It has been suggested that students' perceptions of entrepreneurship, as well as their attitude toward entrepreneurship education, are shaped by their previous experiences and contextual belonging. This longitudinal exploratory study explores how reflective practices that are part of entrepreneurship education work to challenge, change, or reproduce such attitudes, as well as the different path of entrepreneurial development students may follow as a result. The discussion also adds to theoretical development in the field by combining Dewey and Bourdieu into a framework for analyzing and understanding the different aspects of reflection and the differing outcomes reflection may yield.

The traditional ways of teaching are being supplemented with new tools and new educational approaches in order make education more authentic and aligned with the world beyond school. To prepare young people for a rapidly changing and less predictable environment, policy directives have urged the development of entrepreneurial attitudes and abilities through an education relating closely to the surrounding society (Commission, 2015; OECD, 1992). Simultaneously, new technology is suggested to provide new opportunities for learning in an increasingly digitalised society (Samuelson-Wardrip & Shaphiro, 2016; Brinson, 2015; Cheng, Lin, & She, 2015). Although the entry of ICT and entrepreneurship into the field of education may both work to prepare students for an environment beyond school, few scholars have investigated if and how these processes are interrelated, or how they might complement each other. By adopting a sociocultural perspective on learning, and incorporating literature on combined physical and virtual world contexts, this qualitative study offers insights into how various mediating tools used to relate education to the world beyond school may influence the extent to which primary school students develop entrepreneurial attitudes and abilities. The results indicate that computer-aided learning combining virtual and physical world contexts could support the development of entrepreneurial attitudes and abilities.

Entrepreneurship education is high on political agendas for its contributions to cultural change and economic growth. Scholars have suggested that the local context may influence the results of entrepreneurship education, and have recommended that educators strengthen their relationships with local businesses and help students learn from actual business settings. By combining policy analysis with empirical data, the present qualitative study explores two issues. First, we look at how the role of local business is expressed in entrepreneurship education policy documents. Second, we explore how local entrepreneurial activity and culture may influence how policies are understood and translated into practice at the local level. The findings indicate that collaboration between schools and business life may strengthen, rather than change, existing local development paths. The present paper contributes to the literature and understanding of the interplay between entrepreneurship education policy and the local context and proposes several policy recommendations emerging from the empirical study.

This inductive case study extends existing reflective learning theory by introducing the concept of critical event recognition. We define this as the cognitive process through which individuals conclude that they are facing a critical learning point that demands a change of thoughts and actions. Extant theory has described reflection and learning as processes of interaction among an individual’s various experiences and has emphasized that critical events are important for these processes. Yet, theory has largely ignored how learners develop task-specific cognitions from such critical events when they lack previous task-specific experiences to which they can relate the reflection. This study proposes an extended perspective on reflective learning by shedding light on event recognition and by illustrating how cognitive development may progress when the individual has little prior experience with which to integrate the reflection from critical events