Embedding effective Entrepreneurship Education in the South African Senior Phase Technology Education curriculum

Abstract

Youth unemployment is a continuous global problem that recently reached an all-time high in South Africa. Yet, there is hope for addressing this challenge. Developing and expanding entrepreneurship education as part of the school curriculum will expose learners to insights into how they could use their school learning to create self-employment or income-generation opportunities. The literature revealed that Technology Education could be a possible vehicle for entrepreneurship education. Therefore, the current study focused on how entrepreneurship education could be effectively embedded into the South African Senior Phase Technology curriculum using a self-directed approach. In addition, the curricula of other African countries that have – according to literature – included entrepreneurship education with their Technology Education subjects were analysed to gain insight into what could be learned from those to address this aim of the study. A basic qualitative research design, guided by constructivism and interpretivism, was used to purposively focus on the Technology curriculum documents of Botswana, Kenya, Namibia and South Africa. Only curricula for the school phases in which learners are about 13 to 15 years old were analysed, as many of these young people leave school after this phase. Deductive and inductive codes were created to conduct a systematic and thematic data analysis of the different countries to establish if and how entrepreneurship education is embedded into Technology Education. After the document analysis, purposive sampling was utilised to select 30 experienced Senior Phase Technology teachers in the North West Province of South Africa. These participants completed an open-ended questionnaire to provide insights on teachers’ perceptions regarding the practicalities and possibilities of embedding entrepreneurship education into the South African Senior Phase Technology curriculum using a self-directed approach. Colour codes were created to create data themes, and further on, interpretations were made of the meaning of data by re-reading and interpreting according to colour codes. It was apparent from the findings that entrepreneurship education is not constructively included in all curricula of the investigated African countries. Furthermore, it emerged that although the South African Senior Phase Technology curriculum has great potential to contribute to entrepreneurship education, it does not contain any entrepreneurship information. Therefore, clear and implementable recommendations were developed and refined for the Department of Basic Education to embed entrepreneurship education in the Senior Phase Technology curriculum. The study concluded that Technology teachers should self-directedly expand entrepreneurship education in the enacted Technology curriculum until the Department of Basic Education embeds entrepreneurship into the intended curriculum. Future research should investigate and develop guidelines on how to self-directedly expand entrepreneurship education into various school subjects and phases.