Bringing entrepreneurial skills to school, the goal of an industrial doctorate project

An industrial doctorate project is working to implement a program that develops entrepreneurial skills in Primary and Compulsory Secondary students, with the aim of improving their sensitivity towards sustainability, as an essential tool to solve the problems of our environment, and acquire a greater social commitment at the same time.

Assessing students' knowledge based on competencies is one of the great challenges of education, which requires all students to be able to cultivate both transversal and core competencies . This is what Estel Paloma , an industrial PhD student in an applied research project in the educational field with the Pia Santa Anna School in Mataró, explains. Recently, Estel has been awarded the EDEN Best Research Paper Award at the 12th edition of EDEN's Research Workshop for the article " Designing an Assessment Model of Entrepreneurship Competence for the Promotion of Sustainability in Compulsory and Post-Compulsory Education ”, presented jointly with the co-directors of his thesis Lourdes Guàrdia (professor of the Psychology and Education Sciences Studies at the UOC) and Marian Buil (Tecnocampus-UPF). The first results of the research carried out by Paloma are already beginning to give clues as to where to go to generate a model that evaluates entrepreneurial competence: know what entrepreneurial competence means, teamwork by teachers and teaching staff, incorporate other agents into the evaluation and the use of active methodologies, whether disciplinary or interdisciplinary .

If we start from the definition taken from the European Entrepreneurial Competence Framework ( EntreComp ), entrepreneurial competence is the ability to turn ideas into action, ideas that generate value for someone other than oneself . Paloma emphasizes that the concept goes far beyond creating companies and Startups, even this entrepreneurial competence has a lot to do with sustainability , also present in the EntreComp and in the Sustainable Development Goals (ODS) adopted by the United Nations in 2015

Entrepreneurial competence allows if one has an idea to turn it into an action, and to generate value for other people . Paloma believes that it is necessary to have people with this competence in a company, but also in a town hall, a health center, a charity, a football association or an educational institution. Likewise, he recognizes that one of the first aspects he has worked on is the fact that teachers unlearn a concept in order to learn a new one: " when you explain to them what entrepreneurial competence means, then they say Ah, but that's it let's do it!, and of course they do!, but what happens is that they haven't noticed it, they don't know what the evidence might be, they don't know how to evaluate this competence, simply because they haven't put on the right glasses, they don't the look in this definition ".

"Entrepreneurial competence allows if one has an idea to turn it into an action, and to generate value for other people"

Estel Paloma during an educational skills workshop given to teachers.

The industrial doctorate project in question was born from the participation of the UOC and Escola Pia de Catalunya, together with other partners, in the European CRISS project on the certification and assessment of digital competence. The CRISS (Certification of digital competences in Primary and Secondary Schools) project, promoted by the European Union, aims to facilitate primary and secondary school students to certify their achievements in digital competences , establishing a digital platform to obtain, evaluate and validate digital skills in secondary education centers.

In this context, the Escola Pia de Catalunya, the institution responsible for the project, starts from its mission to change the world through education . To this end, it has partnered with the UOC to carry out a collaborative research project that aims to demonstrate how primary and secondary school students can increase their sensitivity towards sustainability , a valuable instrument to address the problems of their environment, and also increase their social commitment when they participate in a program that promotes entrepreneurial capabilities and dynamic capabilities ®. Antoni Aguilar , director of Escola Pia Santa Anna Mataró and tutor of the project, acknowledges that there is little research in education rooted in the reality of schools: " we have the firm intention of continuing to create links between the University, research and day-to-day reality of the school in all its areas ". Research in this area, according to Aguilar, must be aimed at professional teaching teams that move forward together and improve together: " education is not a matter of individual people who teach in our classroom ".

According to the project team, the most immediate challenge facing the school with regard to entrepreneurial skills is precisely to understand it, to incorporate it and for students to be able to develop it naturally in the classroom, but it is also necessary to break down some barriers and prejudices when understanding what it is and where to apply the competence .

"The contribution of this research will have a clear impact on educational transformation, it is a model completely transferable to other schools and other transversal skills"

From the university, thesis director Lourdes Guàrdia and member of the UOC Edul@ab research group tells us how, after collaborating with Escola Pia for three years in the CRISS project, she led them to identify the opportunity to replicate in a similar way the work that had been done with the digital competence in the entrepreneurial competence: " the impact of the project was so important, that we assessed that it could be a very good opportunity to be able to do it also with another competition transversal ". Therefore, the objective is to generate a model to evaluate entrepreneurial competence in the school curriculum for the promotion of sustainability in compulsory and post-compulsory education . Paloma understands it in the same way, when she states that " assessing competence is one of the great challenges of education, and assessing competence means helping all students to develop all competences, whether transversal or not ". Despite this, the project also aims to design an entrepreneurial competence integrated into the school curriculum design so that the teaching teams do not work in isolation : " competencies are a set of skills that must allow you to know how to solve problems or act in different contexts that do not require only the mastery of a specific knowledge ", explains Guàrdia.

The most remarkable progress of the project is to implement a proposal for an evaluation model within the usual tasks that are proposed in order to carry out a transversal competence such as entrepreneurship . Paloma explains how transversal skills are often not identified within any discipline, and they tend not to be evaluated systematically like other skills: " this makes it difficult to find indicators to focus on and evidence to know if the students have developed this competence or not ". The truth is that there are very few scientific references to models of entrepreneurial competence in compulsory and post-compulsory education. Guàrdia acknowledges that the contribution of this research will have a clear impact on educational transformation : " it is a model completely transferable to other schools and other transversal skills ". The impact that this project can generate in society comes from the hands of the students themselves who, thanks to the application of these entrepreneurial skills, become citizens more sensitive to sustainability both in the social and economic aspects , as with the environmental issue, and more sensitive to what is happening in their environment.

Estel Paloma during the presentation of the EDEN Best Research Paper Award at the 12th edition of EDEN's Research Workshop

The collaborative research made possible by the model of the Industrial Doctorate Plan has made it possible to forge partnerships between Escola Pia and the UOC, but it has also allowed the doctoral student to learn about the scientific rigor of a research for a doctoral thesis and to land her at school Aguilar, from Escola Pia, regrets that it is not common to have channels between academic research and the school: " if this were common we would have data on the impact of our practices and it would allow us to be more efficient at the time to introduce improvements ", and this project wants to break this dynamic. In the same vein, Aguilar acknowledges that having a person doing research " begins to introduce a culture of rigor, impact and reflection that we currently do not have sufficiently integrated ".

With respect to the team's expectations, it is worth saying that they are aimed at the teaching staff, participating in the project pilots, being able to make the tools, instruments and guides scalable to other transversal skills: " they could incorporate the model into other skills in the regular curriculum ," says Paloma. In the long term , they aspire to make the model extend, in phases to the whole school, and to other schools.

The experience with the Industrial Doctorates Plan has been very satisfactory for the members of the project team. The Pia School claims that it has helped them to create links with the university and research . Paloma understands that in order for a country to move forward, it needs basic science, but if this science does not reach the market, it is meaningless : " it should be a country policy, and in this case it has been since the industrial doctorates in terms of science applied, but both, basic and applied, should develop at the same pace ".