This thesis explores the gendering of entrepreneurship education in Higher Education in light of increasing government emphasis on the embedding of entrepreneurship education across the higher education curriculum in the UK. It argues that issues around the historical masculinisation of entrepreneurship are not acknowledged in current policy and education approaches and that this is problematic given an increasingly female HE cohort and that female graduates are still less likely than their male counterparts to consider entrepreneurship as an option on graduation. I take a three-phase, qualitative, multiple-method case-study approach - informed by Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice - to explore gendered discourses of entrepreneurship and enterprise education in the UK and how these play out in one post-1992 UK HE institution. The study highlights the choices, positions and struggles of the social space of HE and how staff and students respond to institutionally-framed policy and historically masculinised discourses and their teaching and learning practices in light of this. It suggests that, contrary to current education and entrepreneurship policy discourses, HE institutions and staff are not disinterested purveyors of neutral and uncontested 'facts' but are highly invested in their arbitration of the entrepreneurship education curriculum within disciplines, such as Health, Sport and Hospitality, that have not traditionally had an enterprise or entrepreneurship focus. It also suggests that female undergraduate students - although positioned in policy and practice as 'not-knowing' - bring a range of entrepreneurial experiences and expectations to HE which they can struggle to draw on and make sense of within an HE sector that positions them as deficient and unable or unwilling to take advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:544144 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Jones, Sally Ann |
| Publisher | Leeds Beckett University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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