of innovation. This then leads to those in-school or in-classroom innovations traditionally understood as educational innovations. The innovations to improve the quality of learning mentioned earlier illustrate this second type. I now turn to a discussion of how the context of deprivation and the development of a “learning orientation” can be linked through the framework of social entrepreneurship.

LEARNING ORIENTATION AND SOCIOEDUCATIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP Chand and Amin-Choudhury (2006) developed a three-part model of socioeducational entrepreneurship, comprising roles, characteristics, and learning for competence. In situations of socioeconomic deprivation, innovative teachers reshape their roles and their work context to locate the school among local stakeholders. The model built on Yamada (2004) to develop

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two roles of an entrepreneurial teacher: defining organizational domains in order to create local network knowledge
creating new domains, for instance, tackling social barriers to the education of girls, is by definition disruptive; and seeking out the social capital necessary to establish a domain consensus
an agreement on what activities will be performed and what will not be performed, a necessary condition for the creation of knowledge communities. The second part of the model dealt with the characteristics that innovative teachers exhibit, drawing on the four factors identified by Mort, Weerawardena, and Carnegie (2003): the individuals involved are socially entrepreneurially virtuous, they show balanced judgment, they identify opportunities for creating social value, and show the same decision-making features as economic entrepreneurs, namely tolerance of risk, proactiveness, and innovativeness. This conceptualization is supported by others in the literature (Alvord, Brown, & Letts, 2004; Roberts & Woods, 2005; Thompson, 1999, 2002; Thompson, Alvy, & Lees, 2000). The third part of the model was learning to develop competence, an important aspect of the social entrepreneur’s own development. Cope (2003) and Gielen, Hoeve, and Nieuwenhuis (2003) discuss the relevance of nonroutine learning events and informal learning processes through social networks. Chand and Amin-Choudhury (2006) extended such learning to the development of “identities of competence” that results from such learning and acts as a motive for further innovation
the “learning orientation” noted by Gong et al. (2009) in the workplace innovation literature. The analysis of how these identities of competence emerged indicated that the first step was a clear focus on the creation of “social value,” an outcome perceived to be valuable by the local community, and resulting from a combination of the social and educational missions of the teacher. The next step was to redefine the social value by privileging a new kind of competence for the teacher. As local institutional frameworks (the school-in-the-community) grow stronger, the ability of the community to generate expectations and communicate these to the teacher grows stronger. “What was communicated was an expectation that the teacher
given the ‘social value’ created and personal credibility
would play a ‘leadership’ role” (Chand & Amin-Choudhury, 2006, p. 109). That is, the community makes the same demands with respect to education that the socio-educationally entrepreneurial teacher had made initially, but the difference is that the compulsion is now from the community. This allows the teacher to focus on furthering the classroom practice dimension of competence.

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For instance, if the efforts of a teacher have resulted in regularity of attendance among the children of the disadvantaged social groups, the teacher is then better able to focus on sequencing the learning steps that result in adequate literacy and numeracy skills. Or the use of cultural talent among the children to attract them to school can transform itself into “joyful” pedagogy. This helps the teacher move from the competence in a “dispositional sense” (Carr, 1993) that her preservice training had prepared her for, toward competence in the “capacity” sense (Carr, 1993). “This shift towards a new identity, characterized by a mix of social and educational leadership competence, marks a crucial stage in a teacher’s career. It reflects recognition of the moral authority that a teacher can exercise” (Chand & Amin-Choudhury, 2006, p. 111). Such identities of competence help in further reinforcing the innovativeness of the teachers concerned. To summarize what has been said above, a learning orientation or dedication to developing one’s competence, supported by creative self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation, has been identified as an important antecedent of innovative behavior at the workplace. For teachers working in the public system of education in contexts of socioeconomic deprivation, the social value that they first create and the transformation of this social value into identities of competence appear to be analogous to the process of developing a learning orientation noted in workplace innovation literature. More important, the identities of competence may help in maintaining the motivation to innovate. Thus, engaging in socio-educationally entrepreneurial behavior distinguishes the innovative teacher from the many others subject to the same constraints in the same public system; such behavior results in a learning orientation that may help in maintaining the motivation to innovate. How can such behavior be encouraged among those teachers who are not in the innovation-improvement quadrant of Hartley (2008)? If lateral learning or peer learning is accepted as an important mechanism for learning, what kind of diffusion is called for?

LINKING LOCAL SOCIAL VALUE AND WIDER SYSTEMIC IMPACT The “solution knowledge,” to borrow from the domains of technical knowledge identified by Saemundsson (2004), that the teachers in the EI Bank have developed during their work is derived from the evolutionary and opportunistic forms of learning that Day (1999) has identified. Thus,

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developing a learning orientation on one’s own and learning through an experimental trial-and-error approach have been the dominant modes of these teachers. However, the solution knowledge they have developed should lend itself to accelerated learning, the third form of learning noted by Day (1999). Such a form of learning should be the focus of public teacher training policy, if decentralized social value created in local contexts is to become social innovation (Chand, 2006). If accelerated learning is to be promoted, policy needs to recognize the value of learning from the grassroots, which means allowing the possibility of “bottom-up” learning. Second, processes of diffusion will have to be designed. In order to understand how the concept of EI Bank outlined above facilitates both requirements, I use a theoretical model that links innovation, knowledge, and networking (Swan, Scarbrough, & Robertson, 2003). Swan et al. see the entire process of innovation as having three “episodes,” the invention episode, which involves design and development; the diffusion episode, dealing with the spread and the adoption of an innovation; and the implementation episode. This is consistent with other literature which separates the innovation itself from the structures and processes that aid in diffusion (e.g., Phills, Deiglmeier, & Miller, 2008). A crucial assumption that Swan et al. make is that though the three episodes are iterative and recursive, each demands a particular type of network and activity mix. Innovation, thus, according to them, is systematically intertwined with the development of networks. For instance, the invention episode, as noted earlier, drew on the teachers’ local networks with the community. This “communicated experience” (Rogers, 2003) is important for lateral and peer learning, for, teachers who will get involved in subsequent episodes will have more faith in their colleagues who have generated the idea. While the EI Bank is not so concerned with the invention episode, it brings into play a different network for the diffusion and implementation episodes. The networks that screen and validate the innovations are different, comprising other teachers and experts within the same public system; the work of such networks results in the “objectification” of the solution knowledge of the innovative teachers, which can then be made available to others. The second episode does not depend on the knowledge of the innovators of the invention episode; rather, the communication knowledge of how to present the innovations and where to target them becomes important. While the work in the EI Bank up to now has depended on communicating through printed cases and related material, the focus of the EI Bank is now shifting to electronic modes of communication and diffusion.

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The third episode, the implementation episode, deals with the use of the innovations, and thus does not see diffusion as an end in itself. What this episode seeks to achieve is a decoding of the original innovation and relocating of it in new local contexts and the tacit knowledge that exists among new teachers. Such “user” teachers, therefore, engage in a process of knowledge appropriation and adapt the original innovation to their own contexts. If implementation were to happen on a wide scale, public policy would have achieved its objective of taking locally effective innovations toward systemic impact. The diffusion and implementation episodes cannot depend on the teachers themselves; policy entrepreneurs (Mintrom & Vergari, 1998) are needed to play the role of catalysts who can legitimize the practices and act as bridges between the invention and implementation episodes. However, these policy entrepreneurs cannot be isolated from the invention episode since how they frame the role of grassroots innovations that result in improvement within the wider institutional context will determine the effectiveness of diffusion and implementation; Ramesh (2005) notes that in the public system, the implementation phase receives more attention than the genesis phase of innovation. To summarize, for educational administrators to connect local effectiveness with systemic change, an appreciation of a learner-focused, grassroots perspective on innovations and a better understanding of their role as policy entrepreneurs during the diffusion and implementation episodes of the innovation cycle are necessary. A grassroots perspective will be new to public sector administrators in most developing countries; it contrasts too sharply with the more familiar centrally driven and expert-designed model of reform. Ultimately, such a counter to the dominant view of innovation in the public system targets the bureaucratic culture that is often cited as a barrier to innovation in public schooling. Culture can be seen as a subsystem within the organization, distinct from other components like structure or technology, or as an aspect system, which pervades all subsystems (van Duivenboden & Thaens, 2008). Both perspectives are important; however, the perspective argued for in this chapter should lead to the identification of some strategic actions to counter the “culture as an aspect system.” It would also call upon educational administrators to visualize innovation in terms of the transformation strategy of educational innovation identified by Westera (2004, pp. 508
510). This, in turn, would demand that public administrators and stakeholder institutions themselves become more entrepreneurial and innovative in their outlook and action.

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INSTITUTIONALIZING POLICY ENTREPRENEURSHIP In this chapter, I have argued for recognizing the potential that teacherdriven innovation in contexts of socio-educational deprivation offers for an approach to educational improvement. For this approach to be effective, policy entrepreneurship that valorizes such innovations and creates a culture of innovation by promoting their use is necessary. In conclusion, I present a model that seeks to facilitate such policy entrepreneurship, by drawing on a collaboration that was initiated in January 2013 between the EI Bank and the government of the province in which the EI Bank is situated, the Indian state of Gujarat. The discussion here has to be treated as an initial set of proposals; the results of the collaboration will only become evident in the future. Gujarat is a province which has about 38,000 elementary schools and more than 8 million children in these schools. A fair proportion of these schools would be located in socio-educationally deprived contexts of the kind discussed in this chapter. The state has either initiated or participated in many initiatives designed to improve educational performance in India, but what is of interest is the creation of an enabling legal framework for innovations through the establishment of the Gujarat Educational Innovations Commission, through an Act of the government in 2009.9 This Commission, in partnership with the province’s state-run nodal educational research and training agency and the EI Bank, seeks to create an Innovation Cell in every subprovincial administrative unit, a district, each covering about 1,400 schools on an average. Such a cell, to be established within the district-level subunits of the nodal research and training agency, will provide a decentralized nodal point for coordinating the tasks of identifying teacher-driven innovations and validating and documenting them. The EI Bank proposes to assist in these three tasks and to add those innovations that “improve” educational performance to its electronic database. All three parties will have full right to use the innovations identified under the partnership for their own academic or administrative purposes. The Innovation Cell, in addition, will facilitate the creation of decentralized networks of innovative teachers in the district, with the help of the EI Bank. The partnership is expected to result in the production of appropriate material based on the innovations identified and validated, for the use of teacher training institutes.

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Thus, the policy entrepreneurship imperative identified earlier is being operationalized here through two mechanisms, the enabling framework provided by an Educational Innovations Commission and the decentralized units that the state already has within its structures. This partnership, which also illustrates the collaboration that is possible between the state and an academic institute, is expected to result primarily in a better understanding of the in-school educational innovations that have a direct impact on learning outcomes and quality of learning among children, and of the out-of-school innovations that are necessary to establish a platform for improvement in schooling. The approach described in this chapter, though based on experiences in one part of India, should be applicable to developing country contexts characterized by high educational inequalities, socioeconomic deprivation, and a reliance on the public sector to reach out to the marginalized.

NOTES 1. See, for instance, the Annual Status of Education Report, 2011, which is based on a survey of 14,283 schools and over 600,000 children (http://www.asercentre.org/ ngo-education-india.php?p = ASER%20KEY%20DOCUMENTS). The report notes that while enrollment is not a major issue (only 3.4 percent of the children in the age group 6
14 are out of school), attendance continues to be problematic, with only 70.9 percent in attendance during the survey. On the learning front, the public system comes in for criticism. The survey found that only 48.2 percent of the children in the fifth grade could read a second-grade text correctly; “about half of all children will complete primary school without learning to read fluently …. About one third … will complete primary school without learning to do basic arithmetic.” 2. In this chapter the terms elementary, basic, and primary are used synonymously. Strictly speaking, in a country like India, “primary” or “basic” would refer to grades one to five, and “elementary” to grades one to eight. The focus here is mainly on the primary schooling stage, but grades six to eight are included in the scope of this study. 3. The EI Bank is located in an academic institute, the Ravi J. Matthai Centre for Educational Innovation, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. 4. This effort is being funded by the Hewlett-Packard Social and Sustainability Initiatives Award (2013
2014), which the project received in November 2012. A searchable electronic database format will form the hub of the EI Bank; this should be freely available to teachers and administrators by mid-2013. The first phase of the EI Bank was supported by the Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai, India. 5. In this chapter, the innovative teachers are not identified by name. However, in the database, every innovation is attributed to the teacher who developed it.

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6. The term caste is used here in a restrictive sense
the vernacular equivalent in the present use of the term would be jati
to refer to communities defined socially and historically in Indian society; caste identity therefore is an ascribed identity. Certain caste groups, which for purposes of affirmative action get listed under “Other Backward Classes,” suffer from serious educational deprivation. Certain other historically disadvantaged caste/community groups, listed under “Scheduled Castes” and “Scheduled Tribes,” have been the subject of affirmative action for about six decades. 7. The ability to spot an opportunity that many innovative teachers in highly constrained environments exhibit is illustrated by the following story. A teacher once met a woman who was visiting a temple in order to donate a drinking water facility. The teacher tried to convince her that her school was in greater need of drinking water. The visitor decided to leave it to the gods to decide and prepared two pieces of paper, one with the school’s name and the other with the god’s name. The teacher, fortunately, picked the school; the woman gave the money, on condition that the drinking water facility had to be built in three days. This facility has been meeting the water needs of the children for many years now. 8. A factor that compounds the difficulty is that rapid educational and social change in countries like India has resulted in a situation where many mothers have themselves not been to school; the Annual Status of Education Report, 2011, referred to earlier, found that 46 percent of the mothers of the children surveyed had not attended school. 9. See http://geic.ac.in/ for details about the Gujarat Educational Innovations Commission. The mandate and the functions of the Commission are presented at http://gujarat-education.gov.in/education/Portal/News/3_1_TheGujaratEducational InnovationsCommissionsBill-English.pdf.

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217.

PART 2 DEVELOPING EDUCATION AND SOCIETY WORLDWIDE THROUGH PUBLIC SECTOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP

DEVELOPING INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS IN YOUTH THROUGH MASS EDUCATION: THE EXAMPLE OF ICT IN THE UAE Alexander W. Wiseman and Emily Anderson ABSTRACT Much of the literature on innovation and entrepreneurship in education focuses on how external ideas, processes, and techniques can be applied to education systems, schools, and classrooms to improve educational performance. Little research, however, addresses the ways that internal ideas, processes, and techniques within educational systems, schools, and classrooms impart innovation and entrepreneurial skills to youth worldwide. This chapter identifies ways that these skills can be developed in youth through mass education systems. Particular attention is given to the ways that youth are prepared to participate in the knowledge economy by becoming information innovators and knowledge entrepreneurs.

International Educational Innovation and Public Sector Entrepreneurship International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 23, 85
123 Copyright r 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1108/S1479-3679(2013)0000023013

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Keywords: Educational innovation; public sector entrepreneurship; mass education; information and communication technology (ICT); United Arab Emirates; hierarchical linear modeling (HLM)

Entrepreneurship education is a phenomenon that is closely related to direct instruction in entrepreneurship knowledge and skills, and is implemented in postsecondary and tertiary education worldwide. Business schools and colleges are especially keen to provide direct instruction in entrepreneurship for enrolled students. But, developing innovation and entrepreneurial skills in youth through mass education systems worldwide is much less explicit and widespread. Direct entrepreneurship teaching versus indirect development of innovation and entrepreneurial skills involves both direct instruction as well as identity development of youth as entrepreneurs both in the public and private sectors. “Disruptive” innovation, technologies, instruction, and entrepreneurship are frequently advocated as the best methods for training and achieving entrepreneurship, but little research has investigated how this develops and is implemented in mass education systems, if it is at all. Prior research shows that becoming a knowledge society innovator involves (1) acquiring, (2) managing, and (3) creating new knowledge. Innovation then becomes entrepreneurship when it is implemented, evaluated, and finally held accountable (Wiseman & Anderson, 2012). But, what happens in schools that approximate these processes in simulated situations or classroom discussions? Are there regional differences that suggest socially or culturally specific ways of developing innovation and entrepreneurship in youth in schools? What advantages do mass education systems have for supporting innovation and entrepreneurship in education as well as developing those skills in youth? And, what disadvantages do mass education systems have for supporting innovation and entrepreneurship in education systems as well as in individual youth?

THE ROLE OF MASS EDUCATION IN DEVELOPING INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP The role of mass education in innovation and educational change differs depending on the degree of entrepreneurship that is expected. For example,

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if schools and teacher are expected to teach students directly about how to be innovative and entrepreneurial then mass education acts as a direct facilitator and training process for innovation and entrepreneurial behavior and can be used by students during their schoolwork as well as beyond in their community and the labor market. But, if schools and teachers only teach students about innovation and entrepreneurship
in other words, emphasizing knowledge over skills and not expecting students to be innovative or entrepreneurial, but only to be able to recognize these characteristics in books or on tests
then mass education acts as a source of information but not as a facilitator for action or impact either in school or beyond. A third role that mass education can play is to teach students regular curricular content using innovative and entrepreneurial methods without necessarily teaching the students about those innovative and entrepreneurial methods explicitly. In this way, the teaching activity or pedagogy may be innovative or entrepreneurial but not necessarily translate to innovative or entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, or action on the students’ part either in or beyond school. The challenge for mass education in any attempt to explicitly facilitate, implicitly educate, or passively implement innovation and entrepreneurship in schools and classrooms is that mass education systems
as the name implies
serve the masses of a country’s youth. In other words, anyone of school age is a potential and oftentimes a compulsory participant in mass education and this expectation increasingly extends beyond secondary education to postsecondary and tertiary education as well. The mass character of national educational systems has several advantages, which includes the scope of educational opportunity available, the development of social and political identities, establishment of minimum knowledge and skill competencies, and individual and society-wide economic benefit among others. There are also challenges resulting from mass education, too. These include the stratification of opportunities along social, cultural, and economic lines, the standardization of content and methods, and the separation of schooled knowledge and skills from social and economic context or complexities. In fact, one of the main challenges to educational innovation and entrepreneurship is the soloing and separation of education content, activities, and outcomes from those environments and contextualized complex situations that are typical in “real-world” settings. For example, a student may develop an innovative approach to reading for comprehension and as a result score highly on reading comprehension tests in school, but outside of

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school, comprehending what is read may not help the student translate that information to a complex, realistic context. Translation and real-world implementation instead requires using that information as just one part of the solution to a complex and contextualized problem rather than isolating information to respond to specific questions. This is where entrepreneurship and innovation distinguish themselves. An innovative idea when implemented may not result in value or benefit, which are the anticipated results of entrepreneurship, unless the idea accommodates conditions and contexts that cannot be experienced through simulation nor directly replicated in a school setting. In addition, the institutional framework of mass education systems and institutionalized expectations and behaviors associated with education and students are unique to the school context
especially within mass education systems. One of the most obvious examples of this is the fact that educational outcomes do not have much or any value when separated from the mass education context. For example, a students’ secondary school math achievement score does not directly lead to increased income or prestige outside of the institution of education. Youth and educators who can bridge the knowledge and skills gap between education and the labor market, however, are heralded as genuine entrepreneurs. Therefore, it is reasonable to question the feasibility of educational innovation and entrepreneurship in terms of their value relative to mass education systems. One way to think about the relevance of innovation, entrepreneurship, and mass education is to examine the value that innovative ideas and entrepreneurial applications create relative to mass education. There is an internal and an external value of educational innovation and entrepreneurship relative to mass education systems. The internal value is the result of any innovative idea or entrepreneurial activity that either improves students’ educational outcomes (generally measured as achievement scores) or facilitates innovation and entrepreneurial activity and behavior either among students or teachers. The external value of educational innovation and entrepreneurship is, therefore, the social, political, or economic value of implemented innovation in society, the labor market, or other contexts outside of the school or educational system. Given the differences between internal and external value of innovation and entrepreneurship relative to mass education, any attempt to develop, implement, or measure educational innovation and entrepreneurship is itself contextualized either as a result of profit-supported private sector entrepreneurship, which originates outside of mass education

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systems, or nonprofit-seeking public sector entrepreneurs, which may be either external or internal to mass educational systems. At least four possible combinations exist given the private and public sector origins of educational innovation and entrepreneurship and the external and internal value that educational innovation and entrepreneurship potentially create. Educational entrepreneurship that is most likely to create value and sustainable impact is potentially characterized by both private and public sector support as well as both internal and external value. The way that private and public sector entrepreneurship relative to education have been conceptualized and implemented worldwide largely differentiates and separates public from private sector educational entrepreneurship. This separation is a particular result of the different values that each has as its goal: profit versus social or nonprofit value. Since the value that educational entrepreneurship potentially generates via mass education is largely internal and not-for-profit, the question legitimately arises as to what sustainable value mass education contextualized educational entrepreneurship has for both individuals and society since youth inevitably leave the mass education system and become permanent members of the society and labor market. Beginning in the mid-20th century, a mass education model has spread to or been adopted by almost every country in the world. While there is persistent controversy about the value of this global explosion of mass education systems, the fact remains that almost every country worldwide has a national educational system that resembles the mass education model, and has several generations of citizens who have been through the system. As a result it has become a largely unquestioned expectation that children and youth in every country will participate in formal education and preferably persist to completion of secondary school or beyond. This expectation is embedded into the social norms and cultures in communities all over the world
often in spite of unique contexts or conditions that are not completely compatible or even clash with the mass education model and the norms and expectations that accompany it. Likewise, there are often social norms and cultural expectations that accompany educational entrepreneurship. In particular, the expectation that change is beneficial and that new ideas, activities, and behavior can increase value are firmly embedded in the entrepreneurial spirit. It is also common for educational entrepreneurship to originate from outside of the mass educational system, but to also be aligned with the norms and

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expectations which accompany mass education. For example, the expectation that high or improved academic achievement is valuable and worth cultivating is the rationale behind many entrepreneurial initiatives in education. Or, another expectation is that educational attainment and academic performance are associated with or lead to labor market productivity and employability even when there is no consistent evidence to confirm this. Finally, the expectation that formal education is of value itself and promotes the welfare of both individuals and society is a largely Western cultural norm which relies upon the Western-based myth of the individual (Ramirez & Boli, 1987). Each of these expectations, which accompany educational entrepreneurship worldwide, also are influenced by the origin and initiative behind the entrepreneurial activity or program and the value that it generates (or not). In short, the phenomenon of international educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship is uniquely contextualized by mass education systems and therefore is distinct from educational entrepreneurship, which may be wholly external to national educational systems. A caveat to this exceptionality, however, is that mass education has become so widely legitimized and embedded both in national educational systems worldwide and in individual and societal cultural norms and expectations that even education that occurs outside of formal schools or systems often resembles formal mass education in structure, content, activity, purpose, and outcome. This is manifested in increasingly mass-oriented expectations and norms for private education and training, higher and postsecondary education, informal and nonformal education, workplace learning, and in most situations where new or different knowledge and skills are available and transferable. In other words, the impact of mass education on educational entrepreneurship is both unavoidable and significant in spite of differences in culture, context, content, language, and implementation. This is the framework and context within which innovation and entrepreneurial skills are developed or attempted with youth worldwide. In order to identify ways that these skills are and can be developed in youth requires an investigation into the specific characteristics of mass education systems, public sector educational entrepreneurship, internal and external entrepreneurial innovations, and development of both internal and external value as a result of educational entrepreneurship in mass education systems worldwide. Particular attention is paid to the ways that youth are prepared to participate in the knowledge economy by becoming information innovators and knowledge entrepreneurs.

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YOUTH TRANSFORMATION THROUGH MASS EDUCATION How can youth become information innovators and knowledge entrepreneurs? The answer is that they can do this by creating new or unique value. In mass education systems, value is often the result of developing, using, and institutionalizing innovative methods of acquiring, managing, and creating knowledge. Creativity is a large part of what students must develop in order to be innovative in this way, and entrepreneurship presupposes that they have the opportunity, support, and access to resources in order to put their ideas into practice. The problem is that mass education has been purported to both kill creativity and resist change (Book & Phillips, 2013). This is perhaps largely a function of mass education’s bureaucratic characteristics (Kosack, 2013) or its organizational tendency to resist change (Levin, 2006), but there may also be ways that mass education embraces change and is a harbinger of development at least as much as of decline. Mass education is a carrier and disseminator of culture (Wiseman, Astiz, & Baker, 2013). As a result, it can be used to nurture and cultivate a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship that promotes educational, social, and economic development. The culture that dominates mass education is largely Western in origin and character, but it varies and overlaps beyond these origins and characteristics with the local community’s culture, norms, and expectations as well. There are both neoliberal expectations about decentralization and accountability (Astiz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002) as well as democratic expectations about the role of individuals in society, equality, and political identity and participation as well to consider. But, regardless of the agenda, mass education legitimizes and disseminates cultural norms and expectations. Developing knowledge and skills in youth through innovation and entrepreneurial teaching and learning in mass education systems is often considered to be the opposite of what innovation and entrepreneurship are. Most examples of innovation and entrepreneurial education, in fact, are the opposite of what typically happens in traditional formal schooling in mass educational systems, but the fact of the matter is that innovation and entrepreneurship have to align with or complement mass education systems in order to be sustainable. What may be innovative and entrepreneurial about education then is not that mass education
and the formal schooling that it engenders
and eradicated, but that the infrastructure is differently

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configured, accessed, or used in order to maximize how teachers and students interact with it. Second, the capacity and skills of the teachers, students, administrators, and others involved in the educational process can be innovatively reimagined
especially if there is a new or reimagined way of assessing educational outcomes that moves beyond standardized test scores. Third, the factor that impacts systems’ innovation more than any other is the potential or ability to empower local individuals and groups with the motivation, skills, and knowledge to sustain and support the innovation and entrepreneurship activity themselves moving forward. This is what makes innovation and entrepreneurship successful in concert with mass education systems. So, how is this accomplished through mass education rather than, instead of, or in spite of mass education? The answer is that what works within context has to be identified. This could mean that what works in one community
even within the same national educational system
may not work in another. The differences in context may be socioeconomic, cultural, linguistic, or political. It also means, however, that sometimes differences in context do not change what works. There are different combinations of context and mass education that often lead to different results across locations, cultures, and times. One of the foundational things to note about what works or does not work, however, is related to what infrastructures and resources are available and how those infrastructures and resources are used
or not used
and to what end. For example, an innovation in education may be as simple as using a resource or element of infrastructure in a different way or using a resource that was ignored before. An example of this in the early 21st century is mobile technology
particularly mobile phones. This is a technology that is frequently ignored or even banned in the most high-need and low-performing schools and classrooms worldwide, yet it is quickly becoming (or has become in some communities) one of the most ubiquitous technologies available. What is even better is that mobile technology in the form of mobile phones, in particular, is often a technology that exists throughout a community
not just in schools
and is something that school-age youth either already own themselves or have provided to them to some degree by their family or guardians. Updates to mobile phone technology are often incremental and affordable enough that youth and their families even in the poorest communities are able to bear the burden of independently financing technology upgrades to their mobile phones. This means the mobile phone technology does not become outdated as a result of limited functionality as quickly as personal

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computers or laptops, and therefore it does not quickly become unused technology either. In other words, this is a resource that exists outside of mass education systems, is funded largely through individual or familybased private spending, and is maintained and sustained by the youths and their families or guardians regardless of their educational function. This is true across socioeconomic, cultural, political, or linguistic contexts as well. All that is needed is the innovation for using mobile technology for educational purposes. Entrepreneurship is especially important when bringing innovations to scale, and mass education is a way to bring innovations to scale because mass education systems are already cross-community institutions. Mass education comes with a set of shared expectations and a culture that tends to remain relatively stable or consistent across communities in spite of the fact that the implementation of education worldwide varies in some significant ways. To make mobile phones an international educational innovation the learning use of them has to be developed in a way that it is incorporated into or complements mass education, and that its use is sustainable in that way. The problem is that mobile phones are often banned in classrooms in spite of the fact that most teachers and students own and use them. The innovation then builds on the fact that the resource infrastructure for mobile phone technology exists independently from formal schooling and mass education, but it is the use of the mobile phones for teaching and learning that is the innovation. Public sector entrepreneurs have an opportunity to make a big impact because the major expense (i.e., the technology) is already paid for by private users. What really needs to be done is for the capacity of teachers and students to use their mobile phones for educational purposes to be developed. For teachers and students, this includes training and professional development in how to use the mobile phones for teaching and learning in traditional classrooms as well as outside of the institutionalized formal school setting and outside of the normal expectations that accompany mass education. A final component to innovatively using mobile phones for education is the sustainability of the innovation. If the motivation for using mobile phones for education is external as a product of mass education and traditional formal schooling then the likelihood of the innovation continuing without some sort of permanent, institutionalized pressure is low. But, if the educational function or use of mobile phones is the product of internal motivation or a process that is already part of the institutionalized mass

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education model, then it will be more likely to make an impact and result in some sort of internal or external value.

ICT FOR DEVELOPING YOUTH INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP As the mobile technology example above suggests, one of the key ways that innovation and entrepreneurial knowledge and skills are argued to develop in youth is through the incorporation of ICT into formal educational activities (Wiseman & Anderson, 2012). The incorporation of information and communication technologies (ICT) in all levels of education has increased dramatically and worldwide over the past 30 years (Ham & Cha, 2009). One indicator of the growth and impact of ICT in education is evidence of the development of “smart schools.” Smart schools are formal schooling environments embedded with internet access and computer-based learning tools to support technology-enabled instruction like that which takes advantage of existing mobile technology infrastructures. Smart schools have been promoted as effective educational models for increasing student achievement in mathematics and science as well as promoting studentcentered, inquiry-based learning (Ong & Ruthven, 2010; Yen, Bakar, Roslan, Luan, & Rahman, 2005). Inquiry-based learning has the potential to translate into value through the creation of new knowledge both internal and external to schools. One element that is seriously neglected in research on ICT-based instruction and smart schooling and their contribution to innovation and entrepreneurship in education is the relationship between initial teacher training and in-service pedagogical practice using ICT (Gotas, Yildirim, & Yildirim, 2009). The training and preparation of teachers is especially important for learner success in the ICT-based or smart school model. Development of these skills at the preservice level enables more effective transfer of technology enabled pedagogy once teachers enter the field (Koc & Bakir, 2010). Also of importance is the degree and type of ICT-based experience and training in-service teachers receive through professional development opportunities. Finally, the ways teachers actually use and implement ICT-based instruction often depends on the context and community they work and teach in (Davis, Preston, & Sahin, 2009). In communities that are closely defined by tradition and culture, the community itself can determine how social institutions operate (Wiseman, 2005).

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In other words, local communities largely determine the type and method of schooling and the resources available to schools regardless of the overall structure of education at the national level (Mazawi, 1999). One consequence of this phenomenon is that even when educational innovation and resources such as ICT are available within schools, each student’s ability to take advantage of these resources varies considerably based both on teacher preparation and school context (Davis, Hartshorne, & Ring, 2010). In particular, schools’ access and opportunity to use ICT for school-level programs and classroom instruction is determined by the institutional contexts of schooling unique to local communities. As an example of the innovative and entrepreneurial use of ICT-based mass education, the communities and schools in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) provide an important source of information about technology use in schools and techniques for “smart schooling” being used more broadly in the Gulf region and worldwide. Education in the UAE is not only experiencing rapid growth in enrollment rates, but also in government and private sector investment in educational programs, specifically those dealing with ICT integration. One indicator of private and public support for ICT-related capacity building in the UAE is the growth of smart schools including the Silicon Oasis Authority GEMS school in Dubai. Another is the regional conference hosted by the International Society of Technology Educators (ITSE), the leading professional organization for technology educators, held in April 2011 in Dubai. This chapter integrates a conceptual understanding of international educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship with an empirical analysis of the contribution of ICT in mass education systems to the development of innovation and entrepreneurial skills and knowledge among youth. This is accomplished by analyzing internationally comparative data on ICT prevalence and use in school in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), with a special emphasis on the UAE. This emphasis provides a window into the impact of technology in mass education on innovation and entrepreneurship in education. ICT-related educational data is available for benchmarking communities as well as whole educational systems within each of the countries in the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) background questionnaires, but there is unique data available for a benchmarking community in one GCC country in particular: Dubai in the UAE. In particular, the results reported here provide an internationally validated evidence base for policymaking regarding ICT experience, training, and use of ICT-based pedagogy by science teachers
and whether these factors lead to increased student learning

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in science
for Dubai as the only participating UAE community in the TIMSS 2007.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT FOR INNOVATIVE AND ENTREPRENEURIAL ICT-BASED INSTRUCTION The term digital divide has historically been used to describe how access to technology is impacted by socioeconomic stratification. Researchers have reframed this definition to address the complexities presented by an increasingly globalized educational system. The “new” digital divide is not only influenced by access to the Internet, but also by how educational and informational technology is used in educational systems (DiBello, 2005). One of the primary factors that influence the ability of public schools worldwide to integrate educational technology resources is the technology fluency of the teaching faculty. This is also reflected in the “intergenerational digital divide” (Denton et al., 2004). The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE, 2007) defines digital divide as the “disconnect that occurs between those with access to technology and those without, while recognizing that myriad factors can have a direct impact on that inequity.” These factors include how teachers are taught to use technology in classroom instruction, the ways in-service teachers incorporate technology in classroom activities and their access to professional development. Teachers are more likely to integrate technology into classroom instruction if their teacher preparation program incorporated technology resources into their education curriculum. Teachers who received specialized training in technology integration in the preservice and in-service stages were more likely to incorporate technology in their classrooms than their peers who received no training at either stage of their preparation (Al-Alwani, 2005). Preservice teacher education programs usually conceptualize technology education as a process of teaching students about the technology, not how to “teach with technology” (Chisholm, 2002). This is a challenge to the innovative and entrepreneurial application of education. Field-based experiences in teacher education programs enable preservice teachers to connect the theories they learn in the traditional classroom environment with real-world experiences, which is key to transferring innovation education to real-world implementation. Research into fieldbased experiences and technology integration in subject-area courses at the intermediate and secondary levels identify the need to increase the “number

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and type” of experiences preservice teachers complete in their teacher education programs (Alghanem, 2005). These recommendations advocate for field-experience in all stages of the teacher education program, not limited to student teaching, which is typically the capstone course experience for teacher education candidates. Teachers’ pedagogical practice, professional identities, training and professional development, and standardized indicators of student learning and achievement continue to converge in educational systems around the world. This convergence is a result of increased access to information related to educational systems and student achievement as measured by cross-national standardized tests, but also to an increase in the use of technology in educational settings. The entrepreneurial impact of public education and teacher preparation in the GCC reflects the need for teachers to be highly trained content-area specialists who are also fluent in the innovative use of educational technology resources and their incorporation into classroom practice to positively impact student learning outcomes.

ICT IN THE GULF The Gulf (and specifically UAE) experience is an important comparison case for the innovative and entrepreneurial use of ICT in education, which can be investigated for widespread institutional context, teaching, and learning trends across countries using cross-nationally comparative data like TIMSS. An institutional framework for examining the impact of teachers’ ICT training and professional development on students’ science learning across nations suggests that instead of being an innovative and value-creating activity, the transfer of ICT-based instructional and school models is a negotiated process of policy-borrowing and legitimacy-seeking. An example of this process is evidenced by the Higher College of Technology (HCT) teacher training program in the UAE. Beginning in 2000, all women’s colleges have integrated ICT and innovative progressive teaching methodology into required preservice education coursework to more effectively train female Emeriti nationals to become educators. The program offers a Bachelors of Education degree in Teaching English to Young Learners and a post-baccalaureate Higher Diploma for teachers in Instructional Technology. It is accredited by Melbourne University and is the first professional teacher education program for women in the UAE. The HCT teacher training program aimed

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to train a new national teaching force to respond to the demands of a rapidly expanding educational sector plagued by ineffective teaching practices, poorly constructed curricula, and high student-dropout rates. The HCT teacher training program was envisioned as a way to positively impact student learning and retention through increased investment in teacher training at the preservice level. This program model is marked not only by its innovative level of ICT integration in preservice teacher education, but also by its entrepreneurial commitment to reflective teaching practices. The unique coupling of ICT with reflective pedagogical training creates the opportunity for preservice teachers to integrate these skills using constructivist instructional methods. The incorporation of these pedagogies in the UAE context represents a shift in the way teachers have been historically trained in the region. Further, the incorporation of constructivism and ICT in teacher training is evidence of how the UAE has innovatively responded to global trends reflecting ICT-integration in educational processes to promote student-centered learning. Though the HCT program specifically prepares teachers of English, the program is an example of a replicable and transferable model, which could be used to prepare science content teachers to use ICT in instruction. The primary objective of ICT integration in classrooms is not just to increase students’ access to ICT, but to use it as a means to innovatively transform teaching and learning in schools. To be successful in its objective to transform teaching and learning through the integration of technology and adoption of new teaching methodology, the roles of the students and teachers in ICT-enabled classrooms should lead to an instructional model and educational culture that reflects a more student-centered, “teacher-asfacilitator” paradigm. Entrepreneurial value may be created when the teacher’s role shifts into a facilitator model, while the students assume more responsibility and autonomy in the acquisition and application of knowledge through ICT-based cooperative and student-led learning activities. But, the adoption of ICT in most educational systems is neither decided unilaterally nor implemented centrally across national education systems. As a result, the Gulf (and specifically Emirati) experience is an important comparison case, which can be investigated both for widespread institutional context, teaching and learning trends across countries using cross-nationally comparative data like TIMSS, as well as for the ways that innovative educational practice is entrepreneurially implemented in mass education systems. Throughout the world, schools and school districts have flirted with smart school and other ICT initiatives, but few have taken a system-wide, fully resourced, and committed approach to sustainably institutionalize an

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ICT-based smart school model of instruction and learning. An institutional framework for examining the impact of teachers’ ICT training and professional development on students’ science learning across nations suggests that the transfer of ICT-based instructional and school models is a negotiated process of policy-borrowing and legitimacy seeking. In particular, schools’ access and teachers’ opportunity to use ICT for school-level programs and classroom instruction is limited by the institutional contexts of schooling unique to local communities in the GCC. Nobody yet knows the extent to which smart schools and ICT infrastructure have developed in the GCC compared to other countries and regions.

THE CASE FOR ICT-BASED EDUCATION AS INNOVATION The evidence from internationally comparative reviews suggests that leading educational reforms around the world are aimed at creating a knowledge society or building citizens who can compete in a knowledge economy (Casey, 2006; Robertson, 2005). The most effective and meaningful way to accomplish this goal, according to the comparative policy evidence, is through the development of smart schools. In fact, evidence suggests that building ICT expertise among teachers and students has significant advantages leading to both direct and indirect value. Smart schools provide students with ICT resources, training, and access. Evidence shows that in systems where smart schools exist, there is significant enrichment of the ICT culture among students and teachers and higher utilization of school resources (e.g., Zain, Atan, & Idrus, 2004). While these smart schools are not without challenges, the benefits articulated by educational policymakers and practitioners seem to suggest that ICT-based education is a high-value innovation. For example, the flexible and learner-centered environment enhances motivation, and second, formal computer studies extend the knowledge base. The ICT-enriched school context creates an environment that supports both individual cognition and the formation of a social community (Iloma¨ki & Rantanen, 2007). In addition, an intensive use of ICT and process-oriented learning environments, specifically prevalent in ICT-based classrooms and smart schools, supports the development of student expertise. Student experts are able to focus, lead their peers, and use their ICT knowledge and skills widely: for example, student experts undertake

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ICT-related tasks outside school, have metacognitive consciousness about their competence, and make plans concerning ICT use in their future education and profession (Iloma¨ki & Rantanen, 2007). Preservice teachers’ knowledge and skills development related to effective integration of ICT resources in instruction is dependent on the ways ICT resources are incorporated into their initial training experiences; not just its inclusion in the formal curriculum (Luckin, 2008). The basic knowledge and skills associated with ICT, including communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking, are foundational learning outcomes of any formal school process around the world (Robertson, 2005). Transfer of these ICT-based knowledge and skills promotes human capital development within nations in order to achieve active participation in both local communities and the global economy (Ham & Cha, 2009). By investigating data about preservice teachers’ training, the research reported below empirically identifies and measures the value of initial training on teachers’ abilities to incorporate ICT in classroom instruction and reflect on the knowledge, skills, and abilities students need for effective workforce transition and participation in the knowledge society. While there is data on teacher training in ICT available from international education assessments, we can address the entrepreneurial implementation and impact of innovation in ICT in Gulf states that have participated in international studies. Therefore, our first research question asks to what extent have “smart” schools developed in the GCC compared to peer and target comparison groups. Another question is whether or not there are measurable differences between the instructional usage of ICT among teachers who have been trained to use ICT versus those who have not. Therefore, our second research question asks whether there are differences in ICT-based instructional use of those teachers who have not had ICT-related professional development in the GCC compared to peer and target comparison groups. The training and education of teachers in ICT-based instruction is a key component to the innovative implementation of inquiry-based pedagogy in the classroom. By examining data related to teacher training and professional development, we can estimate the impact that certain emphases in teacher training programs have on science teaching and learning. At a time when more and more attention and financial support is being turned to the impact and importance of ICT-based instruction and inquirybased pedagogies (Kozma, 2005), the results of this study are potentially quite influential. It is necessary to measure both teacher-level and studentlevel factors to effectively evaluate whether the goals of the technology use in schools in the GCC are reflective at the point of instruction, and if they

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lead to increasing student learning outcomes or contribute to broader trends. In order for educational systems to capitalize on the benefits of ICT to achieve these goals, teachers must be trained to effectively incorporate ICT in all facets of their professional practice, and most importantly, to understand and engage students in the process of learning through and with ICT (Gotas et al., 2009). Integration of ICT using an inquiry-based pedagogical model can act as a catalyst of pedagogical change with the potential to increase student-centered instruction in formal learning environments (Zhang, 2010). In this ICT- and inquiry-based paradigm, the role of the teacher and student are re-conceptualized.

RESEARCH HYPOTHESES AND EXPLANATIONS The development and spread of technology in schools as an educational or institutional innovation has been well-documented worldwide (Hallinger, 1998; Swaminathan & Yelland, 2003), but the more recent and unique development of ICT-based instruction and smart schooling is a more specific innovation and entrepreneurial phenomenon that has not been documented in the Middle East, nor in the Arabian Gulf specifically. It is important, therefore, to document the spread of ICT-related education and instruction in the GCC. Our first question suggests that the “smart” school model may have expanded to the GCC countries, and that it falls within the norm worldwide. Is the frequency of “smart” schools in the GCC significantly different from most educational systems around the world? As GCC educational systems have rapidly developed their educational resource capacity since 2000, they have increasingly invested in ICT-related resources because they are easy to acquire, provide the legitimacy of reflecting globally competitive resources for learning, and are popular with the public and policymakers because they reflect the public’s growing interest in and access to technology. Once ICTbased instructional technology is available in the GCC, through the development of “smart” schools, the larger question of how ICT-based instruction occurs and what impact it has becomes increasingly relevant to investigations into educational innovation and public sector entrepreneurship. In addition, the influence of social and institutional culture on how teachers both understand and implement ICT-based instruction depends largely on the context. Evidence suggests that schools and educators in GCC national education systems use ICT for lower order thinking

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(e.g., Bloom’s Taxonomy) if and when ICT-based instruction is implemented in mathematics and science classrooms, particularly at the secondary level (Wiseman & Anderson, 2011). Does GCC teachers’ participation in ICT-related professional development activities significantly associate with students’ achievement scores or higher order classroom activities? The emphasis on ICT-based instruction and inquiry-based learning is a characteristic of “smart” schools, generally, but the cultural and educational context among students, families, and communities in the GCC countries is not associated with a culture of learning and an emphasis on educational achievement (Wiseman, 2006). As a result, ICT may be implemented more often for remediation than for enrichment in GCC countries
even when it is implemented innovatively
because it is considered a more interesting or engaging method for science instruction among low-performing students and classrooms. This is not the result of an emphasis on or awareness of the importance of inquiry-based learning among GCC-based teachers, but is instead a result of the culturally contextualized expectation that those students who are not performing well are those who are not engaged or motivated enough to do well. It is likely that the reasons for the culturally contextualized emphasis on ICT-based instruction for remediation more than for enrichment are more based in the social and economic advantages that GCC nationals enjoy and assume.

METHODOLOGY To investigate the questions summarized above and estimate the value created using ICT-based education in the Gulf educational systems, this study used the ICT-related indicators from TIMSS 2007 to cross-nationally describe and analyze the integration of ICT into math and science education and its impact on student learning among 8th graders in participating GCC countries as well as approximately 60 other countries and benchmarking communities. The TIMSS data is well-known for its rich data from the background questionnaires, which will provide most of the data for the analysis. TIMSS 2007 contains data from approximately 59 countries including about 500,000 students from around the world (Olsen, Martin, & Mullis, 2008). The data used in these analyses were for 8th-grade equivalent students, teachers, and schools. Math and science achievement data as well as questionnaire data for participating students, classroom teachers, and principals contribute to the

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background, ICT, and teacher preparation data. The TIMSS data is publicly available online from the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College. There is a data analysis SPSS add-on tool (IDB Analyzer) available from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), which makes appropriate weighting and data adjustments given the unique sampling techniques employed during the assessment’s administration. Analyses compared teachers’ experience, training, and use of ICT for instructional purposes with their classroom teaching, students’ learning, and background characteristics. The analysis reported here began with univariate and bivariate analyses at the nation-level to describe cross-national trends in the expansion of “smart” schools, differences between math and science teaching and learning indicators by teachers’ experience and training related to ICT-based instruction or classroom use. This information served as a foundation for t-tests and correlations to determine the significance of differences and the degree of association in student achievement by teachers’ ICT experience, training and use in each of the Gulf countries compared to the international means. Methodologically speaking, contextualizing cross-national survey data lends itself to multilevel, multivariate statistical modeling (e.g., hierarchical linear modeling (HLM)) that incorporates national and international variables into individual models (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002). Therefore, multilevel regression models were estimated using HLM to determine the impact of teachers’ ICT experience, training, and use on their teaching and students’ learning controlling for other background and learning environment characteristics. Standard multilevel models of school outcomes assess the relative influence of ICT-based training, teaching, and learning in the nations analyzed here. Hierarchical linear models were used because they estimate the nested effects of school and national characteristics on individual students’ math and science knowledge. In particular, HLM affords great precision in the estimation of variance since it takes into account the nested nature of this data (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002). These models also included family socioeconomic status (SES) and the students’ and teachers’ gender as important controls for background characteristic effects.

STATISTICAL MODELS The summary HLM model is described below for each of the possible levels. A two-level HLM procedure estimated the ICT effects on students’

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math and science knowledge in each of the GCC countries, although only the results for the benchmarking community (Dubai, UAE) are reported here. The first level (1) estimates the amount of variance in students’ knowledge that is explained by student-level characteristics and student-reported ICT resources and ICT-based instruction. Yij = π 0j þ π 1j Femaleij þ π 2j Booksij þ π 3j Languagej þ π 4j Computer Usej þ eij ; ð1Þ where Yij is the TIMSS 2007 measure of student knowledge for the ith student in the jth school, and eij is a student-level residual.1 Note that all of the regression coefficients in the student-level equation (the πs) are indexed by j, indicating that within the multilevel model a student-level regression coefficient is estimated for every jth school in the sample. The term π0j is an estimate of an adjusted dependent variable for the ith school. The coefficient π4j represents the effects of student-reported ICT resources and instruction and is included as a student-level predictor of the effects of ICT training and teaching on student achievement. The second level estimates the amount of variance in students’ knowledge that is explained by the student-level and student-reported characteristics when variance in school-level characteristics is accounted for as well as the effect of each school-level variable on the average school science knowledge score. The second level (2) of this multilevel model included the school level factors as follows: π 0j = β00 þ β01 Teacher Experiencej þ β02 Teacher Educationj þ β03 Teacher Agej þ β04 Teacher Sexj þ β05 PDinICTj þ β05 ICT instructionj þ r0j ;

ð2Þ

where β00 is the knowledge indicator mean, and r0j is the residual difference between a school’s science knowledge indicator mean and its country’s national average. The coefficients β01, β02 … β05 represent the effects of teachers and ICT and are included as school level predictors of science achievement.

FINDINGS The first question suggested that the frequency of “smart” schools in the GCC is perhaps significantly different from most educational systems

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around the world. In order to test this question both the availability of resources and the support for computer-based learning in each participating TIMSS country was measured. Then a one-sample t-test for both of these indicators was run to determine whether or not any of the GCC countries were significantly different from the international mean. The findings for these analyses are shown in Figs. 1 and 2. Fig. 1 shows the national averages for the number of computers available for instruction per student enrolled in the school. Scotland has the highest computer-per-student ratio at 0.26 computers per student (approximately one computer for every four students), while Ghana has the lowest ratio at 0.005 (approximately one computer for every 200 students). The international mean is 0.075, which is approximately 13 students for every computer. GCC countries were largely not statistically significantly different from the international mean, with the exception of Bahrain (t = −3.8, p < .001) and Oman (t = −13.8, p < .001). The ratios for Qatar, Dubai, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are all clustered around the international mean with ratios ranging from 0.09 to 0.07, which equates to roughly one computer for every 11 to 13 students. The exceptions of Bahrain and Oman ranged from 0.06
0.05, which is approximately one computer for every 18 students.

Fig. 1.

Computers/Student by Country, TIMSS 2007.

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Fig. 2.

“Smart” Support by Country, TIMSS 2007.

Our original question that smart schooling was not significantly different from the international mean was largely confirmed both for the number of computer resources available, but also for the perceived and real support for “smart” schooling and computer-based learning. The exceptions of Bahrain and Oman being significantly lower on the computer availability indicator do not necessarily suggest that there is a unique difference between computers available for instruction in Bahrain and Oman, however, as much as the statistical difference might indicate. While the international mean of computers-per-student is about one computer for every 13 students, Bahrain and Oman’s mean is about one computer for every 18 students. If a typical class size worldwide is about 30 students then this is about two computers per class, which is similar to the international mean as well in spite of the statistically significant difference. Fig. 2 shows another measure of “smart” schooling, but concentrates on the support resources. Our “smart support” indicator shows the degree to which instruction is not affected by a shortage in computer hardware or software, and where computer technical support is provided for teachers. This smart support indicator ranges from 0 (no support) to 4 (high support) and has an international mean of 1.52. Singapore has the highest smart support indicator at 3.13, while Iran has the lowest at 0.63. None of .

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the GCC countries were statistically significantly different from the international mean, except for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia’s smart school indicator was only 0.73 (t = −61.6, p < .001). Similarly to the interpretation of Fig. 1, in Fig. 2 Saudi Arabia’s unique difference from the international mean in terms of smart school support suggests that Saudi educators are more aware of the resources they need to implement computer-based learning in Saudi schools rather than there is a significant shortage of resources and support. In other words, it is likely due to the awareness that a higher level of resources and technical support are needed in order to implement the ICT-based instruction teachers and school administrators believe is possible, which results in lower reported support for smart schooling in Saudi Arabia. Table 1 shows the correlations between math and science student achievement and the two “smart” school indicators of computers-perstudent and “smart” support for the GCC countries and the international mean. Computers-per-student is positively and significantly associated with math and science achievement in the international sample and three of the six GCC countries, with the exception of math achievement in Oman (r = −0.275, p < .01) and science achievement in Qatar (r = −0.326, p < .05). In addition, “smart” support was positively and significantly associated with math and science achievement in the international sample, but not significantly associated with math or science achievement in any GCC country. Both of these suggest that computer-based learning and ICT-related school resources are positively associated with student achievement on average around the world, but the significant variation in both significance and

Table 1.

Correlations between Student Achievement and “Smart” School Indicators, TIMSS 2007.

Country

Oman Bahrain Saudi Arabia Kuwait Dubai, UAE Qatar International *p < .05, **p < .01.

Computers/Student

“Smart” Support

Math Score

Science Score

Math Score

Science Score

−0.275** 0.391** 0.03 0.115 0.282* 0.118 0.217**

0.262** 0.421** −0.067 0.126 0.205 −0.326* 0.183**

0.159 0.222 −0.029 0.083 −0.07 0.142 0.197**

0.126 0.137 −0.052 0.097 −0.051 −0.161 0.199**

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direction of association for the computers-per-student indicator and the complete lack of any significant association with “smart” support in the GCC suggests that ICT-based instruction is much more complicated in the GCC. Part of the reason for this variation in association or no association could perhaps be that these indicators are as much of an indicator of ICT-based instruction as they are SES, since computers are scarce resources that are often more available in more advantaged communities and schools. Therefore, it is helpful to understand the relationship between average student achievement score and frequency of computer use in academic lessons in school. Figs. 3 and 4 show average 8th-grade student science achievement scores by frequency of computer use for schoolwork and in science lessons, respectively. In Fig. 3, the average 8th-grade science score is given for each frequency category of computer use for schoolwork for each GCC country. While there is some variation among the countries’ science scores relative to each other, the interesting trend is that while the frequency of computer use for schoolwork seems to have a positive association with some computer use for schoolwork, it drops steadily for more regular computer use for schoolwork. Fig. 4 is more direct in that the more computers are used for science lessons in every GCC country, the lower the science achievement scores go.

Fig. 3.

Average 8th Grade Science Score by Frequency of Computer Use for Schoolwork, TIMSS 2007.

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Fig. 4.

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Average 8th Grade Science Score by Frequency of Computer Use in Science Lessons, TIMSS 2007.

There is no initial improvement in science achievement for some versus more computer use in science lessons. All computer use in science lessons is associated with lower science achievement scores in all GCC countries. A potential threat to innovation using ICT-based education is that GCC teachers’ ICT-based instructional activities will significantly associate with lower-order thinking skills (e.g., memorization and recitation) among GCC students. Fig. 5 shows the percentage of science teachers using computers for various instructional purposes by frequency category for the Dubai, UAE, benchmarking sample only. While this data is limited to the Dubai, UAE, sample, it reflects the GCC trends in ICT-based instruction. Although there is significant variation among the various types and frequencies of computer use for instruction, all of the instructional purposes are used most frequently as part of “some lessons.” In particular, of the four instructional purposes listed, students using a computer for “processing and analyzing data,” which is a fairly high-level instructional activity, is the most frequently used “every or almost every lesson,” while students using computers for “studying natural phenomenon through simulations” and “for doing scientific procedures or experiments” are the most frequent instructional purposes of computers in the classroom overall. In

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Fig. 5.

ALEXANDER W. WISEMAN AND EMILY ANDERSON

Percentage of Science Teachers Using Computers for Various Instructional Purposes by Frequency Category
Dubai, UAE, only, TIMSS 2007.

other words, computers are more frequently used to apply science knowledge than to practice skills or analyze data. Fig. 6 is, therefore, quite interesting because it shows the average 8thgrade science score by frequency of computer use for various instructional purposes for the Dubai, UAE, sample. Again, this sample is used because it gives a specific snapshot of how achievement and frequency of ICT-based instructional activity associate. The highest scoring students use a computer for studying natural phenomena through simulations every or almost every lesson (science score mean = 565.6); whereas, the second highest scoring students use a computer for doing scientific procedures or experiments about half the lessons (science score mean = 555.4). The lowest scoring students use a computer for practicing skills and procedures some of the lessons only (mean = 467.3). These results suggest again that applying science content knowledge using computers is associated with higher student achievement than simply practicing skills or analyzing data using computers in the science classroom. The next question suggested that GCC teachers’ participation in ICTrelated professional development activities may or may not significantly associate with students’ achievement scores. Fig. 7 shows the percent of schools in GCC countries by percentage of 8th-grade teachers involved in

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Fig. 6.

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Average 8th Grade Science Score by Frequency of Computer Use for Various Instructional Purposes
Dubai, UAE, only, TIMSS 2007.

Fig. 7. Percent of Schools in Gulf Countries by Percentage of 8th Grade Teachers Involved in Professional Development Aimed at Using ICT for Education, TIMSS 2007.

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professional development aimed at using ICT for instruction. In every GCC country except for Bahrain, 51
75% of teachers involved in professional development related to ICT was the most frequent categorical response. In other words, while it was significantly less frequent for all teachers in a school to have participated in professional development for ICT-based instruction, it was most common for “most” of the teachers in a school to have participated in this sort of training. This means that most math and science teachers in GCC schools have had some training in how to use ICT for instruction. Figs. 8 and 9 respectively show 8th-grade math and science achievement in GCC countries by percentage of 8th-grade teachers involved in professional development aimed at using ICT for instruction. These figures show that both math and science achievement are either not significantly or negative associated with teacher involvement in ICT-related professional development. So, while most teachers are participating in ICT-related professional development, this seems to be associated with no or a negative change in student achievement. Either teachers are being incorrectly trained during these professional development sessions, or there is an effort to train teachers who have poorly performing students in the first place.

Fig. 8. 8th Grade Math Achievement in Gulf Countries by Percentage of 8th Grade Teachers Involved in Professional Development aimed at using ICT for Education, TIMSS 2007.

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Fig. 9. 8th Grade Science Achievement in Gulf Countries by Percentage of 8th Grade Teachers Involved in Professional Development aimed at using ICT for Education, TIMSS 2007.

Finally, we estimated two HLM models. One with students’ 8th-grade science achievement scores as the outcome variable (Table 2), and the other with students’ reported computer use in their science lessons as the outcome variable (Table 3). In both of these HLM tables, the independent variables are shown in the rows by level of analysis (student and school). As with the earlier Figures, we found that the Dubai, UAE, benchmarking sample, provided similar results to other GCC countries in spite of the fact that Dubai, UAE, students were the highest scoring and most narrowly sampled among all participating GCC countries. Table 2 shows the estimation of several control or contextual variables on 8th-grade science achievement scores, but the most interesting predictor variables are “computer use in the science lesson” at the student level, “professional development in ICT” at the school level, and the instructional activities with ICT (listed near the bottom of the table) also at the school level. First of all, it is important to notice that when estimating science achievement, the significant (and frequently negative) impact that being female has on achievement is absent. Instead, the proxy indicator for SES (i.e., books in the home) and speak language of test are positive and strong predictors of science achievement. We also find that teacher experience at the school level is a positive predictor of science achievement. However, the

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Table 2.

ALEXANDER W. WISEMAN AND EMILY ANDERSON

HLM Estimation on Science Achievement Scores, 8th Grade, Dubai, UAE, TIMSS 2007.

Student Level Computer use in science lesson Female Books in the home Speak language of test School level Professional development in

Model 1

Model 2

Model 3

Model 4

Model 5

−

−11.22 (8.12) 2.24 (8.96) 13.49*** (2.61) 5.52+ (3.18)

−4.89 (10.46) 2.40 (8.96) 13.59*** (2.62) 5.54+ (3.21)

−13.29+ (7.78) 2.42 (9.01) 13.59*** (2.59) 5.52+ (3.13)

−12.69+ (6.51) 2.37 (8.77) 13.61*** (2.55) 5.51+ (3.20)

−3.87 (9.86)

−

−

−

5.69 (9.49) 12.91*** (3.17) 5.85+ (3.30) 9.62 (27.47)

Model 6 −4.96 (5.10) 2.33 (8.76) 13.62*** (2.59) 5.04 (3.20)

Model 7 −13.13+ (7.21) 2.45 (8.82) 13.58*** (2.61) 5.53+ (3.20)

−

−

Teacher age

−

−37.01 (22.36)

−38.02+ (22.18)

−37.91 (22.32)

−38.15 (22.37)

−39.24+ (22.23)

−38.08+ (22.20)

Teacher education level

−

−14.71 (23.46)

−14.66 (22.72)

−14.76 (24.05)

−15.41 (24.50)

−20.63 (25.02)

−14.70 (23.32)

Teacher sex

−

53.19 (36.76)

54.53 (36.66)

52.61 (36.69)

52.64 (37.17)

54.05 (37.29)

52.69 (37.18)

Teacher experience

−

7.37* (2.84)

7.44* (2.80)

7.44* (2.83)

7.46* (2.84)

7.57* (2.83)

7.45* (2.80)

ICT to look up ideas & information ICT to study natural

−

−

−4.33 (4.81)

−

−

−

−

−

−

−

−0.46 (6.29)

−

−

−

ICT to process & analyze data

−

−

−

−

−0.92 (3.98)

−

−

ICT to do scientific experiments ICT to practice skills & procedures Intercept

−

−

−

−

−

−8.59* (3.44)

−

−

−

−

−

−

−

−0.51 (4.67)

443.26*** (21.53)

522.47*** (110.10)

522.78*** (107.48)

524.64*** (113.25)

528.29*** (116.31)

556.08*** (120.50)

524.72*** (110.22)

0.10 (0.31)

0.11 (0.33)

0.11 (0.33)

0.11 (0.33)

0.12 (0.34)

0.11 (0.33)

0.11 (0.33)

0.75 (0.87)

0.75 (0.87)

0.75 (0.87)

0.75 (0.87)

0.75 (0.87)

0.75 (0.87)

0.75 (0.87)

Random effects uo r

Note: Standard errors in parentheses. +p